May 9, 2013 • 27 mins
Once in a while, all the necessary factors converge to produce a peculiar nationalized sexual fetish. In China, that fetish was foot binding and over a millennia three billion Chinese women's feet were brutally disfigured for men's pleasure.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you Stuff you should Know from house Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there,
and uh, it's time for stuff you should know. Everybody
settled down, buckle in, get ready. Hey, congratulations to Kristin Bell.
(00:26):
Stuff you should know. Celebrity fan Kristen Bell and her
husband Dak Sheppard had their baby. Oh hey, congratulations, A
big congratulations to you. And uh, I don't know if Mr.
I thought you're gonna congratulate her on atter movie Owen,
the Veronica Mars movie. Well, congratulations on that. My wife
is very much looking forward to that, and your wife
is looking forward to meeting the baby. She's on her
(00:49):
way right now. Kristen Bell's locking the doors. Oh my god.
What started out is small fascination with their show and tragedy,
dangerous made for TV movie, and anyway, I just want
to say congratulations. Yeah, that's nice if you chuck sure,
Uh I got no congratulations over here. Yeah, interesting that
(01:09):
I tied that to this podcast on like female torture essentially,
do you think there's something to that? Well, we live
in a world now where we don't have to worry
about although I think they had a son where any
little baby's feet being binded, I guess not babies, but
four or five year olds were bound. Yeah, yeah, bound, binded, bound, Okay,
(01:32):
because the feet were bound? Yes, yes, yeah. Um, do
you think we should explain to everybody what we're talking
about foot binding? Yeah? I'm glad you. Um, thank you.
Congratulated Kristen Bell because I didn't really have much of
an intro for this one. Um, because it's just so fascinating.
I feel like we should just kind of dive right in. Yeah,
(01:53):
fascinating and horrible and like oddly impactful and areas I
never would have considered. Yeah, so we should say that
over the course of about a thousand years, from roughly
nine seventy until about the nineteen fifties, like almost on
the dot a thousand years, about three billion women in
(02:13):
China um bound their feet to basically train them to
become small and pointy in a really bizarre custom that
just kind of came out of nowhere and stuck around
again for about a thousand years, voluntarily deforming their feet, well,
at the very least their mothers and grandmothers voluntarily deformed
(02:35):
their feet for them. Yeah, it's a very good point actually, Um,
but at some point they had to take over, and
I guess then it became voluntary. Well sure, well we'll
get to all that, okay, spoilers. So basically this was
purposeful deformation of the human foot, the human female foot,
(02:56):
in order to attract men. There was a standard of
beauty of bound foot. Um, and we'll we'll describe it
in a minute. But um, the idea, the whole thing
kind of came from they think about, like I said,
a d in the court of an emperor named Lee
You and Lee you had a favorite girlfriend, ballerina girl. Yeah,
(03:21):
and apparently he saw her dancing once on a golden
lotus pedestal because everything was made of gold back then
in China, and um, she had her feet kind of
wrapped up, I guess, like a ballerina or something. And
he apparently got very very excited at this, visibly excited,
so much so that um, the other ladies of the
(03:42):
court noticed this. Did you say visibly excited? Visibly excited? Um, yes,
if you know what I mean, I would imagine, Hey,
this guy's been dead a thousand years like all all
slander and defamations, like out the window. It's like it
was a rocking time. It's the Southern Tank Dynasty. It
was you never know gonna happen. Yeah, it made Caligula
look like watching it as an adult, yeah boring. Yeah.
(04:06):
So um so really the ly you was very much
entranced by this enough that other women in the court
noticed it and they started wrapping their feet as well. Yeah,
and it just kind of took off from there, and
it took a weird turn pretty early on. Uh what
was the turn? Well, the turn is originally apparently the
first the woman who started this whole thing just kind
(04:27):
of wrapped her feet in bandages to too. I guess, Oh, okay,
I see what you mean that turn. It's a literal turn. Yeah. Well,
it became a status thing at first because wealthy women
did it, and um then it sort of spread and
and and it also would end up preventing women from
doing like manual labor. Well, not prevent but it made
(04:48):
it tougher. So it was sort of a status thing
that meant like, if you had the bound feetunt out
they're working in the fields, I don't even have to
throw home. But then it spread throughout China and only
a few places. Actually it was more than this article
led on and did some more research on that. I
saw like where fifty six of the women ended up
binding their feet in China, and this says like except
(05:11):
in these provinces. Well, I think they were saying about
close to a of the higher classes. But yeah, there
was so maybe about half of the Chinese population total. Yeah,
that makes sense. So the strange turn it took though,
was to go from simply wrapping their feet to actually
the binding process, which is malforming your feet at a
(05:34):
young age like four to seven years old for life,
to where when your shoe was off, it looks like
you're wearing your foot looks like a high heel. You're disfigured. Yeah,
you can't walk very well. Um, you can't again, you
can't work in the fields. Um, and your your foot
has been brought to a point basically that's ideally three
(05:57):
inches long, three inches like that's it, and it's pointed.
