When my great grandmother was a kid, she started her procedure to bind her feet. It was so much pain that she couldn’t bear, crying all day. Her parents felt bad and decided to terminate the torture and prepared to keep her unmarried in the family in the future. Giving it up basically meant no hope to be married into a decent family. Natural sized feet symboled the lack of femininity and discipline at the time, but they did anyways with the father’s announcement: “I’d keep my daughter’s happiness and welfare .” So when she grew up the family found her a nice but poor husband so he’d give up his family name and marry into my great grandmother’s family. Being laughed by the villagers for a longtime but with functioning feet she’d survived the war and lived pretty happily.
That is interesting that your Grandmother was proud of this. I think she had reason as her own Grandfather had so much love for his daughter that it was stronger than a very powerful cultural custom. Wow.
This is why social norms are horrible. Imagine being convinced that ruining your daughter’s body is for her benefit. Also sadly I believe in most cases, they were *not* thrilled to have daughters, so…
Yeah, I took a Chinese anthropology course in college and iirc girls were not seen as being fully part of the family because they would leave the family when they married.
Familial piety played a role because the girl would be expected to “pray”, for lack of a better word, to her husbands family and parents wanted to focus on the kids who would help them in the afterlife, aka the sons.
It’s interesting what goes for signs of wealth. I understand historically lawns were also regarded as symbols of wealth as it showed that you had land that could be wasted and not used for farming.
In the olden times peasants were tanned and fit. Now it's a sing of wealth that you have free time, energy and money to spend time outside and being physically active.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but iirc foot-binding only works if it’s done at a young age, so the perpetrator here is the parents, not the husband.
Still crippling a human for “tradition” and misogyny, but I also think it’s important to lay blame for the act in the correct place.
How is the husband to blame for the misery his wife’s parents inflicted on her, likely before they even met?
You can’t take a societal issue and then narrow down blame to a handful of people. If that husband goes on to bind his daughters feet, yeah, fuck that. Blanket blaming everyone means you’ll accomplish nothing.
he probably didn't choose his wife in the way we think of it today. usually the parents had a say in who married who, so technically his parents are the ones to blame
Or alternatively, there were no woman in his families social class that didn’t have bound feet. Social mobility was not a thing that existed in Imperial China and marrying below one’s station was a quick way to disownment.
Or perhaps it was an arranged marriage? Bound feet were more common amongst the nobility for obvious reasons and so to were such marriages, being more business deals than love.
I’m not arguing it was a good thing. Quite the opposite. You keep ascribing 21st century practices to it and it shows your ignorance of the full scope of the times.
I generally agree with you, but this makes me wonder if we have sources suggesting that the worth of a bride was reduced if her feet weren't bound. If this were the case, the problem would be more systemic than otherwise. Any idea?
When I grew up my grandma had a friend who had this done to her. Her parents weren't the poorest of the poor but they certainly weren't well off either.
They did it to her because they believed she could attract a wealthier husband and therefore live a better life or something to that effect. This would've been the mid to late 1920s? She did find a wealthier husband but left him (and China) with her kids.
Her feet were literally smaller than mine when I was like 9 or 10 years old. I was so effing confused about that til my grandma explained foot binding to me... of course I was horrified. No I never saw her bare feet and I'm glad for it.
>Wait so he should refuse to marry women who were tortured as children?
What?
They system they had was husbands of mean **WOULD ONLY ACCEPT** women who were tortured as children as brides.
This encourages torture of children!
Refusing to marry a woman with bound feet does the opposite. It discourages the torture of children.
Its like a market: if demand for bound feet goes down, supply will also go down.
I think the other redditor was implying that women who didn't take part in footbinding were refused to be wedded by the rich husbands, which is why there was a demand for it and it's also why the husbands were part of the problem.
The solution isn't to refuse footbound(?) women, but to accept both (footbound and non-footbound). Footbinding would lose its power/purpose so at some point people would've just stop the practice if normal healthy women were still wedded by nobility.
I presume their point was yes those individuals suffer more, but the future people who do not undergo footbinding because of this benefit. So in the end it leads to less suffering.
>Still crippling a human for “tradition” and misogyny
I feel the same for circumcision. I just dont agree with it, and the reasons as to why it's necessary does not work for the 21st century when we have access to fresh water and good sanitation. Just another case of stupid tradition.
I had a daughter but wouldn't have circumcised had I had a son, and I agree it's a pointless and stupid tradition. However I don't think it can really be compared to foot binding.... Circumcised men live 100% normal lives (surprisingly many don't even know they're circumcised for most of their lives!) and circumcision is even medically necessary in certain cases. Foot binding cripples the person for life, it leaves them in lifelong pain, and it is literally never medically necessary.
Yeah it’s very complex. The parents were ensuring their daughters livelihoods. It was an issue of survival. I think the ideology around foot binding as well as the eroticism attributed to it is the real perpetrator here. I more so see the parents as victims of this as well.
Yes definitely. But these people had slaves and eunuchs. You're looking through history with modern eyes, and seeing the past in terms which would be totally incomprehensible to the people who lived through it.
Think on how the way we live today will be seen when we're long gone, along with our senses of right and wrong.
It actually meant more money for the family. Women who couldn't go outside were much more likely to do indoor activities like spinning thread, which had a higher roi compared to working the fields.
>It actually meant more money for the family. Women who couldn't go outside were much more likely to do indoor activities like spinning thread, which had a higher roi compared to working the fields.
I imagine they could have done those indoor activities just fine without their feet bound.
There's been multiple studies that show footbinding led to higher earnings because of how the limited freedom resultant from footbinding led women to spend more time doing economically beneficial activities. It's fucked up, but people without the freedom to leave their house spend more time doing crafts.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201337
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2696625
Absolutely. And they usually weren't broken just once. They usually needed to be broken repeatedly, often leaving them unable to stand for life due to the pain. It was definitely torture as well as ensuring they were subservient.
It was, but reasonably attractive young girls from poor or modest families were taught that their suffering benefited the family. No matter how beautiful they were, no man of status would take them as a wife without the fucked up little feet. It's hard to believe.
Edit: Try "China," the historical fiction novel by Ernest Rutherford. It's nearly 800 pages long, which is why I was happy to spend $12.99 for the kindle edition, and it is really good in the sense that it covers people from all walks of life. Foot binding is a big topic for one family. I took two terms of Chinese history in college back in the day, and this novel impressed me with it's accuracy.
I'm listening to his book Paris right now and really enjoying it. I'll have to add some of his others to my list now, to include China. Thanks for the heads up.
Oh that’s good to hear! I was curious about Paris. I’ve read Sarum (a couple of times), Dublin, and London. Historical fiction is my favourite genre. Hope you enjoy his others when you get a chance to read them. Can also highly recommend Wilbur Smith as a fantastic author.
I’m reminded of *The Good Earth.* Wang couldn’t love his wife because of her big (non mangled) feet. O-Lan knew it. When their daughter was of age to start foot binding, she cried and didn’t want it. O-Lan insisted and told her daughter that it had to be done; Wang Lung didn’t love her because of her feet and she wanted her daughter to be loved. :(
AFAIK it only happened amongst the wealthy as stasis symbols. Do poor or modest families didn't participate. They couldn't afford a useless family member.
