“Victoria Beckham ‘Can’t Do’ Heels Anymore (Let’s Pay Tribute to Her Most Insane Footwear While We Mourn)” (people.com). “Would you work out in high heels like Victoria Beckham?” (thesolemates.com). “Is Victoria Beckham Ditching Her High Heels?” (instylye.com). “This Is Why Victoria Beckham Won’t Wear High Heels Anymore” (bustle.com). “Victoria Beckham braves the rain in open-toe heels” (pagesix.com). “14 Stars Still Wearing Heels in the Frigid Winter: Victoria Beckham and More” (hollywoodlife.com). Upon typing “Victoria Beckham heels” into my Google search bar, these are among the first two pages of results that my particular Google algorithm populates. If you’re at all familiar with celebrity and pop culture from the early to mid-90s and forward, you’ve heard of Victoria Beckham—she was “Posh Spice” in the pop girl group Spice Girls—but you may not necessarily be familiar with her fetish for high heels and the world’s fixation on her fetish for high heels. I wouldn’t necessarily say I “follow” celebrity culture, but I’m aware of it: its pervasiveness across media outlets makes it impossible to ignore—you’ll glean something. The limbic system in my brain has a cache of information on Victoria Beckham’s affinity for heels and the earth-shattering event of paparazzi capturing images of her wearing anything less than a death-defying stiletto.
I distinctly remember celebrity gossip TV shows like Access Hollywood, and E! News, and Entertainment Tonight, among others, sensationalizing Beckham’s choice to no longer wear heels as if it were a crime against femininity, while simultaneously some sort of pardon for the rest of womankind to rip off their pumps, empty their shoe closet—women build physical spaces into their homes to house footwear when they aren’t even afforded the same physical space for bodily integrity—and burn them in a heap in their backyard in solidarity. That’s the interesting thing about femininity under patriarchal hegemony: you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you wear heels, you’re conforming to cultural standards of what it is to be feminine; if you don’t, you’re unfeminine and therefore deviant and eligible for punishment. Confoundingly, through some seriously twisted patriarchal alchemy, wearing heels and performing femininity not only associates a woman with polished ambition and tantalizing allure but it also categorizes her as vain, puerile, and senseless.
Beckham’s transition from the sky high heel to the jaded flat was noteworthy for two reasons: our culture’s obsession with policing women’s aesthetic, especially celebrity women, but also because she was once quoted as saying she “can’t concentrate with flat shoes,” and that she avoids the gym because she “couldn’t run in heels” (Bustle.com) (it’s not clear whether she couldn’t physically run in heels or if heels were against gym policy). As a woman and a feminist, it saddens me to read such obviously internalized patriarchal ideology on Beckham’s part (and the subsequent media canonization that both implicitly and explicitly compounds patriarchal operant conditioning for the greater population). It’s asinine to suggest running in heels, especially as appropriate foot attire for exercise, is preferred, or comfortable, or so outside Beckham’s frame of reference—stemming from decades of learned and internalized performative femininity, especially from years in paparazzi spotlight—that she couldn’t bear the thought of exercising in, let’s say, sneakers.
Evidently, in 2016, Beckham subverted her high heel creed and decided to adopt a more “comfortable” approach for a “working” woman: “I just can’t do heels anymore. At least not when I’m working…clothes have to be simple and comfortable.” One of the articles I stumbled upon referred to Beckham’s new look as “casual” and “no fuss” and “grunge” and “simplistic” and “minimali[stic]” and “norm core” and “cuddly,” or she’s referred to in inherently (or codified) masculine ways as “suit-oriented” and “distinguished.” In essence, if you are wearing any form of flat (sneakers, mules, ballet flats, etc.), you are unfeminine. (This is where I footnote all the makeover movies from the 1980s and forward that depict a teenage girl’s worth after she’s transformed from homely nerd and repackaged as an enigmatic beauty with the help of a new “feminine” wardrobe: only then is she noticed and desirable.) And if you’re unfeminine, you’re either masculine-presenting (aka a “tomboy” and/or “one of the guys”) or lesbian. Either way, you’re queer, and queer is an aberration to be dismissed, punished, and/or corrected. In the same article, when referencing Beckham’s previous stiletto days, she was an image of “glamour” and “polish.” She was “grown up” and a “serious business woman […] with a dash of upper-crust.” The article ends with a proclamation, or perhaps, more appropriately, an invocation, for womankind: “If Beckham can switch over to sneakers, it just goes to show that our style can evolve in unexpected ways” (Komar).
