"If high heels were so wonderful, men would be wearing them"
About this Quote
The line works because it flips a familiar sales pitch into a small, brutal thought experiment. High heels are marketed as empowerment, elegance, even pleasure - but Grafton drags the shoe back into the real world of incentives. If they were truly "wonderful" in the straightforward sense (comfortable, practical, health-neutral), the group with the most cultural permission to prioritize its own comfort would have adopted them long ago. Men, in this framing, function less as a gender than as a measuring stick for who gets to treat inconvenience as nonnegotiable.
Grafton’s intent is not to argue that men never wear heels, or that women are dupes. It’s to puncture the polite fiction that women’s pain is just another lifestyle choice. The joke lands because it’s essentially an economic argument disguised as a one-liner: in a patriarchal marketplace, benefits flow upward, costs flow downward. Heels offer status, desirability, and a coded kind of professionalism - but those rewards are granted inside a system that still expects women to pay for looking "right" with time, money, and literal strain.
Context matters: Grafton wrote from within a late-20th-century culture that treated female presentation as both mandatory and voluntary, a double bind that lets institutions demand beauty while denying they demanded anything. The quote’s cynicism is a form of clarity. It refuses the romance of fashion-as-freedom and asks the uncomfortable question: freedom for whom, exactly, and at what price?
Grafton’s intent is not to argue that men never wear heels, or that women are dupes. It’s to puncture the polite fiction that women’s pain is just another lifestyle choice. The joke lands because it’s essentially an economic argument disguised as a one-liner: in a patriarchal marketplace, benefits flow upward, costs flow downward. Heels offer status, desirability, and a coded kind of professionalism - but those rewards are granted inside a system that still expects women to pay for looking "right" with time, money, and literal strain.
Context matters: Grafton wrote from within a late-20th-century culture that treated female presentation as both mandatory and voluntary, a double bind that lets institutions demand beauty while denying they demanded anything. The quote’s cynicism is a form of clarity. It refuses the romance of fashion-as-freedom and asks the uncomfortable question: freedom for whom, exactly, and at what price?
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|
More Quotes by Sue
Add to List