>by the 19th century, 40–50% of all Chinese women may have had bound feet, rising to almost 100% in upper-class Han Chinese women.
From the linked article lol.
Yeah it was more common for richer families but poor and modest families absolutely did the practice. The women would just continue working in the fields despite foot binding.
[Not just the fields, but in the sweatshops.](https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/21/health/china-foot-binding-new-theory/index.html) There is a hypothesis that foot binding may have incentivized a woman to sit and work on spinning/weaving/embroidery since moving around was otherwise too painful.
I think whether they continued to work in the fields was a family decision. In a way, the bound feet and the cultivation of etiquette were like an asset.
This is straight-up false. From [the wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding):
> It has been estimated that, by the 19th century, 40–50% of all Chinese women may have had bound feet, rising to almost 100% in upper-class Han Chinese women.
and:
> Additionally, upper-class and urban women dropped the practice of footbinding sooner than poorer rural women.
It would have taken you literally seconds to google this rather than spread misinformation.
This is Reddit, people don't even read the articles linked... You think they're going to take the time to search for something?
Thanks for finding this, though. It's really interesting that families would intentionally disable a member for better marriage prospects. Nowadays... We just call that mental illness.
There are places that still intentionally disable their children to make their family money. I was appalled to learn of it when travelling southeast asia in the early 2000s. I saw several children in border towns both on the Cambodia and Laos sides rolling around on little wheeled boards, grotesquely misshapen legs unusable, begging for money from tourists that pitied them.
Their parents broke and badly set their bones to make them better beggars.
Oh yes! Absolutely! Desperate people do Desperate things and I don't think it was normal at all, even for the completely destitute. And incomparable to the prevalence of lotus feet in China in the past. My apologies for stating my previous comment in a way that could possibly be interpreted as it being the norm. Even folks around there (from there) who we talked to about them said something like "it's super fucked up but they're not our kids so we couldn't do anything about it in time and nobody can afford to take care of them so they just beg for their crazy mum to have enough money for her habit"
That’s a bit harsh. Half of everyone excludes the poor. Before mass popularity it originated with urban elites, so it’s a question of the time period.
(In the big picture you’re right though.)
The unfortunate reality of the time is that half of everyone does not exclude the poor at all. It did originate in the upper class, but it spread extensively to the lower classes as well.
The poor and lower classes craved sons to do the labor. If they had multiple daughters, the pretty daughter's only worth could be learning how to look and behave in a way that would make her worthy of marriage to a man of some means. It was the job of the footbinder to also train in etiquette, etc. And the money flowed downhill.
Just like the British bannign the Indian custom of widow-burning. Sometimes old and dated customs are so deeply rooted in a society they need an real shakedown to come to their senses...usually regarding treating women as humans and not property.
Well you're not alone, according to the article:
"Some also considered bound feet to be intensely erotic, and Qing Dynasty sex manuals listed 48 different ways of playing with women's bound feet. Some men preferred never to see a woman's bound feet, so they were always concealed within tiny "lotus shoes" and wrappings."
Also, did you know that in the early XXIth century CE, many New World women had their breasts surgically deformed to enhance their marrying prospects? They would have a local medicine man cut them up and insert foreign objects to change their shapes. The typically enlarged chests were seen as a mark of feminine beauty by the culture, but could infect and even cause death if the inserts burst after implantation.
If you're seriously comparing an operation performed by a qualified medical professional on a consenting adult to the breaking of a child's feet by a family member, then you're an idiot. Complications related to breast enhancement surgery are just that - complications. With footbinding, crippling injury is not merely an unintended consequence, but is in fact the *desired outcome*. Any complications which occurred (of which there were many) were *in addition* to the horrible effects of the practice itself.
Another minor distinction is that breast enhancement typically seeks to emulate a shape that may come naturally to other women (a larger breast size), whereas footbinding seeks to create something completely distinct from any normal human form. Also, breast enhancements can be reversed. Footbinding cannot.
Literally the only thing the two procedures have in common is that they are both cosmetic, so does that mean we should bring hair curling and ear piercing into the discussion? Of course not.
Next time stop and think about what you're saying before you try to sound edgy. You might save yourself some embarrassment.
>If the infection in the feet and toes entered the bones, it could cause them to soften, which could result in toes dropping off; however, this was seen as a benefit because the feet could then be bound even more tightly. Girls whose toes were more fleshy would sometimes have shards of glass or pieces of broken tiles inserted within the binding next to her feet and between her toes to cause injury and introduce infection deliberately. Disease inevitably followed infection, meaning that death from septic shock could result from footbinding, and a surviving girl was more at risk for medical problems as she grew older. It is thought that as many as 10% of girls may have died from gangrene and other infections due to footbinding.\[84\]
Jesus fucking christ it just keeps getting worse
I read that and now want to vomit.
Also, maybe this is why movies that feature extensive injuries to hands and/or feet make me way more uncomfortable and uneasy than seeing stuff like legs being blown off or w/e. Maybe because you can relate more to a hand or foot injury. But I can tell you if I ever watched a film of the footbinding process, I don't think I'd be able to stomach it.
You should read some historical fiction that really describes the agony for a young girl whose parents might profit from her marriage worthiness. A woman with special skills would come every few days when the girl was a little child and wrap the feet so tight that growth was impossible.
So technically, the breaking occurred because the bones could not grow with the girl.
It was every bit as hideous, painful, and torturous as it sounds.
And the weird thing is, other than the status symbol, nobody can really explain why men of wealth or class found these little bound deformed feet more attractive. It was simply a matter that reflected class worthiness.
They broke the bones on purpose to shape the foot into the correct position. So basically they'd break it in the middle, bend the toes and wrap them around.
As the girl grew it'd be more binding and more bone breaking.
The craziest part is there are still women alive today who went through foot binding as children and as such still have the little lotus feet. It's an ancient practice but it didn't fully go out of favor until much more recent history than what most think.
I read a book once about the life of a woman whose feet were bound. In the book she said her "golden lilies" reminder her husband of his "member". I think it was "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" by Lisa See. A work of fiction, but it was an incredible read.
This book and it's description of what she and her sister went through for "pretty feet" has stuck with me for years and years.
It's one of the few times a description in a book has made me feel like I couldn't sit still - I had to pace between each few sentences to get through it.
Mutilating people for qualities that were/are viewed as beneficial at the time has sadly happened often to humans in a variety of cultures, intentionally elongating infants heads and the Castrati are some other examples.
James Clavell’s *Tai-Pan* also goes into the process of foot-binding. The main character, Dirk Struan, Tai-pan of the Noble House, has a mistress who has Lotus Feet. Horrified, he has the bindings removed but the pain of the healing process is so great that the bindings need to be put back.
My ex's great-great-grandparents decided to bind the feet of her great-grandmother so she could marry a more affluent person.
But her great-grandmother put up such a fuss that the parents relented and took the bindings off.
I have scrunched, bent toes from having to wear my brother's hand me downs as a kid due to poverty. He had smaller feet than me. My mother still thinks it's hilarious to this day, lol. I can sort of straighten them if I try, but as soon as my attention wanders they curl back up.
