Alice Wylie: 'Who needs feminism when you've got fashion designers like these?'

I loathe sore balls. Most women know the sensation of which I speak; the burning pain in the balls of your feet that comes with wearing very high heels. It is for this reason, among others, that I very rarely wear heels.

Indeed, the last time I slipped on a pair was probably the day the picture that goes with this column was taken, and if you look very closely you can probably see the tears behind my smile. High heels are painful and restrictive and yet for the past two years women have been routinely donning the kind of teetering shoes that render walking an ordeal at best.

After the 'it' bag of the mid-noughties came the 'it' shoe and it was vile. Heels and platforms got higher and more fetishistic, and the look quickly trickled down from catwalks to the high street. Soon women were navigating the sticky pavements of George Street barefoot at 3am, silly shoes in hand. Tackling hot coals is possibly less precarious.

Truly these are shoes designed for the bedroom: you can't stay vertical in them so you might as well make the most of your time spent horizontal. And it's not just mortals who can't hack them; I watched at a recent event in London as supermodel Kate Moss attempted to stay upright in a pair of Alexander McQueen platforms.

Only now these shoes are on the way out, apparently, and fashion mags are heralding the return of the mid-height heel. One popular weekly glossy recently carried the cover line: "At last! Shoes you can actually walk in." It really should be taken as given that footwear allows you to perform that particular function at the very least. The same magazine recently carried a feature headed: "Can a perfume really make you nice, skinny and brainy?" So what it says should really be of little consequence.

I place the blame for much of this at the door of one Ms Carrie Bradshaw, whose lusty ravings about her Manolo Blahniks have inspired a generation of women to worship at the altar of the stiletto heel, often at the expense of their own comfort and even health.

The fashion world is run by gay men, designers who can have a tendency to fetishise femininity. And from John Galliano to Alexander McQueen, they've given us a new breed of footwear that should require a permit. Worse still, such footwear is often sold to us under the guise of empowerment. Who needs feminism when you've got fashion designers like these, eh?

I adore fashion, I own heels, and I can certainly appreciate a beautifully designed pair, no matter how precarious. However women are not meant to live their daily lives in the kind of nosebleed-inducing shoes that have become commonplace over the past few fashion seasons, no more than they are meant to live their lives in thumbscrews.

I resent that the fashion world is announcing a return to 'mid-height' heels. It implies that heels of some height or another (along with the resultant perpetually flexed calves, sore balls and inability to go anywhere fast) are the default footwear setting, and we're simply at the whim of fashion as to just how low, or (as is usually the case) high, they go. There's a reason that they call them killer heels, and I'm fed up of these ball-breakers.