David Beckham, Victoria Beckham’s husband and retired English professional footballer (or, in American English dialect, soccer player), does not wear high heels. (I’m sure this comes as no surprise.) And if you type “David Beckham heels” into your Google search bar, you’ll likely get results similar to mine: “Harper Beckham has stepped out wearing super high heels—and they’re in her size” (Hellomagazine.com) (Harper is Victoria and David Beckham’s daughter…she’s seven years old). “Victoria Beckham wears HEELS at Manly beach with Harper and Cruz” (Dailymail.co.uk). “All the odd times Victoria Beckham has worn high heels, including the beach, a treadmill and even in the SNOW” (Thesun.co.uk). Google even recycled a headline from my previous “Victoria Beckham heels” search: “Victoria Beckham ‘Can’t Do’ Heels Anymore (Let’s Pay Tribute to Her Most Insane Footwear While We Mourn).” When I searched “David Beckham heels,” I didn’t expect to receive results of him wearing heels—heteronormativity!—but I was surprised to see that the majority of the articles that populated seem to rebuke Victoria Beckham for wearing heels at “odd” times (whereas when I searched her name directly, I mostly saw articles revering her exemplary conformity, even in inclement weather, to stereotypical femininity). I know and understand that women are policed for wearing heels just as much as they’re policed for not wearing heels (or wearing heels at “odd” times), but I find it interesting that including a male figure in the search could deliver such tinged results. What tacit and internalized message can we glean from an acute cultural representation (high heels) of prescribed feminine attire? Furthermore, how do gender binaries in video games—for this essay, I’m focusing on The Sims 4—typify and reify the traditional politics of normative gender roles (gender typing/heteronormativity)?
No matter how you dress as a woman, turn one way in the maze and you’re rewarded, turn another and you’re ambushed, or trapped. It is hard not to despair when one follows this rhetoric to its logical conclusion, which is that “sensible” shoes are unfeminine, and “feminine” shoes are not sensible, therefore to be feminine is to be without sense (Brennan).
Ostensibly, heels are a form of shoes like any other, e.g., loafers or oxfords or sneakers, but, in reality, their palpable sex appeal—artificially elongating the legs and increasing hip movement emphasizing sex-specific characteristics of a “feminine” gait that obliges male sexual arousal—combined with the very literal physical pain of women wearing them plays into the hands of normative heteropatriarchal hegemony: “Yes, high heels cause pain, and not just when you fall down in them. The good ones hurt only after you’ve walked in them for a fair bit, while the bad ones hurt at first contact. They chafe the skin and punish the skeleton. It is an unavoidable fact that when worn frequently, over time, they can do permanent and painful damage to the body” (Brennan). Simply speaking, high heels represent women’s function in society under the male gaze: the fetishization of women’s pain coupled with the ability to easily subdue them, like predator after prey. Women’s social, economic, and political currency are bound to their beauty, and women pay for beauty with pain. It’s masochistic and cyclical.
It is a well-known maxim that women must suffer to be beautiful. It is a mantra we repeat to ourselves as we are tweezed, waxed, and threaded; as we endure another hour of cardio, or ignore pangs of hunger […] as the high heels that we have tolerated throughout an evening of dancing grow bolder and begin to make their assault at the end of the night, with ten blocks left to walk home. The near universal acceptance of high heels says something about compulsory female handicap. Much of being a woman entails a kind of mass ‘consensual martyrdom,’ as coined by Brooklyn Museum director Lisa Small in a write-up or her exhibit Killer Heels. Perhaps women, like Eve, are taught that they deserve pain. This is true for more significant hurts, but also for quotidian pain. Forgotten pain. The kind of pain that we forget, that men are not asked to forget and would not forget. We come to confuse tolerable with comfortable and continue to move the line further and further as to what we are willing to tolerate. As Mary Karr wrote, every pair of excruciating heels also telegraphs a subtle masochism; that is, I am a woman who can not only take an ass-whipping; to draw your gaze, I’ll inflict one on myself (Brennan).
