MAYBE IT WAS NEVER FOR MEN.

Heels, the male gaze, and why femininity still makes people uncomfortable.

There's something I've been thinking about for a while, and it's how differently people seem to perceive heels compared to other dance styles.

Despite how much heels has grown over the last few years, I still think there's a tendency to reduce it to 'sexy dancing'. As if putting on a pair of heels, wearing a little outfit and moving sensually somehow makes what we're doing less technical, less artistic or less deserving of respect.

And I find that really fucking interesting.....

Because when we look at the way society has historically treated things associated with women, femininity and sexuality, I can't help but wonder whether the issue has ever really been about the dancing itself.

Or whether we're still a little uncomfortable with women who are unapologetically sexual, feminine and completely in control of how they express themselves.

So let's talk about it 👀

WHO EXACTLY ARE WE DANCING FOR?

I want to start with something that genuinely baffles me. Why is it that when a woman does something sensual, there's often this automatic assumption that she's doing it for men?

If she's wearing a revealing outfit, she must want male attention. If she's dancing provocatively, she must be trying to turn someone on. If she's touching her body or performing something sexual there must be some imaginary man she's trying to impress.

But what if she just fucking likes it? 😭

What if she enjoys feeling sexy? What if she loves the way her body moves, the way she looks in heels, or the confidence she feels when she's performing?

There's a huge difference between wanting to feel sexy and wanting somebody else to find you sexy, and I think those two things get confused far too often.

When I'm choreographing something sensual, I'm thinking about the music, the textures, the movement, the way something feels in my body and how I want to express it. I'm not sitting in my studio thinking about whether some random bloke would enjoy watching it.

And I think a lot of dancers would say the same.

Of course, some people DO enjoy being desired. Some people love performing for an audience, and some people deliberately create work that's supposed to be seductive. That's completely fine too.

But why do we assume that has to be the motivation behind every expression of female sexuality?

Women are capable of experiencing and enjoying their own sexuality without needing somebody else to validate it.

What a revolutionary concept lol😂

SEXUAL DOES NOT MEAN SEXUALISED.

I think we need to understand the difference between a woman choosing to express her sexuality and somebody else sexualising her.

Because they're not the same thing!

A dancer can intentionally create something sensual, provocative or even overtly sexual, but that doesn't mean everybody watching suddenly gets to decide what it means, who it was created for or how she's allowed to be treated and I think this extends far beyond dance.

Women are constantly navigating this weird contradiction where we're encouraged to be attractive, desirable and feminine, but then judged for being too sexual, too revealing or too confident in our bodies.

We should be sexy, but not too sexy.

Confident, but not arrogant.

Attractive, but preferably without looking like we're trying.

It's fucking exhausting.

Then when a woman decides to embrace her sexuality on her own terms, people can be very quick to assume she's doing it for attention.

A woman choosing to be sexual doesn't mean she's surrendering ownership of her sexuality.

You can enjoy being sexy and still have boundaries. You can wear tiny shorts and still expect to be respected. You can perform provocative choreography without inviting inappropriate comments or behaviour.

Being comfortable expressing sexuality doesn't mean your body suddenly becomes public property!!!!

WHY DOES SEXY MEAN LESS SERIOUS?

Now THIS is the part that really gets me.

Why does the presence of sexuality seem to make some people take an art form less seriously?

Heels requires an incredible amount of technique, strength, coordination, balance, control and body awareness. You're working with an altered centre of gravity, managing weight placement, maintaining alignment and creating movement with your body that's operating very differently from when you're barefoot or in trainers.

And that's before we've even started talking about musicality, performance, textures, choreography, stamina or floorwork.

But because the finished product might look sensual or feminine, some people seem to forget that there's actual fucking training behind it.

Someone can watch a dancer perform an incredibly controlled, technically demanding piece of choreography and their takeaway is essentially:

She's just shaking her ass in heels.

Okayyyy, did you miss everything else? 😂

Would the exact same level of physical skill be perceived differently if it wasn't packaged in something so unapologetically feminine?

And before anybody starts, I'm not suggesting that other dance styles don't face their own challenges or misconceptions. I'm also very aware that women are sexualised across pretty much every area of dance, including styles that aren't intended to be sensual in the slightest. My point isn't that heels is the only style affected by this, but that the overt femininity and sexuality associated with heels can add another layer to how seriously it's perceived and that something being sexy shouldn't automatically make us overlook the skill required to do it.

Being sensual doesn't make movement less technical. Being feminine doesn't make it less athletic. And looking effortless doesn't mean something IS effortless.

MAYBE THE PROBLEM IS HOW WE VIEW FEMININITY.

Think about how often things predominantly associated with women are dismissed as silly, shallow or unimportant.

Makeup, fashion, beauty, romance novels. Anything considered 'girly'

There is an interesting pattern in how quickly feminine interests can be treated as less intellectually, culturally or artistically valuable.

And I think heels sometimes falls into that same category....

It's associated with women, sexuality, appearance, confidence, femininity and often very traditionally feminine aesthetics.

So instead of seeing the skill, people see the heels.

Instead of seeing the athleticism, they just see the outfits.

