Woman Hating (10 page)

The minds of footbound women were as contracted as their feet. Daughters were taught to cook, supervise the household, and embroider shoes for the Golden Lotus. Intellectual and physical restriction had the usual male justification. Women were perverse and sinful, lewd and lascivious, if left to develop naturally. The Chinese believed that being born a woman was payment for evils committed in a previous life. Footbinding was designed to spare a woman the disaster of another such incarnation.

Marriage and the family are the twin pillars of all patriarchal cultures. Bound feet, in China, were the twin pillars of these twin pillars. Here we have the joining together of politics and morality, coupled to produce their inevitable offspring—the oppression of women based on totalitarian standards of beauty and a rampant sexual fascism. In arranging a marriage, a male's parents inquired first about the prospective bride’s feet, then about her face. Those were her human, recognizable qualities. During the process of footbinding, mothers consoled their daughters by conjuring up the luscious marriage possibilities dependent on the beauty of the bound foot. Concubines for the Imperial harem were selected at tiny-foot festivals (forerunners of Miss America pageants). Rows upon rows of women sat on benches with their feet outstretched while audience and judges went along the aisles and commented on the size, shape, and decoration of foot and shoes. No one, however, was ever allowed to touch the merchandise. Women looked forward to these festivals, since they were allowed out of the house.

The sexual aesthetics, literally the art of love, of
the bound foot was complex. The sexual attraction of the foot was based on its concealment and the mystery surrounding its development and care. The bindings were unwrapped and the feet were washed in the woman’s boudoir, in the strictest privacy. The frequency of bathing varied from once a week to once a year. Perfumes of various fragrances and alum were used during and after washing, and various kinds of surgery were performed on the callouses and nails. The physical process of washing helped restore circulation. The mummy was unwrapped, touched up, and put back to sleep with more preservatives added. The rest of the body was never washed at the same time as the feet, for fear that one would become a pig in the next life. Well-bred women were supposed to die of shame if men observed them washing their feet. The foot consisted, after all, of smelly, rotted flesh. This was naturally not pleasing to the intruding male, a violation of his aesthetic sensibility.

The art of the shoes was basic to the sexual aesthetics of the bound foot. Untold hours, days, months went into the embroidery of shoes. There were shoes for all occasions, shoes of different colors, shoes to hobble in, shoes to go to bed in, shoes for special occasions like birthdays, marriages, funerals, shoes which denoted age. Red was the favored color for bed shoes because it accentuated the whiteness of the skin of the calves and thighs. A marriageable daughter made about 12 pairs of shoes as a part of her dowry. She presented 2 specially made pairs to her mother-in-law and father-in-law. When she entered her husband’s home for the first time, her feet were immediately examined by the whole family, neither praise nor sarcasm being withheld.

There was also the art of the gait, the art of sitting, the art of standing, the art of lying down, the art of adjusting the skirt, the art of every movement which involves feet. Beauty was the way feet looked and how they moved. Certain feet were better than other feet, more beautiful. Perfect 3-inch form and utter uselessness were the distinguishing marks of the aristocratic foot. These concepts of beauty and status defined women: as ornaments, as sexual playthings, as sexual constructs. The perfect construct, even in China, was naturally the prostitute.

The natural-footed woman generated horror and repulsion in China. She was anathema, and all the forces of insult and contempt were used to obliterate her. Men said about bound feet and natural feet:

A tiny foot is proof of feminine goodness....

Women who don’t bind their feet, look like men, for the tiny foot serves to show the differentiation....

The tiny foot is soft and, when rubbed, leads to great excitement....

The graceful walk gives the beholder mixed feelings of compassion and pity....

Natural feet are heavy and ponderous as they get into bed, but tiny feet lightly steal under the coverlets....

The large-footed woman is careless about adornment, but the tiny-footed frequently wash and apply a variety of perfumed fragrances, enchanting all who come into their presence....

The natural foot looks much less aesthetic in walking....

Everyone welcomes the tiny foot, regarding its smallness as precious....

Men formerly so craved it that its possessor achieved harmonious matrimony....

Because of its diminutiveness, it gives rise to a variety of sensual pleasures and love feelings....
⁸

Thin, small, curved, soft, fragrant, weak, easily inflamed, passive to the point of being almost inanimate—this was footbound woman. Her bindings created extraordinary vaginal folds; isolation in the bedroom increased her sexual desire; playing with the shriveled, crippled foot increased everyone’s desire. Even the imagery of the names of various types of foot suggest, on the one hand, feminine passivity (lotuses, lilies, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts) and, on the other hand, male independence, strength, and mobility (lotus boats, large-footed crows, monkey foot). It was unacceptable for a woman to have those male qualities denoted by large feet. This fact conjures up an earlier assertion: footbinding did not formalize existing differences between men and women —it created them. One sex became male by virtue of having made the other sex some thing, something other, something completely polar to itself, something called female. In 1915, a satirical essay in defense of footbinding, written by a Chinese male, emphasized this:

The bound foot is the condition of a life of dignity for man, of contentment for woman. Let me make this clear. I am a Chinese fairly typical of my class. I pored too much over classic texts in my youth and dimmed my eyes, narrowed my chest, crooked my back. My memory is not strong, and in an old civilization there is a vast deal to learn before you can know anything. Accordingly among scholars I cut a poor figure. I am timid, and my voice plays me false in gatherings of men. But to my footbound wife, confined for life to her house except when I bear her in my arms to her palanquin, my stride is heroic, my voice is that of a roaring lion, my wisdom is of the sages. To her I am the world; I am life itself.
⁹

Chinese men, it is clear, stood tall and strong on women’s tiny feet.

