Women and Their Shoes, Part 138

[dr_mabeuse]

I know that a good pair of shoes can make a woman feel sexy, but I'm wondering whether wearing certain shoes can also be sexually arousing in a direct kind of way.

Can you get turned on from wearing sexy shoes? Is there something inherently sexual about the way you have to hold yourself when you're wearing heels, the way they make you move?

I also know that a tight pair of jeans can be sexually arousing to wear. Are there any other pieces of clothing that are a turn on too?

 

[Colleen Thomas]

I know that a good pair of shoes can make a woman feel sexy, but I'm wondering whether wearing certain shoes can also be sexually arousing in a direct kind of way.

Can you get turned on from wearing sexy shoes? Is there something inherently sexual about the way you have to hold yourself when you're wearing heels, the way they make you move?

I also know that a tight pair of jeans can be sexually arousing to wear. Are there any other pieces of clothing that are a turn on too?

Kind of a strange question doc. A pair of sexy heels can make me feel sexy, if, they are worn in combination with something sexy. Just a pair of shoes and nothing else and I would feel silly I think.

But if I am dressed to the nines and top the outfit off with my five inch stillettos or my kne high spike heeled boots, yeah, it adds to the effect immensly. I don't know that the shoes themselves are so much sexual, as they are part of an outfit that is sexy. But tennis shoes wouldn't make me fel the same wy or mary janes.

 

[R. Richard]

Can you get turned on from wearing sexy shoes? Is there something inherently sexual about the way you have to hold yourself when you're wearing heels, the way they make you move?

Dr_M:
I am not a girl, but I do play kung-fu. When you stand on your toes, you push your chest and ass out to balance. If you are a man and stand on your toes, no effect. If you are a woman and stand on your toes, BIG effect. When a woman wears really high heels, she stands on her toes.

 

[impressive]

Doesn't even have to be heels. I feel sexy looking at my tanned feet in my favorite old flat leather sandals. Just somethin' about 'em. Dunno what exactly.

As for other clothing: a well-fitted top can do the trick. I had a sweater in college that I called my "borderline" sweater. It was worn to class often if my grade was borderline A-B. Always got the A.

A thong can really focus one's attention to that region, which is nice.

I think there's a distinction, though. Some things make you feel sexy because of the attention they attract. Others just make you feel sexy, period (like my sandals).

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I think there's a distinction, though. Some things make you feel sexy because of the attention they attract. Others just make you feel sexy, period (like my sandals).

That's what I want to know. Not if they make you feel sexy. But if they actually arouse you.

I realize that there's a big overlap between the two--that feeling sexually attractive is arousing in itself--but I'm wondering about clothes that are just a turn on to wear whether anyone sees you or not.

I'm also aware that the clothes that men find sexy on a women aren't especially sexy to the woman who has to wear them. One of the exceptions seems to be leather wear. I've heard a few women say that wearing leather pants does something to them that goes beyond just how they look.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

That's what I want to know. Not if they make you feel sexy. But if they actually arouse you.

I realize that there's a big overlap between the two--that feeling sexually attractive is arousing in itself--but I'm wondering about clothes that are just a turn on to wear whether anyone sees you or not.

I'm also aware that the clothes that men find sexy on a women aren't especially sexy to the woman who has to wear them. One of the exceptions seems to be leather wear. I've heard a few women say that wearing leather pants does something to them that goes beyond just how they look.

In that case, A good corset is arousing to wear, at least for me. If I spend the day in one, I will most decidedly be ready for sex come evening. That's with a partner or without. It dosen't just make me look more attractive, YOu stand differntly, wlk diferenly, move differntly and the tigh grip never realy lest you just forget you have it on.

 

[erise]

Doc, am I right if I assume that you didn't ask what makes me feel sexy, but what makes me sexually stimulated?

I sometimes go out wearing nothing but a denim jacket on top. It's neatly buttoned up, and although it makes me look good, it still looks everyday proper from the outside. However, underneath... rowr. The rough fabric against ny skin, especially my nipples, and the free flow of air underneath it. That's stimulating.

