The Mile in His Shoes Is Bollocks
Our Knickers Prove It
There is a sentence people reach for when they want to sound wise and cost themselves nothing. You have to walk a mile in his shoes. It is offered as the end of an argument, the moment everyone nods. I want to pick it up, turn it over, and show you that it is hollow — and I want to do it with underwear, because underwear, it turns out, is where this particular truth keeps its papers.
Start with a claim I made in an earlier dispatch and never properly cashed.
A cherished bra-and-briefs set has its bra worn out and replaced. Later the briefs go the same way. None of the original fabric survives. And yet the wearer calls it the same set, feels it as the same set, and is not wrong to. The continuity was never in the cotton. It was in the lived relationship between wearer and garment. Replace the matter entirely; the meaning persists.
Now run it the other way.
Take twelve pairs of knickers off a production line, identical to the stitch. Hand one each, at random, to three people: a cis woman, a trans woman, a man who wears them in private and tells no one. The object is the same object three times over. The meaning is three different worlds. For one it is Tuesday. For one it is evidence of being, at last, correctly seen. For one it is a held breath behind a locked door. Identical matter. Divergent meaning.
Put the two together and you have a theorem, proved from both ends. Subtract all the matter — meaning survives. Hold the matter perfectly constant — meaning scatters. Whatever the experience of a thing is, it is not a property of the thing. It lives in the wearer: in her history, her body, her stakes, none of which come bundled with the cotton.
Which brings us back to the shoes.
“Walk a mile in his shoes” makes a promise. It says: acquire his circumstance — the object, the position, the conditions — and you will acquire his experience. Put on what he wears and you will know what he knows. It is the knicker error in sturdier footwear. It assumes the experience travels with the garment. It does not. It never did. You can lace up the identical shoe, walk the identical mile, and arrive precisely nowhere, because the thing you wanted was never in the shoe to be borrowed.
Let me be fair to it, because a fair fight is the only kind worth winning.
The idiom has a decent heart. Strip away the false promise and what remains is a plea for humility: you are judging him from your chair; you do not know his constraints; presume less. That is good counsel. I have no quarrel with it. My quarrel is with the delivery — because the idiom smuggles that humility inside a lie, and the lie is that the humility can be converted into knowledge by an act of imitation. “Walk the mile and you will understand.” No. Walk the mile and you will have walked a mile. Understanding is not the prize at the end of the simulation. It is not in the simulation at all.
And here is why this is not a parlour game, why I will go to the wall over a metaphor.
I am blind. I have been blind for forty years. And there is an entire industry built on the shoe idiom aimed squarely at me: the blindfold. Sighted people tie on a blindfold for an afternoon, walk into furniture, feel their pulse climb, and stand up at the end declaring they understand now. They felt it. They walked the mile.
They understood nothing. Worse than nothing.
What a blindfold simulates is not blindness. It simulates a sighted person losing their sight — the catastrophe, the vertigo, the sudden subtraction of a sense they have leaned on for fifty years. That is the precise opposite of the thing they meant to learn. My life is not a catastrophe of subtraction. It is forty years of accumulated competence, of a body that has rebuilt the world along other channels and got good at it. A blindfold cannot underclock a sighted person into four decades of practice. It manufactures panic and calls the panic empathy. It is the mile in the shoes performed to perfection — and it arrives not at understanding but at a confident, well-meaning lie. The tourist who did the mile is now more dangerous than the one who never tried, because he thinks he has been there.
That is the whole charge against the idiom. It does not merely fail to deliver understanding. It hands people a counterfeit and tells them it is the real coin. It produces the arrogance it pretends to cure — the afternoon-blindfold expert, the gap-year empath, the man who read your circumstances off the label and now speaks for you.
So what is the alternative, if not the mile?
The same thing it always was, the thing the shoe was invented to avoid because it is harder and humbler. You do not understand someone by acquiring their stuff or occupying their position. The object is mute. The wearer is the witness. You understand them by asking, and then — this is the part that costs something — by granting their report the authority you cannot manufacture from outside their body. Not “let me try it on and see for myself.” There is no for-myself to be had. There is only their account, and your willingness to treat it as evidence rather than as a starting bid you get to haggle down with a borrowed shoe.
Walk a mile in their knickers if you like. You will learn the size of their knickers.
To learn the size of the person, you will have to do the unglamorous thing and listen.