And you do this by training your foot and your
bones two deform. Yeah. And when I say it looks
like a high heel, like your foot looks like a
shoe like the heel is separate from the rest of
the foot, and a big block that looks like the
(06:20):
heel of a shoe, and the foot is permanently arched
and pointy, and the toes are cold under and it's
just if you look at pictures to this, it's horrific looking. Yeah.
And it was so um entrenched in the Chinese culture
that when it was outlawed for I guess the first
time in nine um, it continued on and it took
(06:41):
the Communists taking over to really get rid of it,
and footbinding went the way of disco. Um by just
practical necessity. Um. Women had to work in the field
and if you had bound feet, well you're in big trouble. Yeah, well,
the end of it. Should we talk about the end now?
Should we do it later? Let's do it now? Okay,
(07:03):
let's just mess with the end of that. There were
a lot of factors at play. One was Western missionaries
came over there for the first time and said, yeah,
you know, this is really not what the rest of
the world is doing, and it doesn't make you look
good by the way, uh, social Darwinists got on it,
and we're like, yeah, you know what, we're not going
(07:24):
to survive as a country because like half of our
population is hobbled. Essentially, it's like this is gonna be
really bad for business one day. And so they mounted
like a real campaign, like an education campaign, which is
really unusual back then. And uh, they had three phases
to it. One was that it made you look bad
(07:45):
and look strange to the rest of the world too.
That taught the advantages of having normal feat like walking
without pain. And then they formed um natural foot societies
where people would pledge not to do this to their
matters or allow their daughter to marry a son, or
or allow their son to marry a girl who had
bound feet, because that was one of the big deals.
(08:07):
If you didn't have bound feet, then guys would just
pass you over, right. That's what it took to finally
like eradicated. When was that, Uh, that was was that
after the nineteen twelve outlaw or the no it was
leading up to that l was formally outlawed. They had
government inspectors that would come around and make sure that
(08:28):
you weren't binding feet any longer, and they would like
hide girls that they still wanted to do. So it's
like really oppressive and weird because that campaign that you
just described is basically point for point trying to undo
a thousand years of custom like if you had unbound feet,
like natural feet, you were considered a freak. They were ugly,
(08:48):
there was something wrong with you. And even more to
the point, uh, no man would marry you. Yeah, because
bound feet were so idolized in Chinese culture. Um that
if you were just totally plain or even horrendously ugly
in every other way. But I really knock out bound
feet like that was enough for you. You were butterfly.
(09:11):
You're gonna do pretty good. That's hilarious. Um yeah, I
mean it's hard to believe now, but when you see
these photos in like the X rays and stuff, it's
just like total deformation. So let's talk about this. There's
there's an actual process, fairly straightforward, although extremely painful and dangerous. Um.
(09:32):
If you, like I think you said, you you grabbed
like your four year old daughter, you say, it's prepare
for a lifetime of pain and suffering right starting now.
And you take your feet and you soak them in
hot water for a few hours in animal blood too.
Oh yeah, what did that do? The same thing? Softened
It softened you up Okay, so like that was the
(09:53):
whole purposes of the soaking was to soften the skin,
make it more pliable, and I imagine the muscles too. Um.
And then after the soaking you would scrape away any
dead skin. And then after that their toenails were clipped,
you know, super short, so they're still kids. Are like, Okay,
I don't really like the toneail clipping part, but the
foot soak more than makes up for it. Um, And
(10:14):
boy do I really It turns out I like animal blood,
so can my feet in it? And then um, the
the either their mom or maybe a learned woman in
the village would say all right, now we're going to
start bending your foot. Who imagine these ladies too. If
they were the village lady that did it, they probably
didn't take much guph No, probably not. You know, they
(10:35):
probably mess around. Imagine they came in there and just
sort of took care of business like they've heard it
all before. Is grizzly and grotesque or procedure. It's actually
a delicate procedure too, because if if you can wrap
your mind around less, there's ways to do it wrong
that can lead to problems. There's actual risk factors. So, uh,
(10:58):
the one other thing I left out was a sprinkle
talc in there to keep it from perspiring, because you
want it to be dry, right, And then they start
bending things right, yeah, Well, then the cotton comes out,
the bandages about two inches wide, about ten feet long,
and they would soak those in the hot water and
blood and herbs as well, because they want those to
shrink up. It's all about shrinking. They want those to
(11:20):
shrink up after they are applied to the feet. Um
and then the old lady comes up and she folds
the little four toes that were just clipped, not the
big toe under as far as she can, and then
starts to do little figure eights to keep them in place.
You leave the big toe exposed, yes, and you leave
(11:43):
the big toe exposed and the heel exposed, and you
just sense those little front toes under. They break the toes,
It breaks the foot bones. It sounds horrific because it is.