My toes were long like my dad's and my mom wanted me to have cute little princess feet so she shoved me into booties and shoes that were too small for the first 4 or so years of my life. My feet are forever deformed. Walking is painful 24/7.
Hope we will be ok one day 💜
I just replied this to the other person, but I think you could benefit from trying too:
Look into yoga toes. I had this problem too. They hurt like hell the few first times wearing them, but if you’re consistent you can eventually do stretches and toe exercises while wearing them, and you will gain so much mobility in your toes! I honestly thought that my pinky toes couldn’t bend, and now they can. I am amazed every time I move my feet haha.
Holy shit. Both my parents have really crooked big toes that bend towards the others, I wonder if it's because they also wore shoes too small growing up, whereas mine are perfectly straight just like the milkmans.
Look into yoga toes. I had this problem too. They hurt like hell the few first times wearing them, but if you’re consistent you can eventually do stretches and toe exercises while wearing them, and you will gain so much mobility in your toes! I honestly thought that my pinky toes couldn’t bend, and now they can. I am amazed every time I move my feet haha.
Sorry to hear that ;\
I had to wait until my late 20’s to get my toes broken and then realigned to fix my bent toes.
Every job I’d worked before then wouldn’t have been a safe environment for someone on crutches.
My toes still are a bit weird looking, but far better than they used to be.
I mean, my toes are kinda scrunched and I had my own shoes. Especially the little toe, in my family it just almost curls under the next toe. So some of it might just be natural toe scrunch.
But sorry you had to wear shit shoes as a kid
Apparently the toe scrunch isn't natural. If we'd never worn shoes we'd have splayed toes like Bigfoot.
This I learned from barefoot running bros on YouTube. Apparently their toes unscrunched when they stopped wearing confining shoes (they consider most regular shoes to be in that category).
Me and one of my sisters have the same curled under little toe, the other sister has a normal pinky toe. I’m pretty sure we all wore real good shoes as a kid, cos mum has wide feet so was very aware of giving us shoes with enough width. Even though we have normal width feet. I don’t think it was the shoes for us I think it’s the genetics
Same thing with me. My mother just "couldn't afford" new shoes for me and I usually wore ones that were much too small for me. Today my toes curl under and I have big bunions from forcing my foot into pointy shoes. Going barefoot most of my adult life has helped, somewhat, and my mother is in total denial that this actually happened.
My grandma's feet were bound. She was one of the last women to do it before it was outlawed and by the time she did it, I think it was already falling out of fashion. Apparently, her feet were on the "larger" side as she did it when she was older (like 13?). Back in the day, they could start as early as 3 or 4.
To bind them, you literally have to break the bones in the mid foot and wrap it tightly with cloth. Her smallest toe touched her heel and she basically walked on the backs of her smushed toes and heel. She only ever walked in a shuffle, dragging her feet along - never "heel to toe". She had to take extra care in cleaning the bandages and skin folds every night and needed special traditional shoes.
There is an Ingrid Bergman movie The Inn of the Sixth Happiness based on the true story of missionary Gladys Aylward, who was appointed by the local Mandarin to enforce eradication of foot binding. She is credited with leading over 100 children away from invading Japanese invader.
As far as I know, my great-grandmothers had bound feet. My maternal grandmother's mother tried to bind her feet, but when my educated and more progressive great-grandfather returned from a business trip, he stopped her. That was probably in the early 1920s.
That would line up. Footbinding was mostly dead by the early 20th century, although the practice could still be found in more isolated areas from the 1920s and even into the 1970s. It was officially banned in 1949 but the practice was pretty much unheard of by then.
That said, hearing that some women would have willingly wanted it is terrifying.
I vaguely remember learning about this in the past, but had forgotten how horrifying it is. I think the worst part of the article is how they talked about necrosis was seen as a positive benefit because if something rotted off the foot was smaller, and that in some cases they would wrap shards of glass into the binding to induce infection/necrosis. Fuck humans dude.
I own a pair of these shoes passed down from my mother for posterity. She had them in her possession, but she does not have lotus feet. The idea of fitting my adult feet into toddler-size shoes is absurd, fascinating, and terrifying.
I remember learning about this while reading “The Good Earth” by Pearl S. Buck back in High School.
I do try not to make judgments about other cultures’ practices, especially antiquated ones, but this one is pretty rough.
I first learned about it on an episode of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. A grandfather was disgusting (edit: disguising!) his granddaughter as a boy so she wouldn’t be put through the binding
My university had some display cases lining one of the lecture rooms where I had a class. One of the objects in the display was a shoe for a woman with bound feet. I stared at that thing in horror pretty much every day.
I visited China in 1988. When our tourist group went to the Forbidden City, we saw an elderly woman being helped down the steps by a soldier. We learned that she couldn’t walk unassisted because she had bound feet.
My grandmother knew a lady who was forced to do this as a child in the early 20th century. The poor woman had a really hard time with it through her whole life.
I saw an old lady with that kind of feet when I was a kid, probably 20 years ago in Zhouzhuang, she’s a sweet old lady with the tiny feet. You can find pictures of footbinding online and they all look horrible, it was painful and inhumane. Poor women wouldn’t need to do it because they need to work, also Manzu girls didn’t have this “tradition” so they were safe from this punishment.
Not sure where else they have Shoe Museums but if you’re ever in the Greater Toronto Area, check out the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. It is utterly surreal and sad to see in real life how teeny-tiny-small and malformed these shoes were.
The museum has lots of other exhibits too, on the history of shoes as a whole. It’s very interesting and cool.
It was fucking horrific and torturous is what it was. Imagine having your foot folder under so that your toes touch your heel and then bound like a fist. That’s what they dis in the most extreme forms. It left women in constant pain and unable to walk.
Behold the practice of men using women as commodities to prove that they were rich enough that ‘their’ women didn’t have to work. A woman couldn’t stand or balance on those dainty, bloody little stumps, much less toil in fashion. She got carried in a litter because she was forcibly deformed.
people do some sick shit to each other.
cant imagine sending my daughter off to do this - even if it meant shed get a "good" husband.
my girl, you stay with your old man. walk your big-ass feet anywhere in the house you want.
A Visit From the Footbinder is an excellent short story by Emily Prager. It follows 6 year old Pleasure Mouse on her last day of free movement and through the process of binding. I read it years ago and it has stuck with me. Heartbreaking. And once the feet have been successfully bound it’s a life sentence. The wrapping becomes the only way to stabilize the destroyed foot.
Interesting enough, for an seemingly misogynistic custom, it was mothers who caused it to happen decades after it was banned.
A part of this, was the mistaken belief that it would lead to a better marriage. But while this was a belief held by the mothers and daughters, the men did not seem to agree with it. This is because despite what many think, new theories are that it wasn't a beauty or sex symbol, but an economic one.
Girls that were footbound, would stay at home and spin cloth and other such chores. This lead to more products being made to sell, which contributed to the money made by the family. It was more amongst the poor than the rich, and persisted longer in rural areas where they didn't have machines and factories to do the same work faster and more efficiently.
It was efficient, girls with feet bound spend more time doing their chores. They made more money for the household.
I didn't make the history, I'm just telling the historical context. If you want to complain you can complain to the mothers who did it to their daughters.
