Sex vs. Shoes

Not too long ago the Philippines had a notoriously tough guy dictator. So naturally, he had a tough wife too. This wife loved the extravagances that came with being the wife of a ruthless strongman. When Marcus was finally deposed and the poor people of the Philippines invaded the former palaces of the dictator, they discovered that Imelda Marcus had over 3,000 pairs of shoes! In interviews following the couples fall from grace one of the most important things Imelda said she missed were those shoes.

I bring up this example of extreme shoe affection because basically love of shoes is one stereotype of women that has a strong basis in fact. Watch women's shows and often the dialogue focuses on shoes.

 Eavesdrop on a group of females and sooner rather than later they will discuss shoes. Go somewhere with your girlfriend to watch people and invariably she will mention the good or bad of some female's shoes (usually bad). Women are just crazy about shoes.

On the other hand, men have an equal fixation on sex. Some people believe that men think about sex every 10 seconds or less. We talk about it to our male friends in conversations on who we'd like to do. When we trash talk each other, we don't deride another male about what he's wearing, instead we insist we had raunchy sex with the other person's wife/sister/girlfriend (whichever might dig the deepest).

If you go on the Internet you will find millions of sex sites aimed at men. For women you will find around two. Um, sorry no links, you'll have to find those yourself.

Likewise, if you go shopping on the Internet you'll find thousands of shoe sites that target women, but you will be lucky if you can find any that try to draw in men. More than likely, if a guy were to want to look at shoes rather than porn (usually when the girlfriend is in the same room), he'd discover that the site was just a few entries as a sideline to a woman's site.

Now you are probably mumbling under your breath--or screaming at me through the computer screen--that Masters & Johnson found that women like sex just as much as men. But those two sex researchers misunderstood the data.

To this day when I think about that study I imagine a little old lady sitting in her rocking chair knitting as she answered the questions.

"Oh, sex? Why, yes that is fun. I like it immensely."

Which is true. I am absolutely sure they thought that. But what these researchers didn't understand is that they could get the same response about chocolate--or shoes!

The women didn't have the same imperative that men do when it comes to sex. Men start wars because of sex (Helen of Troy) that's how imperative it is for them. Women will marry scummy dictators in order to buy more shoes. I imagine if there were a survey that asked would they rather have sex or get a new pair of shoes, women would go with the shoes. Men wouldn't have made it past the part about sex and wouldn't have known there was another option.

 I should make an admission here though. You might be shocked to know that I actually own about 15 pairs of shoes. Of course, that's because I typically don't throw things away that I think I might use again. That's why one of those pairs is my old jump boots from my 82nd Airborne Days. It also includes two pairs of old jogging shoes I call my "rainy day" shoes because I wear them when I go jogging in the rain. And six of the pairs of shoes have either the heels missing or big holes in them. I keep them because I think I might actually fix them—even though that hasn't happened yet in ten years. So basically I am like most men who have maybe three pairs of shoes they'll wear.

When I did a casual poll of women, not counting the shoes they kept too long (I think women are just as prone to hoarding as us guys), it averaged 25 pairs that were still in rotation.

Like all men, I also don't throw away porn. Yes, I still have sex magazines from the 70s. That's why when police raid a guy's home, you will always read about the massive amount of porn they discovered.  I didn't do a poll of women and ask them about their stash of porn because, well, I didn't want to get slapped, but also since there are only about two magazines that you might call porn for women, I figured they wouldn't have a stash.

So the bottom line is, as insane as men are about sex, women are as equally insane about shoes.