ONCE you stop wearing heels it's hard to go back.

It's not like riding a bike, where the minute you get back on, it all comes back. When you've been off heels for long enough, it starts to seem as if what you're watching all around you, in all different public spaces, is a marvellous feat, a collective female circus act, like mass stilt-walking, or ballet-dancing en pointe. From time to time I find myself staring, amazed, at the shoes of friends or acquaintances, and wondering if since, as the cartoon-version of the female sex goes, women are heels, just like they also are boobs, I am not really a proper woman since I can't do that, or maybe just don't want to.

You only have to look at the kerfuffle that erupts whenever a celebrity topples on her heels, or someone like Emma Thompson at last year's Golden Globes, goes barefoot, dangling her heels and saying "this red is my blood", to know that actually a lot of proper women feel this way. Heels, which should surely by now no longer be a topic of serious feminist discussion, get us in a lather.

Last week, there was outrage when a story emerged that women were being turned away from the red carpet at Cannes because they weren't wearing appropriately high heels. The film festival director denied there was any such policy, yet there was Valeria Richter, a film producer who has had half her foot amputated, saying she was stopped for wearing flats.

Often, I'm glad I'm not in the public eye since almost certainly that would mean navigating the world balanced on vertiginous slender spikes. And I'm not just talking about Cannes. I mean everywhere. We see heels in almost every public space: worn by the female presenters of news programmes, by politicians, by our own First Minister, by weather presenters, by businesswomen. In fact, in the run-up to the General Election, I was gripped by an irresistible compulsion. So perplexed was I by the fact that so many politicians, news presenters, commentators or weather presenters, were tottering on towering heels, that I would finding myself gazing at the screen in horror, saying: "Shoes, shoes!" I even found myself wondering if Nicola Sturgeon was wearing them while out canvassing, then was relieved to see that she was barefoot on the gymnastics bar.

It's rare to find an image of a powerful woman not propped up on a few columned-inches of heel. When Facebook head Sheryl Sandberg became one of the first women to appear on Time magazine's cover two years ago, she was wearing red peep-toes. Indeed, as women have become more powerful across society, their heels appear to have got higher.

It seems to me that there are two possible messages being sent out. The first is: "I know I'm in charge and I'm making things happen in the world, but you don't need to feel too threatened by the terrifying female power of little old me because actually all the while I'm wearing shoes that hobble me almost as much as a Chinese foot-binding." The second is: 'Yes, I'm powerful, but female power is different - it's about sex, so you're probably going to like it."

We need to be alert to our own hypocrisy. We make light of the way heels restrict us, yet at the same time criticise other cultures for the way their dress codes oppress women. But what really concerns me about heels is that they are now so normalised. Like the hairless female pubis, the towering heel has become so ubiquitous it has started to seem like a natural part of what it means to be female. Meanwhile, many of the women in the media who wear these heels don't actually seem to like wearing them. At Cannes, for instance, Emily Blunt said: "Everybody should wear flats." Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis, once said that though she "wore a lot of high heels professionally along the way", she lived her life "in running shoes wherever possible".

Some of this behaviour, I think, is realpolitik feminism: the sacrificing of the foot for the foot-up-the-ladder of real power. Germaine Greer once wrote: "If a woman never ... takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?" Well, there's a good reason women aren't taking off their heels now. They know they will help them hobble further, and faster.

I don't believe it always has to be this way. Wearing heels is a minor form of self-harm. We need to believe that we can turn on our heels and change this. Girl babies and boy babies born today could grow up to find women sexy and powerful without contorting their bodies and feet like this. But that's not going to happen in a world that turns away flats, not only from the carpet, but from the photo shoot and the television studio.