And it brings the heel closer towards the ball of
the foot. So the point of your feet is now
your big toe. The slightly wider part behind it is
(12:03):
the ball of your foot, and then behind that is
your heel. And underneath it all are your four poor,
poor little toes. And the top of your foot is
that this really unreasonable, odd looking arch, because that's like
you're in a high heel. Yeah. By making it arched,
you're bringing your allowing that distance that was once between
the ball of the foot and the heel to go
(12:25):
up rather than between the two, you're bringing them together.
And so all this has just been done to a
four year old four years probably crying in pain. And
after you've finished with the bandages, um, the old lady
or the mom would probably sew them because, especially if
you're dealing with a four year old, it's going to
try to get these things off. Um. And then they
say all right, start walking. Yeah, they put a little
(12:47):
shoe on there, and that the first steps with these things,
and imagine many steps after order excruciatingly painful. Yeah you know.
Well yeah, Um, here's the here's the craziest part. If
you ask me, you do this every day for years, well,
every couple of days, okay, every day or every other
day is what I've kind of diminish it for a
(13:09):
couple of years. It takes a couple of a few
years for these things to be fully deformed into what
are called the lotus petals or new moons or whatever,
because it's a bandage. You know, you you unbind and
they actually wouldn't like need the broken foot, keep it
broken and uh dry it all out real good because infection,
(13:32):
like the toes would cut into the foot if they
weren't cliped properly. So infection and gang green that's too
tight all big threats to like losing their feet, right,
because if you wrap, if you wrap them too tight,
they can become gangrenous because you get gang green, which
is a massive loss of dead tissue um due to
to poor circulation UM. So the foot could just fall off.
(13:52):
And like you're saying, if you don't clip the toe nails, chuck,
like you have to do that every day or every
time you you unwrap and then wrap your feet. And
even worse than that, if you didn't wrap them pretty
quickly after you bathed them every day or the other day, um,
they could start to lose their shape, which apparently was
as painful as the initial footbinding procedure. Like once your
(14:15):
foot has started to take shape, if you wanted to say,
now you know, I don't want to do this anymore.
It's just as painful for the foot to undo itself
because it's already like malformed. But there was like you
didn't think that. I think once once this happened to
you from your mom or whatever, and you grew a
little older and you started to take over for yourself
(14:36):
and you were bathing and wrapping your own feet every
other day. You understood why you were doing this because
footbinding was so important that you could be just completely
poverty stricken and some rich dude would still be like,
I like your feet a lot, and yeah, I can't
even breathe right now because your feet are so deformed,
(14:58):
um that I want to marry you. It's so weird. Yeah,
so there's uh and beyond being wrong and gross and
oppressive and all that stuff, it was just so odd
to me that that was like a turn on. Yeah,
and man, it was a turn on. Like footbinding was
highly highly erotic. That's like nice feet, trust me, I
(15:19):
get that. But the deformed, uh, I just don't get it.
But this is pretty much a national foot fetish um
and it was nationalized, it was cultural, and it was
extraordinarily widespread, Like we said, about three billion women over
the course of a thousand years UM bound their feet. Yeah,
and it had a lot of odd effects side effects
(15:42):
that went along with it. Um, when three billion people
do something that hobbles them, there are going to be
some weird repercussions. Yeah that you don't think about. Um.
One thing it definitely did was it foster dominance over
women because of the simple fact that a woman's being beaten,
she can't run away. Um. A woman can't travel very
(16:04):
far period, so they're going to hang around their village,
in their house, and so it just you know, it's
like hobbling somebody all of a sudden, they can't get
around as well, so they're just dependent on you, right,
and they really aren't traveling much. Not a lot of
traveling going on in your future bound um. And then
also the fact that you they have women with bound
(16:26):
feet had trouble walking UM meant that the architecture of
China kind of was created to help this out. Like
they had to lean on windows or walls. I mean,
so buildings were built close together so the average woman
could could you know, lean on a wall whilst she
was walking. Yeah, and there weren't a lot of six
(16:47):
story walk ups and in ancient China man that would
have been cruel. Everything was one story as a result,
so it Yeah, it had a weird impact on the
architecture and uh what else. Colonization, Yeah, that was a
really big one that Yeah. Um, you know, most people
realize that China didn't do a lot of exploring, um,
(17:08):
while the rest of the world was. It just kind
of isolated itself and shut itself off. And one of
the um reasons given for that was that the women
were foot bound and they couldn't travel like um, women
in other countries who could walk normally did um. So
with the Chinese women unable to travel, and um, I
(17:30):
guess see the sites, Uh, their men didn't want to
leave them, so they stayed at home. And actually the
areas that didn't practice foot binding are the ones that
actually did go out and colonize other places, like the Philippines.
