Foot fetish has no sex element at all?
Surprising, but it’s true.
Work, not sex? The real reason Chinese women bound their feet
Apparently, the real reason why Chinese women bound their feet in the old days not for sex, but for professional reason!
“Lotus Feet” are professional practice, it’s neither for trivial humping purpose, nor a fetish at all.
It was an excruciatingly painful practice that maimed the feet of millions of Chinese girls and women for centuries: foot-binding.
Tiny “golden lotus” feet — achieved through breaking girls’ toes and arches and binding them to the sole of the foot with cloth — were thought to be a passport to a better marriage and a better way of life.
“In the conventional view, it existed to please men. They were thought to be attracted to small feet,” said Laurel Bossen, co-author of the new book “Bound feet, Young hands.”
But Bossen’s research suggests that the custom has been massively misunderstood.
Girls who had their feet bound didn’t lead a life of idle beauty but rather served a crucial economic purpose, especially in the countryside, where girls as young as 7 weaved, spun and did work by hand, Bossen said.
Foot-binding persisted for so long because it had a clear economic rationale: It was a way to make sure young girls sat still and helped make goods like yarn, cloth, mats, shoes and fishing nets that families depended upon for income — even if the girls themselves were told it would make them more marriageable.
Bossen says women weren’t shy about talking about or showing their bound feet, making her skeptical that it was an erotically charged fetish.
Does Whitney Port have her feet bound?
‘Distortion of history’
“You have to link hands and feet. Footbound women did valuable handwork at home in cottage industries. The image of them as idle sexual trophies is a grave distortion of history,” said Bossen.
Foot-binding persisted because it ensured that young girls sat still and worked at a boring, sedentary task for many hours each day, she said, and it died out only when manufactured cloth and foreign imports eliminated the economic value of handwork.
Bossen, professor emerita of anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, and Hill Gates, who holds the same post at Central Michigan University, interviewed just under 1,800 elderly women in several locations across rural China — the last generation to have bound feet — to pinpoint when and why the practice began to decline.
They found that foot-binding endured longest in areas where it still made economic sense to produce goods like cloth at home and began to decline only when cheaper factory-made alternatives became available in these regions.
Farrell says: “Most books out there cover the eroticism of bound feet or the history of it. They don’t really discuss the woman as a human being. I want to humanize the phenomenon. These women had incredible lives, even though they were peasants. Not only did they have bound feet, they lived through famine and the Cultural Revolution, and now they have to deal with the break-up of the traditional family structure and village life as young people move away to cities for jobs.”
Many women Farrell photographed were too old to remember much from their childhood. But one woman, Yang Yu Ying, now 79 years old, was able to recall the time before her feet were bound: “When I was 11 years old I was at my grandfather’s birthday. There were delicious foods and everything was going well until my aunt said my feet were very ugly, that they were so big just like a boy. When my mother bound my feet I didn’t cry. But at night when I lay in bed I cried. The feet were bleeding and infected for one year. I washed it with water. After a year the pain went away and I could walk again.”
Yang went on to have two children and five grandchildren. “These women are really the backbone of today’s China. But they come from a generation where it is difficult for them to see themselves as individuals. They don’t see their story as important — they don’t matter, they are forgotten women,” says Farrell.
Feet binding started in the Song dynasty and fell out of fashion in the early 20th century when it was banned by the government. “Body modification is in all cultures. We all do something to make ourselves more attractive or to help us feel better. Today, we see surgical toe tucks to beautify the foot, rib removal to make the waist smaller,” says Farrell.
Jo Farrell is a Hong Kong-based photographer who focuses on female traditions that are dying out. In the past eight years, she has photographed 50 women with bound feet in rural China. Most live in an area two hours outside of Jinan, Shandong province.
Read more at CNN
Let see if Yvonne Strahovski has bound feet?
We see something else was bound, but not her feet.