Oh, it’s hard for me to even find a place to start.
How about with the fact that, in the United States, there are bi-gendered shoe categories and bi-gendered shoe sizing. We’re talking about feet here, folks. Feet. We all have them. Smaller people usually have smaller feet. Larger people usually have larger feet. And that’s about all you can definitively say about feet.
Let me say it again: Our culture in the U.S. separates shoes into “men’s” and “women’s.” Is that landing yet? Did your jaw drop? If not, pull back a little. Then a little farther. Try again. You can buy a “women’s” or a “men’s” Nike Air Force One. Like, the market has convinced you that’s reasonable. That Nike can tell you what colors you like if you think of yourself as a woman and what colors you like if you think of yourself as a man. Or how big or small your foot is supposed to be.
Does that seem rational to you?
And what if you don’t think of yourself as either?
And what if you’re a “man” (a thing that doesn’t actually exist, by the way, in this context — of colors and style and foot size — it’s all culture and ideas and mythology) who likes light blue, maybe, or pink? You cannot buy a certain Air Force One, because they don’t make it big enough for you. And if you’re a “woman” who likes bright green or red and black, maybe, you cannot buy it, because they don’t make it small enough for you.
And what if you’re a person who likes pink but has larger-sized feet? Or a person who prefers bold red and black but has smaller-sized feet? Why can’t you just buy whatever shoes you like?
I shouldn’t be incriminating Nike so much, here, because they are one of the very rare brands with many un-genderized shoes and that lists both “men’s” and “women’s” sizing for products frequently on their website. Otherwise, you have to get out a tape measurer and do a careful compare and contrast between size charts and try to guess which of the “men’s” sizes will fit your “women’s” feet. Like, how insane is it that the same uniform size numbering isn’t used in the U.S., even if you still couldn’t find certain colors in certain sizes?
Let's keep going. Some companies (La Sportiva, I have on good authority) make “women’s” shoes narrower. As if the practice of foot binding is still acceptable. As if “women” are so dainty and petite, they have these cute little feet that are just smaller everywhere — and if they don’t, they should.
Some companies don’t make the same shoes for “men” and “women.” For example, I just noticed today — the fact which sent me into this fury — that OluKai doesn’t make its Moku Pae boat shoe — or any boat shoe — for “women.” At all. As if “women” don’t go boating, or they don’t need sensible shoes for such boating, because they will just sit on the bow and cheer the “men” on as they fish.
I just. I just can’t even tell you. How much this infuriates me. How deeply irrational and unfair and ridiculous it is. To not only make shoes along a fictional gender binary, but then make such bizarre and inaccurate assumptions about such binary that a company will not even make a product for half of it. Will make items not for everyone but for only it’s conception of “men” or its conception of “women.”
And we just sit around and act like this is normal? Like it’s okay?
I’m tired of being told what I am and how I therefore should be by the government. By strangers on the street. By certain of my relatives. But especially by the market. Doesn’t the market just want the money? How does it benefit a company to not let me buy easily what I want to buy?
I’m tired of walking into a shoe store and seeing a visual binary divide for an imagined binary concept. I’m tired of how we make our ideas of things real, make them manifest, and with our limited minds, create limitations in the actual world.
Limitations which simply don't need to be there. We could just change it. Right now. Just go about it a different way.