They were so old Southern China, yeah, or the Old
West like every Great Old West show has, like the
one Chinese immigrant family with the ponytails. Yeah. Um. The
(17:55):
article points out, like we're being hard on it because
it's easy to look it's to day. It's some antiquated
practice is really cruel and unusual and weird, but um,
at the time, they and the women you know, wanted
their feet bound. There were great bonds between the generations
because it was such a cultural thing between the women,
(18:15):
they would sew their shoes together. Um. I listened to
this one MPR Fresh Air that interviewed some of some
of these old Chinese ladies that still, you know, are
some of the last surviving ones, and a couple of
them said, you know, I really regret it now. It's
been a lifetime of pain. But most of them said, no,
we wanted to do it, and this was I'm very
proud of the fact that we did this. Yeah, and
(18:36):
these are these are women who are confronted with the
outside world and they still feel pride about their bound feet.
You can imagine how much pride a woman had in
her bound feet while it was the norm, you know,
because it was basically the norm in China, and these
women weren't going out anywhere else. So if you had
really nice bound feet, that was a huge point of
pride for you. So one of the other weird things
(19:00):
we need to talk about is sexy time, because we
talked about foot fetishes and things, but it really like
something happened in the water at this time where Chinese
men really really got into it, and they would take
the shoe off in these odd deformed feet, and they
would like do weird things like drink the water that
(19:21):
they bathe their feet in, or put nuts between the
toes and beat the nuts from their toes, and uh,
just really odd things. I also read that it became
a another orifice. I guess if you can imagine, oh
really Yeah, and even outside of that, I guess one
of the more normal things to do is to bury
(19:42):
your face in the center of the bottom of the
foot and really get like a good whif foot boat
boat not to smell it and then chuck. We should
point out that if you're doing that, if you're burying
your face in the deformed foot of a foot bound woman, Um,
one of the things that happens pretty commonly when your
(20:04):
feet are bound is that they developed pustules that break
and stink, and so there is a I read one
guy a contemporary report from several centuries ago saying like,
there's no other smell like it in the world, Nothing
as sexy as a deformed foot with leaking, stinky pustules. Yeah.
(20:25):
So um, Yeah, there was a definite fetish that grew
up around it. There was a UM at least one
sex manual released with I think forty eight different UM
things to do with the um and uh there the shoes.
We didn't talk about the shoes that they play a
role in that eroticism as well, all about the strengthening
(20:48):
of the muscles. That's a big part. Yeah, yeah, apparently
the there was a theory at least that because they
had to walk so funny and oddly, that their vaginal
muscles were extra strong and thus more pleasurable to the
man UM. And then so the average woman with footbound
shoe or with with bound feet, I'm sorry everybody, UM,
(21:12):
she had at least four pairs of shoes you had
to or else like there was no point in in
having bound feet. You had to have one for each season.
Ideally you had at least four pair per seasons sixteen.
Some women had hundreds of these and they were designed
to really like show off, like, hey, look at my
bound feet, buddy. You know that's what they were there for. UM.
(21:32):
But there was one specific one that were always read.
They were your wedding shoes, and inside there was erotic embroidery,
which the husband, the new husband, and the new wife
would look at and like try out together. It's kind
of an instruction manual for the bride by her mother
or the women of the town, like just do this.
(21:55):
Here's a picture of what you're supposed to do tonight.
And slippers period. I think we're just was I'm like
the lingerie of the time, because they would the bedroom
slippers were more like uh, embroidered, like more sexily as
well than just your average like you know, I gotta
go to the shop and pick up some rice shoes,
you know. So the Chinese communists came along now and
(22:16):
his comrades and said, you know what, you're a woman.
We don't care. Get to work digging ditches and oh
your bound feet hurt you. Well, I guess you're gonna
starve because we give food based on how much work
you did. If you don't do the work, you're gonna
start it. Yet that led to the real conclusion of footbinding,
and apparently today they say with great authority that no
one does it any longer. Yeah, that's good to know.
(22:40):
I'm surprised that it completely died out, because do you
think they'd be like some remote families here there. But yeah,
I mean we'll welcome to the modern age. This is
what I say. And that's just a bizarre, strange chapter
thousand year chapter in one of the most populous nations
(23:01):
on the planet's history totes and very few people know
about it. Well, now a lot more people do, right, Uh,
you got anything else? No, you know you can't, like,
there's no place we can direct people to voice their
outrage because it doesn't happen anymore. No, but I'm sure
we're gonna get a lot of suggestions for female genital
mutilation and we should probably do that one female circumcision.
(23:23):
We haven't done that. No, we did male circumcision. I
I don't think we talked about female I think we'd
like mentioned it, said we'll do that later. Oh, well,
there you have it. We'll do it again. Uh. So,
if you want to learn more about foot binding and
see some pictures of some um unshod bound feet, you
can type foot binding in the search bar how stuff
(23:44):
works dot Com and will bring up this article. And
I said search bar, which means it's time for a
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Welcome to you Stuff you should Know from house Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there,
and uh, it's time for stuff you should know. Everybody
settled down, buckle in, get ready. Hey, congratulations to Kristin Bell.
