Men Are From Mars, Women Are Just Plain Crazy

Went into Karen Millen (a lovely English womenswear chain) to try on a pair of killer shoes I’d seen in the window a few days before. They were fabulous and on sale. There was just no conceivable reason I couldn’t have them… Except they weren’t my size. Just a size too small mind you, but not my size nonetheless. I shoved my feet into them, wicked stepsister style, arching, bending and contorting in every conceivable direction to get them to fit. They did, eventually, and I was left feeling very proud of my pain threshold. The salesladies all oohed and aahed and showered me not with fake praise, but with the kind spurned by envy that I’d managed to “fit” into the last pair of these shoes in any Karen Millen store in London (the cashier shook her head ‘no’ before I could open my mouth to ask if there was maybe another pair somewhere out there in Fabulous Shoe Land).

They made me walk around the store a bit, so I could see that really, they weren’t so bad. Who needed healthy, non-disfigured, scar-free pinkie toes anyway? Who needed pinkie toes period? One girl suggested the shoes would doubtlessly stretch, another said they looked perfectly fine and what was I complaining about anyway? They were fabulous! And ON SALE! What kind of freak was I (no she didn’t say any of those things, but I saw them etched in her eyes…)

I bought the shoes and wore them that night to the theater. The show was about three hours long, and I was comfortably seated the entire time. I had to take the shoes off about an hour into the play, because I was about to pass out from the pain.

Would a man, a gay man, a thoroughly metrosexualized man, ANY man, ever do this?

I think not.