High Heels Are Supernormal Body Language Signal
Christopher Philip
Researchers Paul Morris and colleagues University of Portsmouth argue in their paper published in Evolution and Human Behavior that the women’s high heels function to boost female sexuality by acting as a supernormal cue to onlookers.
The study converted point light walkers wearing both high heels and flat shoes and replayed them to observers.
The study found that women wearing heels were significantly more attractive than those wearing flat shoes. In the biomechanical analysis, it was found that high heels led to increased feminine gait including a shorter stride length and increased rotation and tilt of the hips.
Thus, put simply, high heels exaggerate sex specific attributes of the female gait rendering them much more salient – a supernormal stimulus.
The researchers admit that the positive effects of gait are but one reason women risk injury from twisted ankles and other foot issues to sport heels. Wearing heels also make the leg and ankle better contoured, decreases the perceived foot size, accentuates the breast and buttocks and adds height by seeming to stretch the length of the leg.
However, they point out that little evidence has been presented to empirically support the claim.
Men’s and women’s natural gait demonstrate obvious differences. Men have longer stride length, slower cadence, and increased velocity. Men also differ in lateral sway with more upper body lateral movement while women have more translation in the hips. Previous studies have shown that women have greater hip flexion and less knee extension before contact.
What is important about the current study is that women were compared against themselves. Thus women were examined both with and without heels and judged on their youth, attractiveness, and femininity.
The results showed that in all walkers, scores for attractiveness was higher in the heeled condition than the flat condition and in 10 out of 12 walkers this difference was significant. Interestingly, the female raters judged the high heel walkers to be more attractive than those judged by males suggesting that they are more attuned to the differences and are likely to perpetuate the use and consumption of high heels. Female walkers wearing flat shoes were also more likely to be incorrectly identified as males. Women with lower BMI scores were also judged to be more attractive walkers.
Discussing The Findings
In animals the effects, of “super releasers” is well established. For example, oystercatchers prefer to sit on artificial eggs that are so large that they cannot
even correctly sit on them as opposed to the ease with which they sit on their own normal sized eggs. This has been found in insects, fish, birds and mammals alike. Even the swelled bottoms of the female baboon represents an exaggeration of the sexual cue eliciting stronger male interest.
In the same way, high heels in women (and probably ginormous breast implants too) may exaggerate sex specific female walk causing sexual arousal in men and make women aware of potential competitors for mates.
While these are may or may not be conscious and are certainly not instinctive they do represented an “extended phenotype” (physical genetic features i.e. versus genotype by itself) proposed by Richard Dawkins where women use the biology or genetic within to produce effects visible outside of the body – to create positive improvements. Other examples of the extended phenotype include the use of makeup, fashion including corsets and push up or padded bras, and even permanent cosmetic surgery.
The authors also draw attention to other fashion artifices including shoulder pads of the 1980s which emphasized more male characteristics as well as flapper dresses of the 1920s that did little to emphasis female figure suggest that there are some aspects of fashion which are artificially driven rather than sexual. The important take-away is that those fashions that endure and reoccur over time, are the ones which emphasize sex specific aspects of the body.
Drawing Conclusions
The study clearly demonstrates that women wearing heels versus flat shoes are rated as more attractive.
Thus, it is evident that women are either consciously or unconsciously motivated to wear high heels to increase their attractiveness.
When women wear high heels they have a more feminine gait including a greater transverse plane hip rotation (pelvic rotation), increased vertical motion at the hip in the coronal plane (lateral pelvic tilt); shorter strides and higher cadence.
In other words, women with high heels took smaller, more frequent steps, had less knee bend and greater hip rotation and tilt.
In the end, high heels are a supernormal stimulus to observers and serve to emphasize the sexual features which women already possess.
Finally, while women can use more feminine gaits to attract attention and showcase sexuality even while wearing flat shoes, the high heels shoe, as evidenced here, accomplishes the desired effect despite active control. In other words, it is the shoe that creates the type of gait pattern that creates femininity in a more passive and biomechanical sense.
Image Credit: Sjoerd Lammers Street Photography
Resources
Paul H. Morris, Jenny White, Edward R. Morrison and Kayleigh Fisher. High Heels As Supernormal Stimuli: How Wearing High Heels Affects Judgements of Female Attractiveness. Evolution and Human Behavior. 2019. 34: 176-181.