Shoes? Seriously?
I realize it’s a holiday weekend, but it strikes me as darn odd that The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin decided to post about White House Counsel Kathryn Rummer’s penchant for wearing stylish shoes. Keep in mind that this appears in The Fix, the Post’s politics blog, not the Style section.
For women, shoes ARE a deadly serious matter. ( it’s a woman thing: men can’t understand ).
In our new taxonomy this Fix entry as it deals with clothes on a body is somewhere on the flem branch.
The Times found more to report on the remarkable Ms. Ruemmler than her stilettos http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/us/presidents-counsel-finds-herself-center-state.html?ref=us&pagewanted=all
The WaPo did not win the morning.
@Stonetools: “For women, shoes ARE a deadly serious matter. ( it’s a woman thing: men can’t understand ).”
Oddly enough, I’ve never understood it either… and I’m a woman.
@Stonetools: I’ll have to be the one that gives you a thumb’s up, mostly because it’s 100% true in my household.
This is what it is to be a woman. It doesn’t matter what you’ve accomplished, how smart you are, what you are known for – your appearance and fashion choices will be the focus for far too much of the conversation about you.
This is fine if you are married to the Prince of Wales. But if you’re, for example, counsel to the president, it can subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) undermine your work, since it makes some inclined to take you less seriously.
@Kari Q:
indeed. So why do women continue to trivialize other women w/ such stories?
I think part of the interest here is that these are not inexpensive shoes. Louboutins start at around $700 a pair, and can head solidly into the mid-four figures per pair. That’s a lot of salary to be investing in shoes, but to each her own I suppose.
@M. Bouffant:
I’m sure there are many reasons. Sometimes it’s the desire to meet the expectations, whether you approve of them or not; sometimes it’s because they are actually trying to undermine the woman’s success; some have just internalized the dialogue so completely that they don’t even think about it; and some women are actually so interested in that kind of thing that they want to read it even if the woman in question is a highly placed lawyer, Supreme Court judge, or Senator. I’m sure there are other reasons, those are just the ones that occurred to me.