(00:26):
Stuff you should know. Celebrity fan Kristen Bell and her
husband Dak Sheppard had their baby. Oh hey, congratulations, A
big congratulations to you. And uh, I don't know if Mr.
I thought you're gonna congratulate her on atter movie Owen,
the Veronica Mars movie. Well, congratulations on that. My wife
is very much looking forward to that, and your wife
is looking forward to meeting the baby. She's on her
(00:49):
way right now. Kristen Bell's locking the doors. Oh my god.
What started out is small fascination with their show and tragedy,
dangerous made for TV movie, and anyway, I just want
to say congratulations. Yeah, that's nice if you chuck sure,
Uh I got no congratulations over here. Yeah, interesting that
(01:09):
I tied that to this podcast on like female torture essentially,
do you think there's something to that? Well, we live
in a world now where we don't have to worry
about although I think they had a son where any
little baby's feet being binded, I guess not babies, but
four or five year olds were bound. Yeah, yeah, bound, binded, bound, Okay,
(01:32):
because the feet were bound? Yes, yes, yeah. Um, do
you think we should explain to everybody what we're talking
about foot binding? Yeah? I'm glad you. Um, thank you.
Congratulated Kristen Bell because I didn't really have much of
an intro for this one. Um, because it's just so fascinating.
I feel like we should just kind of dive right in. Yeah,
(01:53):
fascinating and horrible and like oddly impactful and areas I
never would have considered. Yeah, so we should say that
over the course of about a thousand years, from roughly
nine seventy until about the nineteen fifties, like almost on
the dot a thousand years, about three billion women in
(02:13):
China um bound their feet to basically train them to
become small and pointy in a really bizarre custom that
just kind of came out of nowhere and stuck around
again for about a thousand years, voluntarily deforming their feet, well,
at the very least their mothers and grandmothers voluntarily deformed
(02:35):
their feet for them. Yeah, it's a very good point actually, Um,
but at some point they had to take over, and
I guess then it became voluntary. Well sure, well we'll
get to all that, okay, spoilers. So basically this was
purposeful deformation of the human foot, the human female foot,
(02:56):
in order to attract men. There was a standard of
beauty of bound foot. Um, and we'll we'll describe it
in a minute. But um, the idea, the whole thing
kind of came from they think about, like I said,
a d in the court of an emperor named Lee
You and Lee you had a favorite girlfriend, ballerina girl. Yeah,
(03:21):
and apparently he saw her dancing once on a golden
lotus pedestal because everything was made of gold back then
in China, and um, she had her feet kind of
wrapped up, I guess, like a ballerina or something. And
he apparently got very very excited at this, visibly excited,
so much so that um, the other ladies of the
(03:42):
court noticed this. Did you say visibly excited? Visibly excited? Um, yes,
if you know what I mean, I would imagine, Hey,
this guy's been dead a thousand years like all all
slander and defamations, like out the window. It's like it
was a rocking time. It's the Southern Tank Dynasty. It
was you never know gonna happen. Yeah, it made Caligula
look like watching it as an adult, yeah boring. Yeah.
(04:06):
So um so really the ly you was very much
entranced by this enough that other women in the court
noticed it and they started wrapping their feet as well. Yeah,
and it just kind of took off from there, and
it took a weird turn pretty early on. Uh what
was the turn? Well, the turn is originally apparently the
first the woman who started this whole thing just kind
(04:27):
of wrapped her feet in bandages to too. I guess, Oh, okay,
I see what you mean that turn. It's a literal turn. Yeah. Well,
it became a status thing at first because wealthy women
did it, and um then it sort of spread and
and and it also would end up preventing women from
doing like manual labor. Well, not prevent but it made
(04:48):
it tougher. So it was sort of a status thing
that meant like, if you had the bound feetunt out
they're working in the fields, I don't even have to
throw home. But then it spread throughout China and only
a few places. Actually it was more than this article
led on and did some more research on that. I
saw like where fifty six of the women ended up
binding their feet in China, and this says like except
(05:11):
in these provinces. Well, I think they were saying about
close to a of the higher classes. But yeah, there
was so maybe about half of the Chinese population total. Yeah,
that makes sense. So the strange turn it took though,
was to go from simply wrapping their feet to actually
the binding process, which is malforming your feet at a
(05:34):
young age like four to seven years old for life,
to where when your shoe was off, it looks like
you're wearing your foot looks like a high heel. You're disfigured. Yeah,
you can't walk very well. Um, you can't again, you
can't work in the fields. Um, and your your foot
has been brought to a point basically that's ideally three
(05:57):
inches long, three inches like that's it, and it's pointed.