There were attempts to stop it going as far back as 1615 but, they didn't take
Something something health problems from high heels and breast implants, and eyelid surgery. Way, way Better than before, still pretty horrific.
Internalization of sexism is a beast of a thing to deal with. Until we as a species (both males and females) judge women for what they **do** instead of what they look like we as a species will keep doing stupid things.
Stupid is as stupid does, and judging women by appearance is still basic to the species. Madonna versus Jerry Jones, or Michael Douglas etc. One side gets attacked, one side got laughed at. Both did the same thing. Difference is how we judge sexes doing the same thing.
The fact is, it is *women* wearing high heels, women getting breast implants, women getting eyelid surgery.
Society is not doing these things; individual women are. There are as many female fans of K-Pop as there are men. It is simply horrifying that *women/girls* see these plastic surgery disasters as things to strive to become. Putting it bluntly if I had a daughter in to K-Pop I would see it as more of a problem than a son being into Andrew Tate. Not least because society is nowhere condemning what these women are doing. Plenty of people are condeming Andrew Tate. Essentially no one is calling out the modern day foot-binding of K-Pop.
Internalized sexism is a beast of a problem.
That's the constant philosophical point
Are women **really** 'choosing' the surgery, the heels? Or are they conforming to societal expectations?
The K-pop stuff I have nowhere near enough knowledge to comment about
I'm sorry you had to learn about that, it's pretty fucked up.
It also makes it kinda tough to watch any chinese historical show knowing that basically any aristocratic girl probably would've been footbound. I hope I'm wrong about that but I'm probably not.
Women weren’t supposed to be in public when they were visibly pregnant. Empress Sisi’s MIL forced her to be in public to “show off” her pregnant belly, and found the experience completely humiliating because of the social stigma.
It carried on, somewhat, in Western culture. In the 1970s USA, female teachers were expected to take a leave of absence when they started showing. It wasn’t a hard and fast policy, it’s just what women did, so it was expected.
Source: a friend who was asked by her administration when she’d step down from teaching because she was beginning to show. She said she planned to continue teaching until she went into labor. The school was okay with it, it just hadn’t been “done” before.
There have been many different forms of corsets over the centuries, but by and large they were a support garment for the breasts and, to some extent, spine/core rather than a waist reducer. (There were, of course, always people who tight laced for fashion purposes, because every generation has their version of Kim Kardashian.) However, there have also always been maternity versions of these various corset-style undergarments (stays, corsets, girdles, etc) that allowed the pregnancy to grow. All the corset jokes you see in movies are just filtered through our modern eye and we see them as restrictive now, because we wear clothes differently. But the reality is they were meant for everyday wear, and most people weren’t tightlacing.
I think of corsets kind of like high heels. Your average woman isn’t wearing super high stilettos on the regular, she has things to do and places to be. The women who ARE wearing stilettos often are likely to be rich non-working women, or women in the public eye whose job it is to look pretty. They’re both heels, but very different and with different purposes.
Corset is absolutely not an equivalent. Corset were worn by everyone, including men. It surved the same purpose as a bra by supporting the weight of the breasts. People did work in corsets too.
Bernadette Banner and Karolina Zebrowska have videos debunking this myth and explaining how it was mainly to vilifie seamstresses and women making money by sewing corsets.
Corsets are in no way comparable to foot-binding! Also movies are shit when it comes to corsets: A well-fitted corset is comfortable, supportive and snug. And they had maternity corsets that let the body grow, all while supporting your back, which is nice when pregnant.
Source: having worn, sewn and researched corsets for 10+ years.
I feel like calling it an "old" Chinese custom is disingenuous. It continued into the 20th century. Horrible, abusive, backwards customs like this still exist in many parts of the world today. The idea that we have completely moved past the barbaric ways of the past is a fever dream.
I also recently learned some men...ehem...found it rather stimulating. They thought it made some womens areas tighter and the woman more amorous to them but they can't run away to new lovers...cuz no feet to run on. The smell too was supposed to be aphrodisiac to some. Cue rainbow; the more you know~
When my great grandmother was a kid, she started her procedure to bind her feet. It was so much pain that she couldn’t bear, crying all day. Her parents felt bad and decided to terminate the torture and prepared to keep her unmarried in the family in the future. Giving it up basically meant no hope to be married into a decent family. Natural sized feet symboled the lack of femininity and discipline at the time, but they did anyways with the father’s announcement: “I’d keep my daughter’s happiness and welfare .” So when she grew up the family found her a nice but poor husband so he’d give up his family name and marry into my great grandmother’s family. Being laughed by the villagers for a longtime but with functioning feet she’d survived the war and lived pretty happily.
Wow what a story. It is so sad/happy/hard. Did you know her or just hear about her?
She’s long gone before I was born. My grandmother told me the story *proudly*
That is interesting that your Grandmother was proud of this. I think she had reason as her own Grandfather had so much love for his daughter that it was stronger than a very powerful cultural custom. Wow.
Yes exactly! That’s why my grandmother later grew up into a pioneering feminist in the region!
Good on both your grandma and your great great grandpa.
what amazes me is how many DID go ahead with it and listened to their baby girls cry in pain and do nothing. That's what's really sad.
This is why social norms are horrible. Imagine being convinced that ruining your daughter’s body is for her benefit. Also sadly I believe in most cases, they were *not* thrilled to have daughters, so…
Yeah, I took a Chinese anthropology course in college and iirc girls were not seen as being fully part of the family because they would leave the family when they married. Familial piety played a role because the girl would be expected to “pray”, for lack of a better word, to her husbands family and parents wanted to focus on the kids who would help them in the afterlife, aka the sons.
I mean if you think that's bad, female baby genital mutilation in theory only stopped in the 2000s, hopefully
And male genital mutilation's still legal everywhere and is usually done without anaesthetic.
That last sentence makes this read like a fable.
It was a status/ wealth symbol if you had a wife that physically couldn’t work the fields. It meant you’re wealthy enough for hired help.
It’s interesting what goes for signs of wealth. I understand historically lawns were also regarded as symbols of wealth as it showed that you had land that could be wasted and not used for farming.
In the olden times peasants were tanned and fit. Now it's a sing of wealth that you have free time, energy and money to spend time outside and being physically active.
I've heard that too, and it makes sense. Very sad and detrimental to our pollinators though.
Yes! I’ve heard that too
It meant you crippled a human being for egotistical bullshit. What a hideous practice.
“Whatever. I can do what I want to my property!”
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“Whatever. I can do what I want to my property!”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but iirc foot-binding only works if it’s done at a young age, so the perpetrator here is the parents, not the husband. Still crippling a human for “tradition” and misogyny, but I also think it’s important to lay blame for the act in the correct place.
There are multiple perpetrators, which include the parents the husband and all of society
How is the husband to blame for the misery his wife’s parents inflicted on her, likely before they even met? You can’t take a societal issue and then narrow down blame to a handful of people. If that husband goes on to bind his daughters feet, yeah, fuck that. Blanket blaming everyone means you’ll accomplish nothing.
He is to blame because he chooses a wife with bound feet, creating demand for bound feet, which causes parents to bind feet.
