Here’s my beef (plural) in no particular order

A). It has the same effect as the foot binding they used to do in China. Everyone who grew up wearing shoes all the time has weird looking tube-feet. If you know anyone from pacific islands (or other civilized cultures) you’ll see for the most part that our feet are much wider compared to the shoe-monger’s culture relative to size, to the point that they almost look like they were designed to support a human body or something. Inb4 nonsense about collapsed arches because no one I’ve met who grew up like this has them.

B). Shoes are the reason y’all’s feet smell bad. If you don’t trap them, they sweat less and the sweat doesn’t build up in a weird-ass sweat sponge that you’ve got wrapped around your foot all day.

C). The only reason you don’t like how feet look is because you grew up hiding them your whole life making them taboo. It’s probably the same reason you have so many people with foot-fetishes. So Quentin Tarantino should be on y’all’s consciences as far as I’m concerned. It’s just a regular ass body part that is pretty much exactly like your hands. Irrational foot fear is just an extension of the shame you feel about y’all’s whole bodies.

D). Most of us who grew up in societies with more freedom can use our feet with much greater dexterity. They really are hands with shorter fingers and no opposability. By wearing shoes your whole life you’ve literally been given a physical handicap.

E). Getting calluses is a sign of growing up and gaining experience and y’all have soft feet like a baby. You also end up overly sensitive to pain. My little sister is only 10 years old and if she happens to step on glass she can just brush it off most of the time with her hand and keep going on a walk unimpeded. She probably had tougher feet as a toddler than a lot of you have now as adults. Once while in the ocean I stepped too hard on Vana (a sea urchin) and got its spines deep into my foot. Often you would just do something to help them dissolve, but the ones I got were super long, so we just got a pocket knife and my girlfriend at the time cut them out of my foot. Really not very painful, because I have the feet of an adult.

F). Your disregard for the ground you walk on leads to less guilt for the people who do litter and break bottles, making it more common of a concern than it needs to be.

G). Even when putting something protective under your foot is necessary (which is rare, since even when there’s glass, all you have to do is walk around it), all you really need is slippers (aka rubbah slippahs, I think you weirdos call them “flip-flops”) and they are many, many times less restrictive than shoes. Pretty much the only time you need more is when you’re working in a situation where you need work boots. If you live somewhere where it snows, first of all that’s your fault, but you’re also probably overestimating how much protection you need because of your baby feet. I’ve gone hiking in snowy areas both barefoot and with slippers and I’d say that you can get away with at least around twenty minutes of direct foot to snow contact without chance of harm. And if you put slippers on you can pretty much walk around indefinitely unless the wind itself is so cold you need to even cover your face to be safe. The only limitation there is once the snow gets above a couple inches the slippers aren’t as effective. Usually we wouldn’t hike at a time when it’s deeper than that the whole way up, so what I usually would do is just take my slippers off and get up past the deep part and put them back on.

H). Sneaker culture is consumerist nonsense.

I). Most of the time even y’all’s weird sweaty feet are much, much cleaner than your shoes because you do this thing called showering pretty regularly, and most people -never- wash their shoes.

J). I’m pretty sure it weakens your ankles as well, I had never heard of a sprained ankle lasting more than a day or two until I visited America. I know someone from America who was on crutches for a sprained ankle for like two or three months! And everyone was saying how sometimes a badly sprained ankle can be worse/take longer to heal than a fracture!

K). You have been robbed of the sensory experiences that different types of terrain provide. Just simple dirt can feel different place to place based on its composition. Temperature of the ground can be such a nice thing to feel as well, like if you’re walking in the shade but you notice the ground is slightly warmer than the air because it was in the sun earlier. The only way I’ve ever been able to describe how walking on slightly hot concrete or pavement is it’s as if your feet feel like maple syrup on a fresh pancake.

L). I can put on shoes any time I want to, but it would take you months of very regular conditioning (at least!) to get your feet to some point of small mediocrity, and you’ll never likely reach the levels that people raised in the free world experience. Not only is there a physical deficiency there’s also a deep cognitive aspect to walking around without strange foot wraps on, which might seem like a strange concept at first. We grew up with an awareness of what part of the ground we are walking on that has made it a second nature to us, it would take up so much more of your constant concentration to accomplish what we achieve with ease. We’re not walking around with our eyes glued to the ground like you might have to do.