And you do this by training your foot and your
bones two deform. Yeah. And when I say it looks
like a high heel, like your foot looks like a
shoe like the heel is separate from the rest of
the foot, and a big block that looks like the
(06:20):
heel of a shoe, and the foot is permanently arched
and pointy, and the toes are cold under and it's
just if you look at pictures to this, it's horrific looking. Yeah.
And it was so um entrenched in the Chinese culture
that when it was outlawed for I guess the first
time in nine um, it continued on and it took
(06:41):
the Communists taking over to really get rid of it,
and footbinding went the way of disco. Um by just
practical necessity. Um. Women had to work in the field
and if you had bound feet, well you're in big trouble. Yeah, well,
the end of it. Should we talk about the end now?
Should we do it later? Let's do it now? Okay,
(07:03):
let's just mess with the end of that. There were
a lot of factors at play. One was Western missionaries
came over there for the first time and said, yeah,
you know, this is really not what the rest of
the world is doing, and it doesn't make you look
good by the way, uh, social Darwinists got on it,
and we're like, yeah, you know what, we're not going
(07:24):
to survive as a country because like half of our
population is hobbled. Essentially, it's like this is gonna be
really bad for business one day. And so they mounted
like a real campaign, like an education campaign, which is
really unusual back then. And uh, they had three phases
to it. One was that it made you look bad
(07:45):
and look strange to the rest of the world too.
That taught the advantages of having normal feat like walking
without pain. And then they formed um natural foot societies
where people would pledge not to do this to their
matters or allow their daughter to marry a son, or
or allow their son to marry a girl who had
bound feet, because that was one of the big deals.
(08:07):
If you didn't have bound feet, then guys would just
pass you over, right. That's what it took to finally
like eradicated. When was that, Uh, that was was that
after the nineteen twelve outlaw or the no it was
leading up to that l was formally outlawed. They had
government inspectors that would come around and make sure that
(08:28):
you weren't binding feet any longer, and they would like
hide girls that they still wanted to do. So it's
like really oppressive and weird because that campaign that you
just described is basically point for point trying to undo
a thousand years of custom like if you had unbound feet,
like natural feet, you were considered a freak. They were ugly,
(08:48):
there was something wrong with you. And even more to
the point, uh, no man would marry you. Yeah, because
bound feet were so idolized in Chinese culture. Um that
if you were just totally plain or even horrendously ugly
in every other way. But I really knock out bound
feet like that was enough for you. You were butterfly.
(09:11):
You're gonna do pretty good. That's hilarious. Um yeah, I
mean it's hard to believe now, but when you see
these photos in like the X rays and stuff, it's
just like total deformation. So let's talk about this. There's
there's an actual process, fairly straightforward, although extremely painful and dangerous. Um.
(09:32):
If you, like I think you said, you you grabbed
like your four year old daughter, you say, it's prepare
for a lifetime of pain and suffering right starting now.
And you take your feet and you soak them in
hot water for a few hours in animal blood too.
Oh yeah, what did that do? The same thing? Softened
It softened you up Okay, so like that was the
(09:53):
whole purposes of the soaking was to soften the skin,
make it more pliable, and I imagine the muscles too. Um.
And then after the soaking you would scrape away any
dead skin. And then after that their toenails were clipped,
you know, super short, so they're still kids. Are like, Okay,
I don't really like the toneail clipping part, but the
foot soak more than makes up for it. Um, And
(10:14):
boy do I really It turns out I like animal blood,
so can my feet in it? And then um, the
the either their mom or maybe a learned woman in
the village would say all right, now we're going to
start bending your foot. Who imagine these ladies too. If
they were the village lady that did it, they probably
didn't take much guph No, probably not. You know, they
(10:35):
probably mess around. Imagine they came in there and just
sort of took care of business like they've heard it
all before. Is grizzly and grotesque or procedure. It's actually
a delicate procedure too, because if if you can wrap
your mind around less, there's ways to do it wrong
that can lead to problems. There's actual risk factors. So, uh,
(10:58):
the one other thing I left out was a sprinkle
talc in there to keep it from perspiring, because you
want it to be dry, right, And then they start
bending things right, yeah, Well, then the cotton comes out,
the bandages about two inches wide, about ten feet long,
and they would soak those in the hot water and
blood and herbs as well, because they want those to
shrink up. It's all about shrinking. They want those to
(11:20):
shrink up after they are applied to the feet. Um
and then the old lady comes up and she folds
the little four toes that were just clipped, not the
big toe under as far as she can, and then
starts to do little figure eights to keep them in place.
You leave the big toe exposed, yes, and you leave
(11:43):
the big toe exposed and the heel exposed, and you
just sense those little front toes under. They break the toes,
It breaks the foot bones. It sounds horrific because it is.