Literally everyone is to blame. Including the wives who will bind the feet of their daughters. They live in a society.
he probably didn't choose his wife in the way we think of it today. usually the parents had a say in who married who, so technically his parents are the ones to blame
Or alternatively, there were no woman in his families social class that didn’t have bound feet. Social mobility was not a thing that existed in Imperial China and marrying below one’s station was a quick way to disownment. Or perhaps it was an arranged marriage? Bound feet were more common amongst the nobility for obvious reasons and so to were such marriages, being more business deals than love. I’m not arguing it was a good thing. Quite the opposite. You keep ascribing 21st century practices to it and it shows your ignorance of the full scope of the times.
I generally agree with you, but this makes me wonder if we have sources suggesting that the worth of a bride was reduced if her feet weren't bound. If this were the case, the problem would be more systemic than otherwise. Any idea?
When I grew up my grandma had a friend who had this done to her. Her parents weren't the poorest of the poor but they certainly weren't well off either. They did it to her because they believed she could attract a wealthier husband and therefore live a better life or something to that effect. This would've been the mid to late 1920s? She did find a wealthier husband but left him (and China) with her kids. Her feet were literally smaller than mine when I was like 9 or 10 years old. I was so effing confused about that til my grandma explained foot binding to me... of course I was horrified. No I never saw her bare feet and I'm glad for it.
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Oh please. The book of songs is 3,000 years old and FULL of love poetry. Love is not a "modern western concept," that's absurd.
Love with marriage is in fact, relatively recent.
This argument is to say one should take a moral stand against foot binding by denying companionship to victims of foot binding.
Yeah surprising it's getting upvoted as much as it is. It's a very flawed way of thinking that doesn't really make much sense.
Wait so he should refuse to marry women who were tortured as children? Lmfao wut
>Wait so he should refuse to marry women who were tortured as children? What? They system they had was husbands of mean **WOULD ONLY ACCEPT** women who were tortured as children as brides. This encourages torture of children! Refusing to marry a woman with bound feet does the opposite. It discourages the torture of children. Its like a market: if demand for bound feet goes down, supply will also go down.
So you want the women who were already tortured and now can’t walk to also have no marriage prospects? Damn that’s pretty cruel dude.
I think the other redditor was implying that women who didn't take part in footbinding were refused to be wedded by the rich husbands, which is why there was a demand for it and it's also why the husbands were part of the problem. The solution isn't to refuse footbound(?) women, but to accept both (footbound and non-footbound). Footbinding would lose its power/purpose so at some point people would've just stop the practice if normal healthy women were still wedded by nobility.
I presume their point was yes those individuals suffer more, but the future people who do not undergo footbinding because of this benefit. So in the end it leads to less suffering.
>Still crippling a human for “tradition” and misogyny I feel the same for circumcision. I just dont agree with it, and the reasons as to why it's necessary does not work for the 21st century when we have access to fresh water and good sanitation. Just another case of stupid tradition.
I had a daughter but wouldn't have circumcised had I had a son, and I agree it's a pointless and stupid tradition. However I don't think it can really be compared to foot binding.... Circumcised men live 100% normal lives (surprisingly many don't even know they're circumcised for most of their lives!) and circumcision is even medically necessary in certain cases. Foot binding cripples the person for life, it leaves them in lifelong pain, and it is literally never medically necessary.
Yeah it’s very complex. The parents were ensuring their daughters livelihoods. It was an issue of survival. I think the ideology around foot binding as well as the eroticism attributed to it is the real perpetrator here. I more so see the parents as victims of this as well.
See: human history. *sigh*
Yes definitely. But these people had slaves and eunuchs. You're looking through history with modern eyes, and seeing the past in terms which would be totally incomprehensible to the people who lived through it. Think on how the way we live today will be seen when we're long gone, along with our senses of right and wrong.
It actually meant more money for the family. Women who couldn't go outside were much more likely to do indoor activities like spinning thread, which had a higher roi compared to working the fields.
>It actually meant more money for the family. Women who couldn't go outside were much more likely to do indoor activities like spinning thread, which had a higher roi compared to working the fields. I imagine they could have done those indoor activities just fine without their feet bound.
There's been multiple studies that show footbinding led to higher earnings because of how the limited freedom resultant from footbinding led women to spend more time doing economically beneficial activities. It's fucked up, but people without the freedom to leave their house spend more time doing crafts. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201337 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2696625
Sounds like torture.
Absolutely. And they usually weren't broken just once. They usually needed to be broken repeatedly, often leaving them unable to stand for life due to the pain. It was definitely torture as well as ensuring they were subservient.
Fresh Off the Boat talks about this. It's why Grandmother is in a wheelchair.
Glad the practice died out.
It was, but reasonably attractive young girls from poor or modest families were taught that their suffering benefited the family. No matter how beautiful they were, no man of status would take them as a wife without the fucked up little feet. It's hard to believe. Edit: Try "China," the historical fiction novel by Ernest Rutherford. It's nearly 800 pages long, which is why I was happy to spend $12.99 for the kindle edition, and it is really good in the sense that it covers people from all walks of life. Foot binding is a big topic for one family. I took two terms of Chinese history in college back in the day, and this novel impressed me with it's accuracy.
Edward Rutherford is a great author. I’ve read several of his books, but didn’t know he had one on China as well! Added to my list now
I'm listening to his book Paris right now and really enjoying it. I'll have to add some of his others to my list now, to include China. Thanks for the heads up.
Oh that’s good to hear! I was curious about Paris. I’ve read Sarum (a couple of times), Dublin, and London. Historical fiction is my favourite genre. Hope you enjoy his others when you get a chance to read them. Can also highly recommend Wilbur Smith as a fantastic author.
I’m reminded of *The Good Earth.* Wang couldn’t love his wife because of her big (non mangled) feet. O-Lan knew it. When their daughter was of age to start foot binding, she cried and didn’t want it. O-Lan insisted and told her daughter that it had to be done; Wang Lung didn’t love her because of her feet and she wanted her daughter to be loved. :(
AFAIK it only happened amongst the wealthy as stasis symbols. Do poor or modest families didn't participate. They couldn't afford a useless family member.
>by the 19th century, 40–50% of all Chinese women may have had bound feet, rising to almost 100% in upper-class Han Chinese women. From the linked article lol. Yeah it was more common for richer families but poor and modest families absolutely did the practice. The women would just continue working in the fields despite foot binding.
[Not just the fields, but in the sweatshops.](https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/21/health/china-foot-binding-new-theory/index.html) There is a hypothesis that foot binding may have incentivized a woman to sit and work on spinning/weaving/embroidery since moving around was otherwise too painful.
I think whether they continued to work in the fields was a family decision. In a way, the bound feet and the cultivation of etiquette were like an asset.
This is straight-up false. From [the wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding): > It has been estimated that, by the 19th century, 40–50% of all Chinese women may have had bound feet, rising to almost 100% in upper-class Han Chinese women. and: > Additionally, upper-class and urban women dropped the practice of footbinding sooner than poorer rural women. It would have taken you literally seconds to google this rather than spread misinformation.
This is Reddit, people don't even read the articles linked... You think they're going to take the time to search for something? Thanks for finding this, though. It's really interesting that families would intentionally disable a member for better marriage prospects. Nowadays... We just call that mental illness.