M). It’s also essentially an example of the cultural cowardice that is described by the phrase “giving up freedom for the illusion of safety”. Yes I’m saying shoe-supremacism operates under a similar philosophical line of reasoning that allowed the TSA and NSA to come into being so easily. And similarly, now, even though they don’t provide any real benefit, their removal would be a very difficult and involved process to accomplish without harming yourselves.

N). Yeezys are ugly and you know it. I know I mentioned the consumerist side of this already, but this is about aesthetics. And, actually, while we’re on the subject

O). Kanye made much more of his current fortune from the shoes than anything else he’s done, and maybe if he hadn’t made quite so much money his politics wouldn’t have had the chance or motivation to become so terrible. Shoes might have paved Kanye’s path to the sunken place. I admit this is just a theory, but remember that before becoming ultra-wealthy Kanye was using his off-script powers to point out racial injustice in disaster relief and the distribution of cultural accolades, not calling slavery a choice. It’s been shown that wealth has the potential to make you less empathic, and you can’t tell me he was gonna make that kind of money selling big shirts.

P). By far shoe culture’s greatest achievement, that being their role in 2002’s Like Mike starring Lil’ Bow Wow, could have easily been accomplished by a jersey, if one had only been given the chance.

Q). Shoes are the most detailed basic clothing product to make, and therefore are the hardest to automate the creation of, meaning that sweatshop labor will continue to be the generally cheapest option for their creation for many companies for much longer than for other basic clothing. Slippers are made mostly by just injecting rubber foam into a slipper-shaped mold. This is also a capitalism problem, but we’re talking about a different form of near ubiquitous oppression right now (shoes).

R). Running with shoes on increases incidences and force of heel strikes, which places much more damaging stress on your body and makes both immediate and long-term injuries more common.

S). Having a regular awareness of how your feet touch the ground makes it easier to adjust full body posture while standing or walking, and reduces overall destructive pressures on your lower back, hips, legs and knees. It builds protective muscle structures for these areas as well. We have a better ability to balance. Beshodden culture is a culture that reproduces an intergenerational sado-masochistic cycle, passing on its aberrant form without consent or consideration from forebears to their children. In technical terms you have been robbed of your full proprioception.

T). There’s the relatively small but well known annoyance of the consequences of getting your shoes wet, and the chafing that causes. If you get your feet wet, they are just wet for a minute. It’s even a common expression for not making a huge commitment. Water is like, the whole deal with this planet, honestly it’s kind of weird our name for it means dirt. Water is objectively the big deal here. It covers like 4/5ths of the whole planet, falls out of the sky just RANDOMLY, and you’re gonna tell me you wanna walk around -all the time- with things that will ruin up to one full day (if you don’t get blisters) of your, ya know, incredibly finite life if they just come into contact with said nearly-everpresent substance?

U). I just wanna say that the word for what y’all do just sounds stupid. It’s called shod. You’re shod. You grew up shod. You’ve only known a shod life. You might as well get shod life tattooed on your knuckles. Dumb.

V). I mentioned shoes being weird fetishized consumer products already, but I didn’t say just how damn overpriced they are. We all know hype beasts are paying untold riches for these literally walking scams, but even outside of that buying a new pair of shoes is an obscene investment in your own despair. That’ll be like fifty bucks minimum just to have a worse life. True, slippers break more easily, but the way they break can be repaired within the time it takes to walk a couple steps, and beyond that they only cost a few bucks anyways.

W). Having a sock tan-line is one of the lamest things I can imagine.

X). Besides the fact that even in the best case scenario shoes are deforming y’all’s feet, just as a matter of course, functioning as intended, there’s also the problem of ill-fitting shoes. If you’ve got shoes that fall outside of a thin parameter of dimensions, you’re going to be fucking yourself up even faster. All the same problems in overdrive. And in a proof of concept, you’ll get used to it to the point you don’t even realize what is being done to you, just like all the other shod people.

Y). You grow up with such a perverted, restricted mentality that you consider it inconceivable to do the actually normal thing of not wearing shoes. You cannot imagine the beginning or end of the cruel era of shoes.

Z). There is no call to action here. No exit. Most of y’all are trapped, just like your feet, in a shoe called society. And lemme tell you, the bow is double-knotted.

(Ok, Just in case anybody didn’t catch on, I’m kind of joking with the harsh judgmental tone I wrote this with. I think all (ok most) of my points are valid, I just enjoy “flipping the script” I often see from people who’ve bought into the colonialist mentality they were raised around. I meet a lot of people who really are this harshly judgmental about other cultures. I meant this all in good fun. But seriously, fuck shoes.)