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“I have size 11 feet. Yeah, it sucks, because I see all these super cute shoes in the stores - Guccis, YSLs, Manolos. And when they bring them out in my size, they look like clown shoes." –Paris Hilton
Confessions of a big footed girl
by Molly Jong-Fast
My feet have always been my Achilles’ heel: They have been called ships, boats, giant wedges of bony flesh, even flippers. Yes, I have very mixed feelings about my size 11 dogs: sometimes I am annoyingly liberated, embracing my hugeness, filled with the glee of a young bra burner in the 1960’s, and sometimes I just want to be able to buy a pair of Royal Elastic sneakers.
I suppose a good feminist would say that my feet are my own unasked-for, built-in protest against the patriarchy, freeing me from the conventional bonds of femininity. After all, foot binding in China was all about oppression, right? So by that thinking enormous feet are freedom--freedom to share shoes with drag queens, freedom to scare pedicurists, freedom to make kitten heels look like some kind of science experiment gone horribly wrong, which they are...
But here’s the crucial difference: unlike enormous, lopsided boobs, or a nose that is aerodynamically problematic, or giant twisted yellow teeth, my feet are incurable. There is no surgery to fix what ails me, there is no treatment, there is nothing Pat Wexler or Doctor Dan Baker can do to fix my problem. My enormous problem, my drag queen-sized problem, my feet, size 41, are large enough so that I will never be able to squeeze into Mella flip flops, cute Charlotte Ronson wedges, Tory Burch logo flats, or most styles of Kors by Michael Kors shoes.
I wish I could say, like a dimwitted golden retriever, that I have to love my enormous fleshy appendages, the way Angelica Huston cherishes her nose and Lauren Hutton loves the gap in her teeth. Because self-loathing is so 1990’s, right? Because we have entered the age of oppressive self-love, and the admission of displeasure at anything about my body will lead to teenage girls everywhere sniffing furniture polish.
Growing up I was pretty normal, at least for the daughter of a sex queen and a Buddhist, who lived on Manhattan’s upper east side in a dilapidated town house with a hot pink door. I had a pretty, newly single mom (Erica Jong) who was a successful writer and obsessed with fashion. Tragically, much of the fashion my mom was obsessed with was eighties fashion. For better or worse, mom was a constant clotheshorse of Koos, Norma Kamali, Zandra Rhodes, and the ubiquitous Maud Frezon. Her two large walk-in closets were like shoe museums, a testament to her obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and I spent much of my life sitting hiding in those closets.
I was a very anxious child, terrified of the city around me (I had some reason to be terrified, because from ‘85 to ‘88 our lives were ruled by mom’s stalker). But much of my hiding was about shoes, about loving them, about wanting to be with them --their impractical kitten heels, their sky-high platforms, their angry alligator skin. It was the safety of inanimate objects that those shoes offered me. It was the spirituality of commerce that saved me from the very clear and present danger of my mother’s activities: partying at Studio 54, dating, marrying, and writing books about sex.
Growing up, I assumed that I would have a closet like my mother’s—filled with beautiful, tiny (size 8 and 1/2; tiny is relative), sexy shoes, all of them with skinny, precarious heels. But around the age of twelve I started to have inkling that things might not go exactly as planned. For one thing I was fast becoming taller than my mother (who is actually 5’2 but lies and says she’s 5’3). On a good day, I am 5’8, and if you actually measured me you might find I am as short as 5’6. Not a shrimp, by any means, but short enough to perhaps have normal feet.
I don’t remember the day I crossed the demarcation line, trotted right into the Gaza strip of shoe buying. Anyone who has fallen off the foot normalcy map knows there is a huge difference between a size 10 (40) and a size 11 (41). All shoe stores carry size ten, all brands go up to size ten—when you have size ten feet the world is your oyster.
