Good Morning America had a recent segment on cosmetic surgery for women’s feet (I really doubt a man would do such a thing) so that they can wear ridiculous high heels. Here’s the article: Is Cosmetic Surgery for Your Feet the Solution for Shoe Lovers?.
This is just insane.
Sorry, I cannot figure out how to embed the video, so you’ll have to click to see it.
There are actually three procedures that are talked about.
The most disgusting is toe-shortening surgery. Why? Why? Why?
The least disturbing was for the woman who sweated heavily and ruined her shoes.
When Jennifer Pyron, a 27-year-old from New York City had to stop wearing her favorite summer shoes because they were being ruined by sweat from her toes, she decided to have a cosmetic procedure.
“A lot of people have the problem, especially women that want to wear great shoes,” said Dr. Suzanne Levine, a podiatrist at the Institute Beaute in New York City who treated both Pyron and Gumbs. “They [women] don’t want their shoes ruined. It really is quite a problem.”
Dr. Levine injected Pyron’s feet with Botox to lessen the sweating. She treated high heel shoe-lover Gumbs’s pain by injecting a biodegradable cushioning into her foot, a filler similar to what people have injected into their smile lines.
The cushioning, which replaces the natural cushioning in the foot, will last about nine months, according to Dr. Levine.
Pyron . . . found relief in her feet after her Botox injection.
“Once it kicked in I totally noticed a difference,” she said.
I’d like to point out that psychiatry might be cheaper. Of course, when you are just barefoot, feet don’t need to sweat as much, and then any sweat you have dissipates naturally.
Almost as crazy was the woman who had extra padding injected into her soles.
“A beautiful pair of shoes can suck me in,” Gumbs, from Brooklyn, N.Y., told ” Good Morning America.”
But for Gumbs, her love of high heels came with a price: living with pain in the ball of her foot when she wore her favored shoes.
“It burns and it’s like fire,” she said. “I have my New Year’s Eve Jimmy Choos that I have not put on my foot yet because I am afraid of them…that heel.”
Gumbs chose to take action to fix her pain, becoming one of a number of women across the country choosing to fix their toes instead of giving up their favorite pumps, or even their sandals.
The patient, Gumbs, said she realizes that the procedure may seem crazy to others, but it is worth it to her.
“Not when you love shoes,” she said of the other option, to not wear high heels.
Hey, I have a better solution. Drop the fetish!
Seriously, is anybody impressed by such tottering?
The article itself doesn’t say a whole lot about operating on toes (though the video mentions it). No, they don’t remove them. What they do is remove one of the bones (or shave it), and then restructure the toe.
Hey! You really don’t need to do this.
At first I was going to liken this to women having ribs removed so that they could fit into smaller and smaller corsets, but that is a myth. You can see the Snopes debunking here.
Or maybe it is more like Chinese foot-binding:
Chinese Bound Foot, and the Shoe it fits into
The thing is, for Chinese foot binding, that seemed to be under the dictates of men. Women who go for these horribly high heels seem to be doing it just for themselves, or for other women. Do men really care about high heels? Maybe I’m weird, but they always strike me as really odd. (Supposedly, what high heels do is nicely define the calf, which men supposedly do care about.) I’m more impressed by competence, not cosmetics. My real suspicion is that women really dress more for each other. (Men are not that sophisticated, and just like that a woman is even paying attention to them. 
).
But is toe whacking a myth too? Not as far as I can tell. Here’s an article from the Huffington Post, Plastic Surgery For Fitting Feet In High Heels Is Still Happening, Still Probably Not A Good Idea, and here’s one from the New York Times: If Shoe Won’t Fit, Fix the Foot? Popular Surgery Raises Concern.
There really is no reason to do this. While removing ribs for corsets was a myth, squeezing into them, for some false idea of beauty, wasn’t.
Why not accept the way we are built?
Seriously! This is just crazy. At least when the Zombie Apocalypes strikes, they’ll be the first to get eaten
They won’t be able to run away!
This article shows that if they had had the technology to remove ribs safely they would have.
Hadashi – That’s a really good observation. I think you’re right.