There were very few groups of people who managed to avoid joining in with this part of Chinese culture. Men would rarely go near a woman with unbound feet and it was certain that a big footed woman would not get far in life. This is so ironic, as most of the women with bound feet died premature deaths from infections, blood poisoning, gangrene etc. Many woman would lose toes, and most of the feet would soon die anyway. Can you imagine the smell of carrying around dead and rotting flesh with you everywhere you went? And yet, that was the only way of ensuring your daughter would be eligible as a potential wife! INSANE!
you can see here how strange it looks.. but you could also understand perhaps how this may be considered highly erotic for men, foot fetishes and all of that. The women had to walk with such tiny steps due to the pain and restrictions on the feet and it was believed that walking this way strengthened the upper thighs and tightened the vaginal muscles so women with the most tiny feet were considered to be the most desirable sexual partners... However, it get WAY too creepy for my liking... take a look at the feet that then existed beneath the bindings..
Some men would not allow their wife's feet to ever be seen unbound by anyone other than herself or perhaps a doctor in the case of bad infection... yet many men found the bare feet to be highly arousing and would use the fold of the maimed foot as a sexual orifice!!!
I can't think of anything more disgusting than this!!!!
The tradition started in 800AD and only became illegal in 1911.. there are still many women alive today who still have bound feet, you can see a couple of them in this video...
saw a documentary on this before, very interesting, but as you said, very sad. Like female genital mutilation, these traditions mainly persist where women remain uneducated, just goes to show how important a basic education is when it comes to the whole human rights thing. Although, a lot of women sunmissively agree to such things, so its easy for us to cast our western values on a complicated ancient tradition and disregard it, viewing us as "right" and them as "wrong"....when right and wrong doesnt exist at all.
ReplyDeleteThe bare feet photos make me feel sick to my stomach.
ReplyDeleteohh i find this footbinding fascinating! i wrote an essay for college a few years ago about it, coming from the angle that beneath the pretty ornate shoes lies the horrific foot which has been interfered with for the purposes of attraction, and how sex/marriage yet again is such an unfathomably huge part of the world and essentially all the ways humans will change themselves in order to be attractive. Glad I saw this actually, I wanna research it more! :)
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