The so-called art of footbinding was the process of taking the human foot, using it as though it were insensible matter, molding it into an inhuman form. Footbinding was the “art” of making living matter insensible, inanimate. We are obviously not dealing here with art at all, but with fetishism, with sexual psychosis. This fetish became the primary content of sexual experience for an entire culture for 1,000 years. The manipulation of the tiny foot was an indispensable prelude to all sexual experience. Manuals were written elaborating various techniques for holding and rubbing the Golden Lotus. Smelling the feet, chewing them, licking them, sucking them, all were sexually charged experiences. A woman with tiny feet was supposedly more easily maneuvered around in bed and this was no small advantage. Theft of shoes was commonplace. Women were forced to sew their shoes directly onto their bindings. Stolen shoes might be returned soaked in semen. Prostitutes would show their naked feet for a high price (there weren’t many streetwalkers in China). Drinking games using cups placed in the shoes of prostitutes or courtesans were favorite pastimes. Tiny-footed prostitutes took special names like Moon Immortal, Red Treasure, Golden Pearl. No less numerous were the euphemisms for feet, shoes, and bindings. Some men went to prostitutes to wash the tiny foot and eat its dirt, or to drink tea made from the washing water. Others wanted their penises manipulated by the feet. Superstition also had its place —there was a belief in the curative powers of the water in which tiny feet were washed.

Lastly, footbinding was the soil in which sadism could grow and go unchecked —in which simple cruelty could transcend itself, without much effort, into atrocity. These are some typical horror stories of those times:

A stepmother or aunt in binding the child’s foot was usually much harsher than the natural mother would have been. An old man was described who delighted in seeing his daughters weep as the binding was tightly applied.... In one household, everyone had to bind. The main wife and concubines bound to the smallest degree, once morning and evening, and once before retiring. The husband and first wife strictly carried out foot inspections and whipped those guilty of having let the binding become loose. The sleeping shoes were so painfully small that the women had to ask the master to rub them in order to bring relief. Another rich man would flog his concubines on their tiny feet, one after another, until the blood flowed.
¹⁰
 

... about 1931... bound-foot women unable to Bee had been taken captive. The bandits, angered because of their captives’ weak way of walking and inability to keep in file, forced the women to remove the bindings and socks and run about barefoot. They cried out in pain and were unable to move on in spite of beatings. Each of the bandits grabbed a woman and forced her to dance about on a wide field covered with sharp rocks. The harshest treatment was meted out to prostitutes. Nails were driven through their hands and feet; they cried aloud for several days before expiring. One form of torture was to tie-up a woman so that her legs dangled in midair and place bricks around each toe, increasing the weight until the toes straightened out and eventually dropped off.
¹¹

END OF FOOTBINDING EVENT

One asks the same questions again and again, over a period of years, in the course of a lifetime. The questions have to do with people and what they do —the how and the why of it. How could the Germans have murdered 6, 000, 000 Jews, used their skins for lampshades, taken the gold out of their teeth? How could white people have bought and sold black people, hanged them and castrated them? How could “Americans” have slaughtered the Indian nations, stolen the land, spread famine and disease? How can the Indochina genocide continue, day after day, year after year? How is it possible? Why does it happen?

As a woman, one is forced to ask another series of hard questions: Why everywhere the oppression of women throughout recorded history? How could the Inquisitors torture and burn women as witches? How could men idealize the bound feet of crippled women? How and why?

The bound foot existed for 1,000 years. In what terms, using what measure, could one calculate the enormity of the crime, the dimensions of the transgression, the
amount
of cruelty and pain inherent in that 1, 000-year herstory? In what terms, using what vocabulary, could one penetrate to the meaning, to the reality, of that 1,000-year herstory?

Here one race did not war with another to acquire food, or land, or civil power; one nation did not fight with another in the interest of survival, real or imagined; one group of people in a fever pitch of hysteria did not destroy another. None of the traditional explanations or justifications for brutality between or among peoples applies to this situation. On the contrary, here one sex mutilated (enslaved) the other in the interest of the
art
of sex, male-female
harmony, role-definition, beauty.

Consider the magnitude of the crime.

Millions of women, over a period of 1,000 years, were brutally crippled, mutilated, in the name of erotica.

Millions of human beings, over a period of 1, 000 years, were brutally crippled, mutilated, in the name of beauty.

Millions of men, over a period of 1, 000 years, reveled in love-making devoted to the worship of the bound foot.

Millions of men, over a period of 1, 000 years, worshiped and adored the bound foot.

Millions of mothers, over a period of 1, 000 years, brutally crippled and mutilated their daughters for the sake of a secure marriage.

Millions of mothers, over a period of 1, 000 years, brutally crippled and mutilated their daughters in the name of beauty.

But this thousand-year period is only the tip of an awesome, fearful iceberg: an extreme and visible expression of romantic attitudes, processes, and values organically rooted in all cultures, then and now. It demonstrates that man’s love for woman, his sexual adoration of her, his human definition of her, his delight and pleasure in her, require her negation: physical crippling and psychological lobotomy. That is the very nature of romantic love, which is the love based on polar role definitions, manifest in herstory as well as in fiction —he glories in her agony, he adores her deformity, he annihilates her freedom, he will have her as sex object, even if he must destroy the bones in her feet to do it. Brutality, sadism, and oppression emerge as the substantive core of the romantic ethos. That ethos is the warp and woof of culture as we know it.