For me, high heels are also exciting. Not in a purely physical way, but I wear it so rarely that everytime I do it's on a very special occation with my man. Wearing them means that we're celebrating something, and when we do, a certain kind of celebraing D) is pretty much inevitable by the end of the night. It has personal connotations and expectations that are exciting to me, but the physical feeling of walking and standing in them is nothing special.

 

[impressive]

That's what I want to know. Not if they make you feel sexy. But if they actually arouse you.

A thong would definitely fall into that category. Doesn't matter if anyone else even sees it.

 

[sophia jane]

I don't think wearing sexy shoes turns me on necessarily, but they do make me feel sexy, which makes it easier for me to get turned on.
Wearing certain clothes can me turn on, though. Wearing something naughty (or nothing at all) under my clothes is a huge turn on. It's like having a sexy little secret.

SJ

 

[Dar~]

I turned myself on when I was out the other night in a raw silk shirt that was new and the push up bra my friend made me wear. I love how my body felt under the silk and I loved the way my breasts moved in the bra.

 

[Hooper_X]

Can you get turned on from wearing sexy shoes? Is there something inherently sexual about the way you have to hold yourself when you're wearing heels, the way they make you move?

From the male perspective--well, from my male perspective--this is certainly true. Heels accentuate the shape of women's legs and impart a delicious hip-swaying wobble to their walk.

 

[logophile]

My black leather knee boots turn me on. Zipping them up over my calf, feeling the leather encase me - all of that starts the thrum inside me that can only be calmed by a deep hard fuck.

Also, corsets do the same thing. There is something so stimulating about not being able to draw a full breath. I get damp about 2 minutes after I'm laced into one and the desire grows the long I'm wearing it.

 

[shereads]

Ladies:

To enliven what is otherwise an utterly miserable experience - going through security during a peak travel day at an awful airport - try wearing snug-fitting black leather boots with a stilleto heel instead of the more sensible slip-on shoes. When you're told to remove the boots before going through the metal detector, take your time unzipping each one and steal a glance at nearby men. For maximum effect, tug your skirt down and blush a little. Important: pantyhose are the arch enemy of sexy shoes. Google up some silk stockings, which are still manufactured in France and feel slippery on the skin.

Sexy shoes hobble us, but they give us the power to make strong men drool. (Be careful not to slip in the pools of drool on the linoleum near the metal detector, especially if the boots are new and have slippery soles!)

 

[minsue]

I can't say I feel anything other than ridiculous in heels, but that's because I never did learn to walk properly in them. On the rare occasion I wear a dress, I most certainly notice a change. I feel more feminine, I walk more feminine (though it must not all that much more of a girly walk because I've also been told that when I'm wearing a dress as opposed to my jeans that it's far more obvious that I "walk like a guy"... ). Basically I feel more, I don't know, vulnerable? when wearing a skirt or especially a dress. Sometimes it's arousing, sometimes it's disturbing. Depends on where I am and who I'm with.

 

[matriarch]

A thong would definitely fall into that category. Doesn't matter if anyone else even sees it.

Agreed.
100 fucking percent.
Every single time.
*shiver*

 

[scheherazade_79]

I have a pair of kick ass black boots with a hell and a pointed toe. Whenever I wear them, I feel a lot more confident in my ability to pull. Maybe it has something to do with the added height?

But for an instant buzz at home, I have a pair of dirt cheap sports flip flops. They have a raised bubble pattern on the sole that must be pushing against some pressure points, because when I'm walking along in them I feel instantly horny.

 

[impressive]

Agreed.
100 fucking percent.
Every single time.
*shiver*

On me or you?

 

[matriarch]

On me or you?

With your gorgeous arse? On you woman....oh hell, yeah !!!!!!

 

[sincerely_helene]

I tend to put myself down a lot, but one of the features I'm most proud of is my legs. Years of not driving, combined with a job working a shovel has really defined them nicely, so when I put on anything with even a small heel it is pretty common for me to get a little moist.

When I look in the mirror, the way the shadows fall on the muscles and the feeling of my ass tightening, being pulled upward, leads to all sorts of naughty fantasies. If I accompany the shoes with a short, light, loose skirt, it makes the sensation all the more delicious as the material occasionally brushes against the flesh.

