the way i see it: Quit It With The Women's Novels With The Shoes On The Cover!
11.20.2002

Can somebody tell me what's going on with all these novels these days targeted towards young women? Every one of them has feet or shoes on the cover. It has always been a stereotype that women love shoes. Women, as we know from watching the Emmys, love Sex And The City. Carrie Bradshaw, from the show, which was once its own book, loves shoes. My theory is that publishers feel that by putting shoes, or feet, on all the books they are targeting towards young women, it will cause synapses in women's brains to start firing, resulting in a sale as impulsive as a post-work stroll past Nine West.

I walked into my local bookstore and glanced at the newly published fiction. If I were a foot fetishist I could have came in my pants right then and there. All those books about single women having a hard time making it, but always finding solace in buying things. Like books with pictures of shoes on them.


These books are being marketed as fiction for women, by women, books that are empowering. Yet they all sell the same tired song and dance that young women are getting older, are losing out on the single guys, and can only find true happiness in the things that they can put on their credit cards. Sure, they have happy endings, some of them (I don't read them, but I don't need to). But it's that trap of the hopelessly single woman that sells the book.

I remember in school they showed us that film "Killing Us Softly", in which it was made apparent just how advertising perpetuates the oppression, objectification, and exploitation of women. One of the popular tactics they showed us was how women's heads, arms, and other body parts in photographs are cut off at the edge of the frame, as if suggesting dismemberment or decapitation, or simply objectifying body parts. Well, if this is what progressive women have been claiming about marketing, then why are these women novelists' books, aimed at women, doing the same thing? Do they hate themselves? Do they wish to sell to women who hate themselves? Or do they simply want to point out that all women really care about is footwear? I don't know which is worse.

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