From the comments to a post by my favorite rad-fem ever, Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy, comes this gruesome story:

"I used to be Miss Femininity. My goal was to be Miss America when I was a teen (it was not revealed to me at that age that I was not tall enough or rich enough to do so) so I got up every morning at 5 am so I could spend two hours making myself “pretty enough” to go to school, and the culmination was tottering to the bus stop in little spike heeled pumps hoping they wouldn’t catch on a crack in the sidewalk and spill me most unfemininely to the ground. Then after school, I took ballet, wore en pointe shoes, and starved myself appropriately in hopes of being the ultimate feminine slender graceful icon of beauty which would make lesser ugly females cry in despair (and of course, make all men want to protect me and take care of me and buy me a big house in the country and tenderly look after me and however many children I bore to him.)
Result - by age 19 I had arthritis in my feet so bad now I cannot wear so much as a one inch heel without suffering intense pain after a few hours, and my two smallest toes on each foot are permanently red and swollen and remain turned in and curled under even when barefoot, and thus are prone to infection if I don’t carefully dry them after every shower or whenever I get my feet wet. My wife looks at my toes frequently and mutters things about foot binding. And in spite of this sacrifice in the name of femininity and beauty, no rich man has ever taken more of an interest in me other than to offer to buy me for an evening when I looked sufficiently down-n-out and powerless.
So soliliquies in praise of the beauty of the tortured feminine foot in high heels somehow fail to impress me.

Of course, the whole blog and subsequent discussions are worth reading, but do enter at your own peril: this is a radical feminist blog of a radical feminist who espouses entirely radical feminist notions (such as ‘fashion is a tool of the patriarchy’), so be advised! (I’m a hypocritical feminist by Twisty’s standards, since I do love fashion, but I can’t help it. I love Twisty  and consider myself a feminist, but I also DO love fashion. C’est la vie, toujours ambivalent.)

PS: In case you wondered, the shoe pictured above is an 1890 English fetish shoe (really, look at those curves: who could possibly walk in it?). If you’re familiar with a bit of the history of the stiletto, you’d know it has its origins in fetish wear. So, behold an early precursor!