And it brings the heel closer towards the ball of
the foot. So the point of your feet is now
your big toe. The slightly wider part behind it is
(12:03):
the ball of your foot, and then behind that is
your heel. And underneath it all are your four poor,
poor little toes. And the top of your foot is
that this really unreasonable, odd looking arch, because that's like
you're in a high heel. Yeah. By making it arched,
you're bringing your allowing that distance that was once between
the ball of the foot and the heel to go
(12:25):
up rather than between the two, you're bringing them together.
And so all this has just been done to a
four year old four years probably crying in pain. And
after you've finished with the bandages, um, the old lady
or the mom would probably sew them because, especially if
you're dealing with a four year old, it's going to
try to get these things off. Um. And then they
say all right, start walking. Yeah, they put a little
(12:47):
shoe on there, and that the first steps with these things,
and imagine many steps after order excruciatingly painful. Yeah you know.
Well yeah, Um, here's the here's the craziest part. If
you ask me, you do this every day for years, well,
every couple of days, okay, every day or every other
day is what I've kind of diminish it for a
(13:09):
couple of years. It takes a couple of a few
years for these things to be fully deformed into what
are called the lotus petals or new moons or whatever,
because it's a bandage. You know, you you unbind and
they actually wouldn't like need the broken foot, keep it
broken and uh dry it all out real good because infection,
(13:32):
like the toes would cut into the foot if they
weren't cliped properly. So infection and gang green that's too
tight all big threats to like losing their feet, right,
because if you wrap, if you wrap them too tight,
they can become gangrenous because you get gang green, which
is a massive loss of dead tissue um due to
to poor circulation UM. So the foot could just fall off.
(13:52):
And like you're saying, if you don't clip the toe nails, chuck,
like you have to do that every day or every
time you you unwrap and then wrap your feet. And
even worse than that, if you didn't wrap them pretty
quickly after you bathed them every day or the other day, um,
they could start to lose their shape, which apparently was
as painful as the initial footbinding procedure. Like once your
(14:15):
foot has started to take shape, if you wanted to say,
now you know, I don't want to do this anymore.
It's just as painful for the foot to undo itself
because it's already like malformed. But there was like you
didn't think that. I think once once this happened to
you from your mom or whatever, and you grew a
little older and you started to take over for yourself
(14:36):
and you were bathing and wrapping your own feet every
other day. You understood why you were doing this because
footbinding was so important that you could be just completely
poverty stricken and some rich dude would still be like,
I like your feet a lot, and yeah, I can't
even breathe right now because your feet are so deformed,
(14:58):
um that I want to marry you. It's so weird. Yeah,
so there's uh and beyond being wrong and gross and
oppressive and all that stuff, it was just so odd
to me that that was like a turn on. Yeah,
and man, it was a turn on. Like footbinding was
highly highly erotic. That's like nice feet, trust me, I
(15:19):
get that. But the deformed, uh, I just don't get it.
But this is pretty much a national foot fetish um
and it was nationalized, it was cultural, and it was
extraordinarily widespread, Like we said, about three billion women over
the course of a thousand years UM bound their feet. Yeah,
and it had a lot of odd effects side effects
(15:42):
that went along with it. Um, when three billion people
do something that hobbles them, there are going to be
some weird repercussions. Yeah that you don't think about. Um.
One thing it definitely did was it foster dominance over
women because of the simple fact that a woman's being beaten,
she can't run away. Um. A woman can't travel very
(16:04):
far period, so they're going to hang around their village,
in their house, and so it just you know, it's
like hobbling somebody all of a sudden, they can't get
around as well, so they're just dependent on you, right,
and they really aren't traveling much. Not a lot of
traveling going on in your future bound um. And then
also the fact that you they have women with bound
(16:26):
feet had trouble walking UM meant that the architecture of
China kind of was created to help this out. Like
they had to lean on windows or walls. I mean,
so buildings were built close together so the average woman
could could you know, lean on a wall whilst she
was walking. Yeah, and there weren't a lot of six
(16:47):
story walk ups and in ancient China man that would
have been cruel. Everything was one story as a result,
so it Yeah, it had a weird impact on the
architecture and uh what else. Colonization, Yeah, that was a
really big one that Yeah. Um, you know, most people
realize that China didn't do a lot of exploring, um,
(17:08):
while the rest of the world was. It just kind
of isolated itself and shut itself off. And one of
the um reasons given for that was that the women
were foot bound and they couldn't travel like um, women
in other countries who could walk normally did um. So
with the Chinese women unable to travel, and um, I
(17:30):
guess see the sites, Uh, their men didn't want to
leave them, so they stayed at home. And actually the
areas that didn't practice foot binding are the ones that
actually did go out and colonize other places, like the Philippines.