Instead of seeing the choreography, they see the sexuality.

And I can't help but wonder whether part of the problem is that we've been conditioned to view femininity as something decorative rather than something that can also be powerful, technically demanding and worthy of respect.

Because here's the thing,

A woman shouldn't have to reject femininity to prove she's strong.

She shouldn't have to dress more conservatively, move less sensually or make her art more palatable to be considered a serious dancer.

And she certainly shouldn't have to make herself less sexual to be considered intelligent, talented or respectable.

You can be feminine AND strong.

Sexual AND intelligent.

Provocative AND professional.

You can love pink, tiny outfits, makeup, six-inch heels and shaking ass while also being an incredibly disciplined, knowledgeable and technically trained dancer.

I promise the two can coexist and they do😭

RESPECT THE ART, EVEN IF IT ISN'T FOR YOU.

Something I find frustrating is the idea that because somebody doesn't personally connect with a style, it somehow makes that style less legitimate.

You don't have to enjoy heels.

You don't have to find sensual choreography empowering.

You don't have to want to wear heels, perform sexually or express femininity in that way.

Nobody is asking you to.

But there's a difference between saying “that's not for me” and deciding that something doesn't deserve respect because you don't understand or relate to it.

And I think those of us within the heels community have a responsibility here too.

If we want heels to be respected as a technically demanding dance discipline, we need to take the training seriously ourselves. That means understanding foundations, studying the people who have shaped the style, continuing to develop our knowledge and not reducing it to simply putting choreography in a pair of heels.

We can't complain that people only see the aesthetic if we're not also educating ourselves about the technique, artistry and history behind it.

But equally, we shouldn't have to remove the sexuality from heels to prove that the technique exists.

That's the part I really want people to understand.

The sensuality isn't something we need to apologise for before we're allowed to talk about the skill and the femininity isn't something we need to hide to be taken seriously.

And the fact that someone might find a performance sexy doesn't mean that's all the performance has to offer.

MAYBE IT WAS NEVER FOR MEN.

I think what bothers me most about the whole male gaze conversation is how easily we can end up centring men in something that might have absolutely nothing to do with them.

A room full of people training, experimenting, creating, building confidence, developing their technique and enjoying movement somehow becomes a conversation about whether men would find it attractive.

And I'm just thinking...

Why are we making this about them again? 😂

Something I find particularly funny about the assumption that women dance in heels for male attention is that, in my experience, about 99% of the time we're dancing in rooms predominantly filled with women and the LGBTQ+ community. There isn't exactly a crowd of straight men sitting at the back of my classes waiting to be entertained. It's people showing up after work, spending their own money, putting themselves outside their comfort zones, learning new skills and supporting each other. Plenty of them don't even film themselves, let alone post anything online. So if the whole point is supposedly to attract men, we're going about it in a pretty inefficient way.

And even when we do share our dancing online, that doesn't automatically mean we're looking for male attention either. I genuinely think that if we could share our work in a space just for women and the LGBTQ+ community, a lot of us would happily do exactly that. Because there's something incredibly powerful about receiving support from people who actually understand and appreciate what you're doing. A comment from someone complimenting your confidence, your movement, your musicality or your technique can mean so much more than people realise. Especially when you know how much work has gone into getting to that point.

Compare that to some of the unsolicited comments from men, where an entire performance gets reduced to what they'd like to do to you sexually. It's not flattering, it's not particularly enjoyable and it's certainly not the validation we're all desperately waiting for. Imagine spending hours training, choreographing, rehearsing and refining something, only for somebody to overlook every bit of skill involved because they've decided your body is the most interesting thing about it. 

And from a teaching perspective, there's another part of this that makes me laugh. I've built an entire career around teaching heels, and the people who have supported that career have been women and the LGBTQ+ community. They're the ones booking my classes, attending my workshops, investing in their training and allowing me to do what I love for a living. Yet somehow there are still men who seem convinced that this entire industry exists for their viewing pleasure. Which is quite an impressive level of main character syndrome for people who aren't even buying a ticket lolll the audacity.

Maybe the woman dancing in heels isn't trying to impress anybody.

Maybe she's exploring a side of herself she doesn't get to express anywhere else.

Maybe she's spent years training to make it look as effortless as it does.

Maybe she's having the time of her life.

Or maybe she's simply an artist creating something she loves.

And yes, maybe she does want to be sexy. Maybe she enjoys being desired, and is deliberately creating something provocative, and maybe she knows exactly what kind of reaction she wants. That's her choice too. The point is that none of those possibilities should determine whether she's worthy of respect.

Because ultimately, women deserve to be taken seriously even when they're being sexual.

They deserve to be respected when they're feminine, provocative, confident, sensual, ambitious, loud or completely uninterested in making themselves palatable to other people.

And heels deserves to be recognised for the artistry and technical skill involved, without pretending that its sensuality is somehow an embarrassing part of the equation.

We don't need to make heels less sexy to make it more respectable.

Maybe we need to stop treating sexuality and respect as if they're mutually exclusive.

And maybe, just maybe...

It was never f*cking for them in the first place 🩷