Are women still self-abusing themselves in this manner? (I really don't know. I'm the Anti-Fashionista, as far as this Girly-Girl stuff goes.)
I remember my Mom and her rows and rows and rows of pretty, sparkly "Party Shoes," as she called them, back in the sixties.
And then I flash forward to her IN her sixties when she had her bunions removed and had seven of her ten toes BROKEN and set with pins to straighten them out again just so she could walk unaided...
Good Golly. Give me a pair of Combat Boots any day over those instruments of torture, LOL! :)
What I can tell you is that the first guy who invented shoes got laid a lot.
In other words, it only took a few hundred years for the invention of shoes to spread right across the planet.
Neanderthals were in ice age europe as early as 400,000 years ago so I imagine it happened right around this time.
I really do think that there is much ado about nothing, this feminist bashing of the so called "objects of torture": high heel shoes. Most women wear the wrong bra size, in turns subjecting the spine to a lot of pressure but I don't see a lot of activism about that. It's a question of choice, a question of common sense and moderation. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wearing a nice, slinky shoe while going out.