I also agree with the corset/leather comments. Although mine is not leather, it hugs and rubs against my curves in much the same way and gives me a sense of power which can be quite stimulating sometimes even to a submissive.

 

[Sunnie]

I've only met one person with a genuine foot/shoe fetish.

I've sort of got a preoccupation with my own feet -- they've got to be pretty, pedicured, painted, and the 10K gold toe ring stays on at all times -- but mostly I don't care about other people's feet/shoes.

...My husband has an armpit fetish though.

 

[shereads]

Googled by accident, while updating an image of the mythical Pink Maribou Mules*

High on heels

Madonna says his shoes are better than sex; Sarah Jessica Parker loves them so much she was still wearing them the day before she gave birth... Tamsin Blanchard discovers why Manolo Blahnik has the celebrity world at his feet

Manolo Blahnik has a rare gift: he knows how to make women happy. Truly happy. Why else would a heavily pregnant Sarah Jessica Parker emerge from her nest to present the shoe designer with an award in New York last October? Despite the fact that she was due to give birth that day, she turned out in a black taffeta YSL dress, her miraculously unswollen ankles teetering on black, strappy Manolo stilettos. 'Archive them ladies,' she told the audience. 'Most marriages don't last that long, but with Blahnik, you can be monogamous.' The star of Sex and the City gave birth just a few days later. We can only presume she was parted from her precious heels for the occasion.

'I love that woman,' says Blahnik. He is suave, silver-haired and now in his sixties. On the surface, he is the perfect, old-school gentleman, but a wicked streak means he is still in tune with the shoes guaranteed to make a woman's pulse race. 'Sarah Jessica presented me with the award and the next day she had the baby. Shoes this high! I love that woman. She's divine. Without her I wouldn't be able to sell in America the way we do. I see the programmes - they are very funny. But they were all serious customers before, Miss Parker and Madame Bushnall. They've been shopping for donkey's years but those girls, I must say, they luuuuuuurve shoes.' So, it is safe to say, the love affair is mutual. And it is not just the Sex and the City girls who are devoted to Blahnik. Madonna claims his shoes are better than sex because they last longer. As I said, he knows how to make women happy. Sometimes, he says, he makes personal appearances at department stores in New York, and the women there will tell him how happy he makes them, while their husbands hold out the plastic and complain bitterly. If only they had his secret.

Women worship at the alter of Manolo Blahnik and although he is a grand and flamboyant character - a veritable fashion institution - he is quite dismissive of the first major retrospective of his work, which opens next month at London's Design Museum.

'For God's sake, how pretentious! I'm not dead yet,' he explodes, laughing heartily, in his exotic accent which is a mix of Spanish, 1940s Hollywood Joan Crawford English, and the campest of Loyd Grossman-style tortured vowels.

The man himself is seated before me, in a tiny cramped office on the ground floor of the town house which is his headquarters, half way down the King's Road. He is referring to the very fact that he is to be the subject of a show, 'this bloody exhibition', as he calls it. Somehow, he thinks the whole thing is quite ridiculous. Madness. He is after all, just a shoemaker, a factory boy, as he describes himself. I ask if he still gets his hands dirty when he visits his factory in Italy. 'Dirty!' he exclaims. 'Blood sometimes! They have these chain mail gloves to protect yourself. I cannot work with things like that, so sometimes it's dangerous. My hands are in such a state of corruption, destruction, they look like workers' hands.'

The exhibition promises to enchant every woman who goes to see it. Like diamonds, spindly heels leave most men cold

Maybe the author means that men don't like to wear spindly heels. They certainly seem to notice them. ~ SR

but they cast a peculiar spell over otherwise perfectly sane women who will look, drool, and dream.

They will imagine themselves being laced into a pair of wicked stepmother kinky boots that tie seductively up the back, or manacled into a stiletto heel by a wide cuff attached to the ankle by just the most razor sharp lengths of leather. They will point their toes and stand on the balls of their feet, arching them and stretching their calves, while imaginary bells and beads will jingle at their toes.

That's accurate.

And they will fantasise that after they have seen the show, they are going to head straight to the shop just off the King's Road, and hand over their hard-earned cash for a pair of this season's aggressively sexy biker heels in black leather, with a saucy chain slung around the back of the heel. And no doubt, many of them will. If they weren't already addicted to Manolos, they will be.