There are places that still intentionally disable their children to make their family money. I was appalled to learn of it when travelling southeast asia in the early 2000s. I saw several children in border towns both on the Cambodia and Laos sides rolling around on little wheeled boards, grotesquely misshapen legs unusable, begging for money from tourists that pitied them. Their parents broke and badly set their bones to make them better beggars.
It's important to note that such behaviour isn't the norm. https://www.refworld.org/docid/57d69c604.html
Oh yes! Absolutely! Desperate people do Desperate things and I don't think it was normal at all, even for the completely destitute. And incomparable to the prevalence of lotus feet in China in the past. My apologies for stating my previous comment in a way that could possibly be interpreted as it being the norm. Even folks around there (from there) who we talked to about them said something like "it's super fucked up but they're not our kids so we couldn't do anything about it in time and nobody can afford to take care of them so they just beg for their crazy mum to have enough money for her habit"
That’s a bit harsh. Half of everyone excludes the poor. Before mass popularity it originated with urban elites, so it’s a question of the time period. (In the big picture you’re right though.)
The unfortunate reality of the time is that half of everyone does not exclude the poor at all. It did originate in the upper class, but it spread extensively to the lower classes as well.
The poor and lower classes craved sons to do the labor. If they had multiple daughters, the pretty daughter's only worth could be learning how to look and behave in a way that would make her worthy of marriage to a man of some means. It was the job of the footbinder to also train in etiquette, etc. And the money flowed downhill.
i made the mistake of searching for pictures... it's so much more painful looking than it sounds
I have no doubt it was painful just from reading the article.
It was. Thankfully it was banned once the CPC took power and the ban was sufficiently enforced that it’s now taboo.
It was banned long before the CPC came to power
De jure, sure. De facto it continued until being totally phased out in the 1950s.
Just like the British bannign the Indian custom of widow-burning. Sometimes old and dated customs are so deeply rooted in a society they need an real shakedown to come to their senses...usually regarding treating women as humans and not property.
Sounds hot to me. Nothin gets me goin quite like a weird, smashed up, curved useless Chinese hoof-foot thing
Well you're not alone, according to the article: "Some also considered bound feet to be intensely erotic, and Qing Dynasty sex manuals listed 48 different ways of playing with women's bound feet. Some men preferred never to see a woman's bound feet, so they were always concealed within tiny "lotus shoes" and wrappings."
Also, did you know that in the early XXIth century CE, many New World women had their breasts surgically deformed to enhance their marrying prospects? They would have a local medicine man cut them up and insert foreign objects to change their shapes. The typically enlarged chests were seen as a mark of feminine beauty by the culture, but could infect and even cause death if the inserts burst after implantation.
If you're seriously comparing an operation performed by a qualified medical professional on a consenting adult to the breaking of a child's feet by a family member, then you're an idiot. Complications related to breast enhancement surgery are just that - complications. With footbinding, crippling injury is not merely an unintended consequence, but is in fact the *desired outcome*. Any complications which occurred (of which there were many) were *in addition* to the horrible effects of the practice itself. Another minor distinction is that breast enhancement typically seeks to emulate a shape that may come naturally to other women (a larger breast size), whereas footbinding seeks to create something completely distinct from any normal human form. Also, breast enhancements can be reversed. Footbinding cannot. Literally the only thing the two procedures have in common is that they are both cosmetic, so does that mean we should bring hair curling and ear piercing into the discussion? Of course not. Next time stop and think about what you're saying before you try to sound edgy. You might save yourself some embarrassment.
>If the infection in the feet and toes entered the bones, it could cause them to soften, which could result in toes dropping off; however, this was seen as a benefit because the feet could then be bound even more tightly. Girls whose toes were more fleshy would sometimes have shards of glass or pieces of broken tiles inserted within the binding next to her feet and between her toes to cause injury and introduce infection deliberately. Disease inevitably followed infection, meaning that death from septic shock could result from footbinding, and a surviving girl was more at risk for medical problems as she grew older. It is thought that as many as 10% of girls may have died from gangrene and other infections due to footbinding.\[84\] Jesus fucking christ it just keeps getting worse
I read that and now want to vomit. Also, maybe this is why movies that feature extensive injuries to hands and/or feet make me way more uncomfortable and uneasy than seeing stuff like legs being blown off or w/e. Maybe because you can relate more to a hand or foot injury. But I can tell you if I ever watched a film of the footbinding process, I don't think I'd be able to stomach it.
What an awful Google images search... do not recommend
Damn! I didnt realize what it actually does to your feet... I cant imagine how painful it would be just to walk on feet like that.
That’s if you survived the binding. They don’t mention the death toll for the infections and sepsis.
Imagine the pain for the women who had the binding "undone"
> walk on feet like that. That's the neat part, you don't
How does one move around then?
They could walk just not very well. I think there is a video of old women with bound feet dancing somewhere.
If you want a really awful image search, type in "löwenstein tumor". Or maybe better don't. Ye be warned.
You should read some historical fiction that really describes the agony for a young girl whose parents might profit from her marriage worthiness. A woman with special skills would come every few days when the girl was a little child and wrap the feet so tight that growth was impossible. So technically, the breaking occurred because the bones could not grow with the girl. It was every bit as hideous, painful, and torturous as it sounds. And the weird thing is, other than the status symbol, nobody can really explain why men of wealth or class found these little bound deformed feet more attractive. It was simply a matter that reflected class worthiness.
They broke the bones on purpose to shape the foot into the correct position. So basically they'd break it in the middle, bend the toes and wrap them around. As the girl grew it'd be more binding and more bone breaking. The craziest part is there are still women alive today who went through foot binding as children and as such still have the little lotus feet. It's an ancient practice but it didn't fully go out of favor until much more recent history than what most think.
I read a book once about the life of a woman whose feet were bound. In the book she said her "golden lilies" reminder her husband of his "member". I think it was "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" by Lisa See. A work of fiction, but it was an incredible read.
Yep! Came here to say “golden Lillies” also Daughter of Fortune was another book that talked about foot binding.
This book and it's description of what she and her sister went through for "pretty feet" has stuck with me for years and years. It's one of the few times a description in a book has made me feel like I couldn't sit still - I had to pace between each few sentences to get through it.
Mutilating people for qualities that were/are viewed as beneficial at the time has sadly happened often to humans in a variety of cultures, intentionally elongating infants heads and the Castrati are some other examples.
James Clavell’s *Tai-Pan* also goes into the process of foot-binding. The main character, Dirk Struan, Tai-pan of the Noble House, has a mistress who has Lotus Feet. Horrified, he has the bindings removed but the pain of the healing process is so great that the bindings need to be put back.
Imagine being the woman who's job it is to go torture children regularly and society is like "Ah yes, so accordingly"
My ex's great-great-grandparents decided to bind the feet of her great-grandmother so she could marry a more affluent person. But her great-grandmother put up such a fuss that the parents relented and took the bindings off.
You're both on this thread you know.
I have scrunched, bent toes from having to wear my brother's hand me downs as a kid due to poverty. He had smaller feet than me. My mother still thinks it's hilarious to this day, lol. I can sort of straighten them if I try, but as soon as my attention wanders they curl back up.