Not only is the high heel a preponderant symbol of the painstaking standards and double bind of what it is to be feminine in women’s public lives, but these same standards are perpetuated and reiterated in how femininity is portrayed and performed in the digital sphere. As Mia Consalvo noted in her exploration of the first iteration of The Sims “Feminist researchers have started to systematically explore images of women in mainstream video games, and have found that representations of women and girls in games reapply many stereotypes of femininity and vulnerability found in more traditional media” (Consalvo, pg. 172). In playing The Sims 4 and scrutinizing the seemingly benign details of creating a Sim, I learned that among the details the creators coded into the game for you to personalize a Sim, “masculine” heels are not one of them. If you choose a “male” Sim, the default clothing options are coded as “masculine.” If you choose a “female” Sim, the default clothing options are coded as “feminine.”
From there, you can give your Sim freckles or tattoos or change the arch of their eyebrows or change their gait, but “male” Sims cannot wear heels unless you customize your gender settings to populate “feminine” selections (other “feminine” selections include long dresses, short dresses, and lingerie). Among the list of gait choices, there’s one identified as “feminine.” It is wreathed with butterflies, and the demo is very sashay-like: legs close together and a strong swivel of the hips. Conversely, there isn’t a gait identified as “masculine,” but there is a “tough” one: arms are lifted up and out from the body, the hips remain stationary, and there’s a stronger velocity in the strides (the image selection of the “tough” gait has the body leaning forward, reminiscent of a bull about to charge).
As feminist scholar Judith Butler may point out, “male” and “masculinity” as both nouns and adjectives retain such a sovereignty on standard gender assumptions and practices that creating and coding choices for “male” and “masculinity” would be superfluous because we tend to demarcate only that which is anomalous or queer: in the case of gender, that which is “female” and “feminine.” “Woman” is both subversive and submissive to “man.”
Because heels are coded into the game as “feminine”—and the only way to populate heels as an option for a male Sim is to choose “feminine” in the “custom gender settings”—the implicit message the game reifies is not only that there is a concrete gender binary but that there are definite ways to perform gender. Male Sims are not given a heel option in The Sims 4 because just as it is in real life, men are not expected to carry the same burden and feel the same pain as women. They aren’t expected to make the same sacrifices for beauty (and how that beauty translates to their worth): men are inherently worthy. The destruction of women’s bodies are collateral damage in a patriarchal society where men bond over the objectification and subjugation of women. Women’s suffering is the point: men find homosocial intimacy through collective contempt for women.
The point of having “heels” as a selection for male and masculine-identifying Sims is not to suggest that male Sims necessarily desire to wear heels, but how the codification, literally and figuratively, of high heels as universally feminine affects, foments, and reinscribes gender binaries in our digital worlds. Considering there are so many “feminine” implications tethered to the wearing of high heels, what would it mean if a male chose to wear them? What does it mean that they aren’t allowed to choose to wear them unless they abandon the inherent masculinity of not wearing them? Additionally, what does it mean that high heels—as stereotypically feminine footwear—aren’t made for walking, i.e., what do high heels mean for women’s autonomy? High heels are an obscure metaphor for women’s movement within a man’s world, i.e., their inherent lack of forward movement.
Absent in the manual for The Sims 4 is language pertaining to a Sims’ “sex.” Curiously, the term “gender” is used to describe the creation of a Sim by uniting the genetics of two different Sims: “The genetics of any two age appropriate Sims can be spliced together, regardless of gender” (Sims manual). As Consalvo pointed out in the manual for the first Sims, sex and gender were conflated as coequal, “[…] the manual makes an interesting move in conflating gender with biological sex, and reifying both as a primary signifier of identity. In the section on how to create new Sims, the manual explains ‘perhaps the best way to begin putting things in order might be by selecting a sex for your Sim-to-be—gender is a pretty basic constituent of self from which to build personality.’” But in The Sims 4, gender is employed as the sole element of identity. Typically, gender, i.e., social roles, is assigned to sexed bodies, i.e., “sexed” generally referring to one’s biological and/or reproductive system, so the implication in the absence of “sex” in The Sims 4 is that gender is the essence of both reproduction and social roles. Additionally, in “Create A Sim,” after you’ve chosen the “gender” for your Sim, you are then given the option to tinker with the Sims’s physical frame (“masculine” or “feminine”); clothing preference (“masculine” or “feminine”); the Sims’s ability to “become pregnant” or “get others pregnant” or “neither”; and whether or not the Sim can use the toilet standing.
All of these options are adjustable independent of one another and the gender you choose for your Sim. Interestingly, your Sims’s gender and customized gender choices—if you choose a male Sim, the physical frame and clothing preference automatically populate as masculine; the male Sim “get[s] others pregnant” and can use the toilet standing; vice versa for a female Sim—are signifiers of your Sims’s “personality.” So being, a Sims’s gender is informed by their personality.