It is, after all, a form of slavery, not so distant from the days when women's feet were bound for a reason other than simple pleasure.

Blahnik has been honing his craft for more than 30 years, since he was ordained by the high priestess herself, the late, great Diana Vreeland, Vogue editor extraordinaire, and the grandest curator New York's Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute has ever known. Blahnik met Vreeland in New York in 1971, and showed her his sketches for set designs for A Midsummer Night's Dream. He was, he recalls, terrified. He wore a gingham suit, 'white and nasty red. Can you imagine? A suit! Made of that!' But it did not deter Madame Vreeland. Without a moment's hesitation, she knew what he must do. 'What you have there is amusing and funny,' she told him. But instead of pursuing a career in theatre design, she advised him to transfer his talents on to fashion accessories. He chose shoes, which became the perfect vehicle for his vivid imagination and riotous sense of colour.

'In the beginning I didn't have much money, so I did care if I sold shoes. Now I do what I do simply because I love to. I have to do it. I have to indulge myself.' He could make much more money from his shoes. He could sell his name for a start. He could be an international chain. But he prefers to remain small and in control, with just a tiny handful of shops. He has always had a thing about feet, since he was a little boy. He shows me a photograph of himself aged 18 months, in his native Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canaries, where his 88-year-old mother still lives in the family home on their banana plantation. He is naked, apart from a pair of Start-rite sandals. His mother bought them from Harrods. He has one on his foot and the other is clutched in his tiny hand.

He loved to chew the leather, he admits. As a child, he made shoes for the local monkeys and iguanas out of tiny pieces of foil.

He likes the way feet move. And although you need a serious amount of money to indulge in a regular Manolo habit, he insists that anybody can wear them. You don't need particular shaped feet. In fact, some ladies, such as Carolina Herrera a designer in New York and a socialite, very elegant, from Venezuela, she always says to me, "Your things gave me legs." I really like European feet, I like a broader thing.' Admittedly, he's never been asked to design for flat feet, but his shoes are by no means confined to the vertiginous. He likes to make shoes with tiny heels, or others that are completely flat, like the unlined satin slippers he made for Diana Vreeland in the last years of her life. 'I always believe that for a woman in a flat shoe, it's up to her to make it really work. Bardot wore ballerina shoes and wonderfully sexy she was. All these girls in the past, like Miss Hepburn, all those women. Just flat shoes, and they really were sooooo sexy and feminine.'

The secret of his shoes, he says, is something to do with the spoon shape he gives them. 'You know, you just learn from years and years and years.' I ask if any of his customers have deformed feet. 'Nooooooooo!' He looks vaguely horrified at the thought of it. His shoes aren't stiff and hard like so many he sees in the shops. And he can't understand the trend in America for injecting Botox into the balls of the feet to allow women to suffer their heels for longer, and with less pain. He's against the whole idea of plastic surgery. 'There is this necessity to prove all the time this kind of youth. I'm not part of this American society where everybody from the age of about 40 starts doing things. No, no, no. I like an old face. Shoes are a total attitude. It's not about age.'

- The Observer

What about shoe chains? I just recently found out that shoe chains exist as an accessory for ankle cuffs. I'm concerned that the chains might be incompatible with maribou feathers. (See below.) If anyone has experience with pink maribou high-heeled bedroom slippers (mules) worn in combination with shoe chains, please advise.

*Pink maribou bedroom slipper with 3-inch heel and no purpose whatsoever. I like them. They remind me of the Gabor sisters, Jayne Mansfield and Doris Day:

 

[English Lady]

As a general rule I don't wear knickers, so when I do they're special. lacy or satiny but sexy and if I'm slipping them on it's to feel sexy and to have sex later. Thefeel of them encasing me is highly stimulating.

Anything velvet sets me going too, I have a velvet dress which feels so good that I'm constantly running my hand up and down it or stroking parts of my body hidden by it and the feel just makes me horny.

 

[BlackShanglan]

From the non-gendered equine point of view -

Anything sufficiently tight and firm on any part of the body is sensually arousing. Firm generally translates into leather or something of similar weight and resistance.

Shanglan