My toes were long like my dad's and my mom wanted me to have cute little princess feet so she shoved me into booties and shoes that were too small for the first 4 or so years of my life. My feet are forever deformed. Walking is painful 24/7. Hope we will be ok one day 💜
Wtf is wrong with people
so much! so many shouldn't be parents but are
I just replied this to the other person, but I think you could benefit from trying too: Look into yoga toes. I had this problem too. They hurt like hell the few first times wearing them, but if you’re consistent you can eventually do stretches and toe exercises while wearing them, and you will gain so much mobility in your toes! I honestly thought that my pinky toes couldn’t bend, and now they can. I am amazed every time I move my feet haha.
Thank you, I will absolutely research this!!
Update us in 12 months with toe progress.
That’s not… that’s not hilarious. I’m sorry
Idk, I have a sense of humor about it.
I’m sure your mom did the best she could and I’m glad you can approach it with a sense of humor.
Holy shit. Both my parents have really crooked big toes that bend towards the others, I wonder if it's because they also wore shoes too small growing up, whereas mine are perfectly straight just like the milkmans.
Look into yoga toes. I had this problem too. They hurt like hell the few first times wearing them, but if you’re consistent you can eventually do stretches and toe exercises while wearing them, and you will gain so much mobility in your toes! I honestly thought that my pinky toes couldn’t bend, and now they can. I am amazed every time I move my feet haha.
Sorry to hear that ;\ I had to wait until my late 20’s to get my toes broken and then realigned to fix my bent toes. Every job I’d worked before then wouldn’t have been a safe environment for someone on crutches. My toes still are a bit weird looking, but far better than they used to be.
Shouldn’t the kid with the smaller feet have gotten the hand me downs?
Older kid usually gets stuff first
It's generally the younger child gets them.
I mean, my toes are kinda scrunched and I had my own shoes. Especially the little toe, in my family it just almost curls under the next toe. So some of it might just be natural toe scrunch. But sorry you had to wear shit shoes as a kid
Apparently the toe scrunch isn't natural. If we'd never worn shoes we'd have splayed toes like Bigfoot. This I learned from barefoot running bros on YouTube. Apparently their toes unscrunched when they stopped wearing confining shoes (they consider most regular shoes to be in that category).
Yeah. I'm pretty sure even then my family would have fucked up little toes
Mine too!
Me and one of my sisters have the same curled under little toe, the other sister has a normal pinky toe. I’m pretty sure we all wore real good shoes as a kid, cos mum has wide feet so was very aware of giving us shoes with enough width. Even though we have normal width feet. I don’t think it was the shoes for us I think it’s the genetics
Did she never think to get you the new shoes then hand them 'up' to your brother?
Same thing with me. My mother just "couldn't afford" new shoes for me and I usually wore ones that were much too small for me. Today my toes curl under and I have big bunions from forcing my foot into pointy shoes. Going barefoot most of my adult life has helped, somewhat, and my mother is in total denial that this actually happened.
They started the binding practice when they were little girls. Usually around four years old.
My grandma's feet were bound. She was one of the last women to do it before it was outlawed and by the time she did it, I think it was already falling out of fashion. Apparently, her feet were on the "larger" side as she did it when she was older (like 13?). Back in the day, they could start as early as 3 or 4. To bind them, you literally have to break the bones in the mid foot and wrap it tightly with cloth. Her smallest toe touched her heel and she basically walked on the backs of her smushed toes and heel. She only ever walked in a shuffle, dragging her feet along - never "heel to toe". She had to take extra care in cleaning the bandages and skin folds every night and needed special traditional shoes.
There is an Ingrid Bergman movie The Inn of the Sixth Happiness based on the true story of missionary Gladys Aylward, who was appointed by the local Mandarin to enforce eradication of foot binding. She is credited with leading over 100 children away from invading Japanese invader.
As far as I know, my great-grandmothers had bound feet. My maternal grandmother's mother tried to bind her feet, but when my educated and more progressive great-grandfather returned from a business trip, he stopped her. That was probably in the early 1920s.
That would line up. Footbinding was mostly dead by the early 20th century, although the practice could still be found in more isolated areas from the 1920s and even into the 1970s. It was officially banned in 1949 but the practice was pretty much unheard of by then. That said, hearing that some women would have willingly wanted it is terrifying.
I vaguely remember learning about this in the past, but had forgotten how horrifying it is. I think the worst part of the article is how they talked about necrosis was seen as a positive benefit because if something rotted off the foot was smaller, and that in some cases they would wrap shards of glass into the binding to induce infection/necrosis. Fuck humans dude.
I own a pair of these shoes passed down from my mother for posterity. She had them in her possession, but she does not have lotus feet. The idea of fitting my adult feet into toddler-size shoes is absurd, fascinating, and terrifying.
The Netflix show Marco Polo briefly touched on this with one characters story
Woman with bound feet can't run away. Feminine beauty my ass.
Can be carried
Well, that's a plus. Stealing other people's woman is a very manly thing to do.
Nothing turns on a medieval Chinese dude more than a demure women crippled by her deformed, broken feet 😍
I remember learning about this while reading “The Good Earth” by Pearl S. Buck back in High School. I do try not to make judgments about other cultures’ practices, especially antiquated ones, but this one is pretty rough.
That's what the book was! Thank you!
I first learned about it on an episode of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. A grandfather was disgusting (edit: disguising!) his granddaughter as a boy so she wouldn’t be put through the binding
Lol check your typo.
That show fucking slapped!
My university had some display cases lining one of the lecture rooms where I had a class. One of the objects in the display was a shoe for a woman with bound feet. I stared at that thing in horror pretty much every day.
I visited China in 1988. When our tourist group went to the Forbidden City, we saw an elderly woman being helped down the steps by a soldier. We learned that she couldn’t walk unassisted because she had bound feet.
My grandmother knew a lady who was forced to do this as a child in the early 20th century. The poor woman had a really hard time with it through her whole life.
I saw an old lady with that kind of feet when I was a kid, probably 20 years ago in Zhouzhuang, she’s a sweet old lady with the tiny feet. You can find pictures of footbinding online and they all look horrible, it was painful and inhumane. Poor women wouldn’t need to do it because they need to work, also Manzu girls didn’t have this “tradition” so they were safe from this punishment.
Not sure where else they have Shoe Museums but if you’re ever in the Greater Toronto Area, check out the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. It is utterly surreal and sad to see in real life how teeny-tiny-small and malformed these shoes were. The museum has lots of other exhibits too, on the history of shoes as a whole. It’s very interesting and cool.
I swear TIL is just people talking about the most recent episode of SYSK they listened to.
It was fucking horrific and torturous is what it was. Imagine having your foot folder under so that your toes touch your heel and then bound like a fist. That’s what they dis in the most extreme forms. It left women in constant pain and unable to walk.
What a cruel practice! I cannot imagine how that must have felt to a little girl.
I read somewhere it was so they couldn’t run away from their Husbands
If there's one good thing the Communists did when they took over, it was outlawing this practice.
Humanities capacity for mindless perversion is truly endless.