For as long as time, women’s bodies have been objectified, appropriated, and commodified. Their representation in video games is no different. We modify our digital selves just as much as we modify our corporeal selves to fit whatever mold the patriarchy prescribes. Oddly enough, in fictional worlds where we can invent anything “queer,” anything that defies norms, we actively choose to replicate and perpetuate those same norms. Video games are the crucible of a queer future: they are the paradigmatic sandbox for introducing new ideas and molding thought in a constantly evolving technological landscape. Instead of relying on tired gender binaries, we should be affecting change with creativity and invention. Video games are the benchmark of possibility. Especially games like The Sims franchise. The first installation in the franchise debuted in early 2000 and within a couple years, it became the best-selling PC game in history, and eventually, the best-selling video game in history. The Sims 3 launched in the summer of 2009, selling 1.4 million copies in its first week, the best launch in Electronic Arts’ (EA’s) history, and EA just so happens to be one of the world’s largest game companies (Gee and Hayes). The Sims 4 was released in May of 2013 and is the latest installment of the life simulation video game. What’s in store for The Sims 5?
A lot of the scholastic reading and research I’ve conducted on the marginalization and disenfranchisement of women in video games and video game culture focuses on women gamers as missed markets, overshadowing women’s inclusivity as equal and ethical and superseding it with women’s inclusivity as commodity. Women—and their bodies—are already a commodity. We know how to barter with our physique. Our beauty is our worth, and the male gaze metes our worth. Is it so impossible to consider women as agents of their own body and mind that we can only think of ways to include women that compound their market value? What kind of gaslighting is this?
Instead of relying on a normative—in this case, capitalistic—lens to justify women’s integration into the creation of video games and their representation within games, we need to focus on disrupting norms: gender binaries, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, etc. Women’s inclusion in gaming borne from a capitalistic perspective is only doubling down on institutions that create and perpetuate oppression and inequality. We need to apply queer methodology to video games in order to subvert the norms that preclude women as mere commodities. As Adrienne Shaw writes in her essay “Circles, Charmed and Magic: Queering Game Studies,” “what does it mean to study games queerly? It requires that we use queerness as a method, as Salamon articulates, and as an orientation, in Ahmed’s terms. In looking at play, it requires moving away from attempts to define types of gaming, forms of gaming, and taxonomies of play. It requires not defending games as an object of study via normative standards of value (e.g., how much money they make or how many people play them)” (Shaw). Without queer understandings, our video games will continue to reflect the paradigm of women as commodity, as powerless spectators to their own subjugation. Utilizing capitalistic rhetoric to rationalize women’s inclusion in video games is exploitation, not equality. We need to destroy patriarchal norms in our culture, including in video game culture; we don’t need to be included in market research as a nicety to line the coffers of the gaming industry. In the long, long history of women’s silence, you’re asking us to buy our own voices.
A Han woman without bound feet in Imperial China was considered ugly and unmarriageable, and to get married and come under the legal and sexual aegis of a man was then, and continues to be, the primary expectation of women worldwide. Perceiving oneself to be beautiful, and the sense of power or safety that it provides, is its own kind of spectatoring [sic] pleasure—even if it is ‘pleasure’ one has to grin one’s teeth through. Plus ça change, etc. We see ourselves through the eye of society, through the eyes of men or women who may desire or judge us, and find that we conform. These norms bleed across the ledges of heterosexuality, too. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy, Margaret Atwood writes: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your head, is nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur (Brennan).
Works Cited
Brennan, S. “High Heels (Object Lessons).” New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Kindle edition.
Consalvo, M. (2003) “Hot Dates and Fairy-Tale Romances” in The Video Game Theory Reader, New Fetter Lane, London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 171-194
Gee, J. and Hayes, E. “Women and Gaming The Sims and 21st Century Learning.” Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Komar, M. (2016) “This Is Why Victoria Beckham Won’t Wear High Heels Anymore.” www.bustle.com, online, <https://www.bustle.com/articles/144635-this-is-why-victoria-beckham-wont-wear-high-heels-anymore>
Shaw, A. “Circles, Charmed and Magic: Queering Game Studies.” in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer 2015), Michigan State University Press, pp. 64-97.
The Sims 4 Instruction Manual, pg. 3.
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