High heels are stylish but unpleasant, and they may put your feet at risk for long-term injury. At first look, it doesn’t make sense to prefer footwear that hurts and damages feet and makes it difficult to flee from predators both old and new.
However, if wearing high heels makes women more beautiful and enables them to choose more carefully among a greater number of higher quality males competing for their attention, this could explain the evolutionary benefits of this style choice.
According to evolutionary theory, what’s trendy, what’s in, and what’s out should be predictable. Otherwise, history will view it as only a fleeting trend. In time, they’ll be as dated as shoulder pads from the 1980s.
High heels may assist accentuate the uniquely feminine elements of stride since women often walk differently than men. Women who wear these shoes walk even more like other women.
Male gaits are faster, have longer strides, and move more slowly. Additionally, there are variations in side swing. Men move their heads more and sway their upper bodies more, whereas women move their hips more.
Utilizing point-light displays, which depict the body as a sequence of markers placed on significant landmarks on limbs, gait is investigated. In these tests, a screen with a dot pattern is displayed to the perceiver. Any influence on preferences or attractiveness must have something to do with movement patterns since all they are seeing are moving dots.
Perceivers are extraordinarily adept at deciphering the motion patterns of point-light display dots and are able to differentiate between the gaits of men and women. It is feasible to correctly identify the gender of the walker by simply seeing the moving dots that reflect the movement of the entire body.
The psychologists compared ratings of women walking in flat shoes with those of the same women walking in high heels to determine whether or not walking in high heels enhances the attractiveness of gait in their recent study, “High heels as supernormal stimuli: How wearing high heels affects judgements of female attractiveness.”
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