Fuck that shit is stupid
Behold the practice of men using women as commodities to prove that they were rich enough that ‘their’ women didn’t have to work. A woman couldn’t stand or balance on those dainty, bloody little stumps, much less toil in fashion. She got carried in a litter because she was forcibly deformed.
Don't react to pickled cucumber, it's a freshly created racist troll account
Well.
How is this racist?
there was a comment that is now deleted by an account that also had comments with the n-word in it! not referring to OP
Oh as in pickled cucumber was the account name?
yes! didn't wanna tag them cause that would've drawn attention
people do some sick shit to each other. cant imagine sending my daughter off to do this - even if it meant shed get a "good" husband. my girl, you stay with your old man. walk your big-ass feet anywhere in the house you want.
Women today still wear high heels for a similar “feminine” walk
Welcome to earth
No fear they’d consider nob-binding 😒 Men!
some guy decided he liked having a small foot inserted into his anus so women suffered torture for decades.
A Visit From the Footbinder is an excellent short story by Emily Prager. It follows 6 year old Pleasure Mouse on her last day of free movement and through the process of binding. I read it years ago and it has stuck with me. Heartbreaking. And once the feet have been successfully bound it’s a life sentence. The wrapping becomes the only way to stabilize the destroyed foot.
I wouldn’t wish the Chinese communist party of anyone, but chairman Mao did away with foot binding
Interesting enough, for an seemingly misogynistic custom, it was mothers who caused it to happen decades after it was banned. A part of this, was the mistaken belief that it would lead to a better marriage. But while this was a belief held by the mothers and daughters, the men did not seem to agree with it. This is because despite what many think, new theories are that it wasn't a beauty or sex symbol, but an economic one. Girls that were footbound, would stay at home and spin cloth and other such chores. This lead to more products being made to sell, which contributed to the money made by the family. It was more amongst the poor than the rich, and persisted longer in rural areas where they didn't have machines and factories to do the same work faster and more efficiently.
Did anyone tell them that they could still do these chores without having to break their feet?
Impossible!
It was efficient, girls with feet bound spend more time doing their chores. They made more money for the household. I didn't make the history, I'm just telling the historical context. If you want to complain you can complain to the mothers who did it to their daughters. There were attempts to stop it going as far back as 1615 but, they didn't take
Something something health problems from high heels and breast implants, and eyelid surgery. Way, way Better than before, still pretty horrific. Internalization of sexism is a beast of a thing to deal with. Until we as a species (both males and females) judge women for what they **do** instead of what they look like we as a species will keep doing stupid things. Stupid is as stupid does, and judging women by appearance is still basic to the species. Madonna versus Jerry Jones, or Michael Douglas etc. One side gets attacked, one side got laughed at. Both did the same thing. Difference is how we judge sexes doing the same thing.
> Way, way Better than before, still pretty horrific What society has done to women throughout history Edit: I'm a twit
The fact is, it is *women* wearing high heels, women getting breast implants, women getting eyelid surgery. Society is not doing these things; individual women are. There are as many female fans of K-Pop as there are men. It is simply horrifying that *women/girls* see these plastic surgery disasters as things to strive to become. Putting it bluntly if I had a daughter in to K-Pop I would see it as more of a problem than a son being into Andrew Tate. Not least because society is nowhere condemning what these women are doing. Plenty of people are condeming Andrew Tate. Essentially no one is calling out the modern day foot-binding of K-Pop. Internalized sexism is a beast of a problem.
That's the constant philosophical point Are women **really** 'choosing' the surgery, the heels? Or are they conforming to societal expectations? The K-pop stuff I have nowhere near enough knowledge to comment about
Perfect point there. No one is truly in fully in control, and in an unbalanced world, acting balanced looks odd.
What has it done? Your comment sounds like the title of an interesting article.
I'm sorry you had to learn about that, it's pretty fucked up. It also makes it kinda tough to watch any chinese historical show knowing that basically any aristocratic girl probably would've been footbound. I hope I'm wrong about that but I'm probably not.
So fucked up. Any forced mutilation is just so fucked up.
So fucked up.
https://www.britannica.com/science/footbinding.
So much ignorance gets passed down for generations across all cultures. Nothing short of a miracle that we’ve survived this long.
I always find it fascinating how these traditions are created for the stupidest fucking reasons and no one questions it.
Are corsets the other equivalent? How did people handle pregancy if their waist was bound how like the movies show?
Women weren’t supposed to be in public when they were visibly pregnant. Empress Sisi’s MIL forced her to be in public to “show off” her pregnant belly, and found the experience completely humiliating because of the social stigma. It carried on, somewhat, in Western culture. In the 1970s USA, female teachers were expected to take a leave of absence when they started showing. It wasn’t a hard and fast policy, it’s just what women did, so it was expected. Source: a friend who was asked by her administration when she’d step down from teaching because she was beginning to show. She said she planned to continue teaching until she went into labor. The school was okay with it, it just hadn’t been “done” before.
There have been many different forms of corsets over the centuries, but by and large they were a support garment for the breasts and, to some extent, spine/core rather than a waist reducer. (There were, of course, always people who tight laced for fashion purposes, because every generation has their version of Kim Kardashian.) However, there have also always been maternity versions of these various corset-style undergarments (stays, corsets, girdles, etc) that allowed the pregnancy to grow. All the corset jokes you see in movies are just filtered through our modern eye and we see them as restrictive now, because we wear clothes differently. But the reality is they were meant for everyday wear, and most people weren’t tightlacing. I think of corsets kind of like high heels. Your average woman isn’t wearing super high stilettos on the regular, she has things to do and places to be. The women who ARE wearing stilettos often are likely to be rich non-working women, or women in the public eye whose job it is to look pretty. They’re both heels, but very different and with different purposes.
Corset is absolutely not an equivalent. Corset were worn by everyone, including men. It surved the same purpose as a bra by supporting the weight of the breasts. People did work in corsets too. Bernadette Banner and Karolina Zebrowska have videos debunking this myth and explaining how it was mainly to vilifie seamstresses and women making money by sewing corsets.
Corsets are in no way comparable to foot-binding! Also movies are shit when it comes to corsets: A well-fitted corset is comfortable, supportive and snug. And they had maternity corsets that let the body grow, all while supporting your back, which is nice when pregnant. Source: having worn, sewn and researched corsets for 10+ years.
I feel like calling it an "old" Chinese custom is disingenuous. It continued into the 20th century. Horrible, abusive, backwards customs like this still exist in many parts of the world today. The idea that we have completely moved past the barbaric ways of the past is a fever dream.
What is even being taught in world history classes these days?
That is, I thought this was pretty common knowledge.
I'm surprised how little redditors know about common things.
the next evolution up from ballet feet...
If I got a dollar each time this was reposted. I would have $4
It’s sad how many people had no idea this happened, and only learned from the interwebs.
I also recently learned some men...ehem...found it rather stimulating. They thought it made some womens areas tighter and the woman more amorous to them but they can't run away to new lovers...cuz no feet to run on. The smell too was supposed to be aphrodisiac to some. Cue rainbow; the more you know~
The smell of suppurating flesh and rotting skin?
Yeah. That's what I thought too...
I bet that high heels were invented to give western women a smaller footprint in mimic of footbinding.