Some lady things take a lot of regular effort with nothing to show for it aside from looking “normal,” and those lady things are the bane of a lady existence: shaving, plucking, waxing, moisturizing. Other lady things pay off visually, and are thus much more fun to play around with: accessorizing, doing makeup, or wearing heels. So it is equally perplexing when you can’t seem to pull these things off, because then you feel doubly bad for being lame at something with the potential to add such fun and glamour to your life.
I’m of two minds about a lot of stuff on the feminine presentation front. I think elaborate hairstyles and carefully contoured makeup look great on other people, for instance, but I just can’t bear to put the time in myself—plus it just doesn’t look right when I do. I can’t say whether that’s because I’m doing it all wrong or I just have the wrong head/face to pull it off. (I also don’t have an earring face, a hat head, or a watch arm.) I mostly don’t care about not being good at these things, but then on occasion will realize I do care and wish I’d spent the time in junior high mastering cat-eye eyeliner, wearing more scarves, or learning to walk in heels for certain occasions when these seem like the perfect enhancements.
Such is The Hairpin’s Haley Mlotek’s lament in a funny piece about not being able to wear heels. With a very important event coming up and a long-nurtured desire to sashay inches above her normal stature, Mlotek writes:
I have a Cool Wedding™ to attend in early June and the prospect of going in flats was weighing heavily on my tiny feet for a lot of reasons. First, I love heels the way I love all the most impractical kinds of fashion: recklessly, stupidly. Heels, when worn correctly, fake a kind of self-assurance and strength in their wearer. The sound they make!! The shape of your legs, elongated by a crisp point!! They connote power and they force a very unnatural kind of grace because every step matters so much. No one can forget they’re wearing heels while they’re wearing them. Heels encourage mindfulness. And, I mean, they just look fucking sexy. They’re gorgeous and terrifying, two qualities I’d most like to embody in my daily life.
But I go back and forth between two competing instincts: first, trying to make peace with the fact that I cannot walk properly in heels, and more than that, three hours in a pair of ill-fitting heels and the pain will turn me into such a monster no one will ever mistake me for a gorgeous boss bitch and just a red-faced menace, and that the beauty of heels comes from the confidence the wearer feels in said heels, and since I do not have that I just have to embrace cool flats or slight platforms with whatever of my dignity remains, and second, the completely irrational “but I’ll look so cooooooooooool” that echoes through my head when I hold a pair of really good heels in my equally tiny hands.
I’m very clompy and egret-like in heels, so I relate. Other fun lady things I can’t do for shit: