#foot binding

Wu Zetian from Iron Widow is intersex and canonically bisexual, polyamorous in a relationship with Gao Yizhi and Li Shimin, and disabled (chronic pain and mobility limitations as a result of foot binding, uses both a cane and wheelchair), and her variation is Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS)!

Hi!

This was in my inbox for a while (I have so many asks I need to do research on before replying ^^;;)

There's a few variations of when feet binding started, most historians believe it was in Northern Song dynasty (北宋), but became more popularized in Ming, then reached a peak during the Qing Dynasty (despite the imperial court's attempts to ban it).

I don't have too much information on it as a part of Hanfu (my current book focuses on clothing, but I am looking at other books that talk about other aspects of historical attire which include hair and shoes).

For anyone unfamiliar with this practice, foot binding was a practice of women curling all the toes, except the big toe, under the foot, then wrapping a bandage around the foot to keep it in place. This was started when the girls were very young, which meant their bones would grow into this disfigured shape. This caused walking to be extremely painful, so originally it was contained to wealthy families where the women didn't need to do much work. But later on even regular civilian households started to imitate this practice (my great grandmother had bound feet).

The reason for this practice was because small, dainty feet were considered part of the ideal aesthetic at the time. These tiny feet were called "3 inch golden lotus feet (三寸金莲)". (What is up with societies torturing women's feet for aesthetics...even today, I love my heels but ouch. Why can't aesthetics be those big, comfy, plush slippers xD)

I'll post some photos under the Keep Reading. !!!Warning that some of the pics can be disturbing since it does show extremely disfigured feet.!!!

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.