They were so old Southern China, yeah, or the Old
West like every Great Old West show has, like the
one Chinese immigrant family with the ponytails. Yeah. Um. The
(17:55):
article points out, like we're being hard on it because
it's easy to look it's to day. It's some antiquated
practice is really cruel and unusual and weird, but um,
at the time, they and the women you know, wanted
their feet bound. There were great bonds between the generations
because it was such a cultural thing between the women,
(18:15):
they would sew their shoes together. Um. I listened to
this one MPR Fresh Air that interviewed some of some
of these old Chinese ladies that still, you know, are
some of the last surviving ones, and a couple of
them said, you know, I really regret it now. It's
been a lifetime of pain. But most of them said, no,
we wanted to do it, and this was I'm very
proud of the fact that we did this. Yeah, and
(18:36):
these are these are women who are confronted with the
outside world and they still feel pride about their bound feet.
You can imagine how much pride a woman had in
her bound feet while it was the norm, you know,
because it was basically the norm in China, and these
women weren't going out anywhere else. So if you had
really nice bound feet, that was a huge point of
pride for you. So one of the other weird things
(19:00):
we need to talk about is sexy time, because we
talked about foot fetishes and things, but it really like
something happened in the water at this time where Chinese
men really really got into it, and they would take
the shoe off in these odd deformed feet, and they
would like do weird things like drink the water that
(19:21):
they bathe their feet in, or put nuts between the
toes and beat the nuts from their toes, and uh,
just really odd things. I also read that it became
a another orifice. I guess if you can imagine, oh
really Yeah, and even outside of that, I guess one
of the more normal things to do is to bury
(19:42):
your face in the center of the bottom of the
foot and really get like a good whif foot boat
boat not to smell it and then chuck. We should
point out that if you're doing that, if you're burying
your face in the deformed foot of a foot bound woman, Um,
one of the things that happens pretty commonly when your
(20:04):
feet are bound is that they developed pustules that break
and stink, and so there is a I read one
guy a contemporary report from several centuries ago saying like,
there's no other smell like it in the world, Nothing
as sexy as a deformed foot with leaking, stinky pustules. Yeah.
(20:25):
So um, Yeah, there was a definite fetish that grew
up around it. There was a UM at least one
sex manual released with I think forty eight different UM
things to do with the um and uh there the shoes.
We didn't talk about the shoes that they play a
role in that eroticism as well, all about the strengthening
(20:48):
of the muscles. That's a big part. Yeah, yeah, apparently
the there was a theory at least that because they
had to walk so funny and oddly, that their vaginal
muscles were extra strong and thus more pleasurable to the
man UM. And then so the average woman with footbound
shoe or with with bound feet, I'm sorry everybody, UM,
(21:12):
she had at least four pairs of shoes you had
to or else like there was no point in in
having bound feet. You had to have one for each season.
Ideally you had at least four pair per seasons sixteen.
Some women had hundreds of these and they were designed
to really like show off, like, hey, look at my
bound feet, buddy. You know that's what they were there for. UM.
(21:32):
But there was one specific one that were always read.
They were your wedding shoes, and inside there was erotic embroidery,
which the husband, the new husband, and the new wife
would look at and like try out together. It's kind
of an instruction manual for the bride by her mother
or the women of the town, like just do this.
(21:55):
Here's a picture of what you're supposed to do tonight.
And slippers period. I think we're just was I'm like
the lingerie of the time, because they would the bedroom
slippers were more like uh, embroidered, like more sexily as
well than just your average like you know, I gotta
go to the shop and pick up some rice shoes,
you know. So the Chinese communists came along now and
(22:16):
his comrades and said, you know what, you're a woman.
We don't care. Get to work digging ditches and oh
your bound feet hurt you. Well, I guess you're gonna
starve because we give food based on how much work
you did. If you don't do the work, you're gonna
start it. Yet that led to the real conclusion of footbinding,
and apparently today they say with great authority that no
one does it any longer. Yeah, that's good to know.
(22:40):
I'm surprised that it completely died out, because do you
think they'd be like some remote families here there. But yeah,
I mean we'll welcome to the modern age. This is
what I say. And that's just a bizarre, strange chapter
thousand year chapter in one of the most populous nations
(23:01):
on the planet's history totes and very few people know
about it. Well, now a lot more people do, right, Uh,
you got anything else? No, you know you can't, like,
there's no place we can direct people to voice their
outrage because it doesn't happen anymore. No, but I'm sure
we're gonna get a lot of suggestions for female genital
mutilation and we should probably do that one female circumcision.
(23:23):
We haven't done that. No, we did male circumcision. I
I don't think we talked about female I think we'd
like mentioned it, said we'll do that later. Oh, well,
there you have it. We'll do it again. Uh. So,
if you want to learn more about foot binding and
see some pictures of some um unshod bound feet, you
can type foot binding in the search bar how stuff
(23:44):
works dot Com and will bring up this article. And
I said search bar, which means it's time for a
message break all right now listener mail right, that's right,
I'm gonna call this. We're plugging something, okay, and we
when we asked to plug things, we get all lot
of people right in for like good charities, and we
(24:04):
can only do a certain amount of otherwise we'd be
reading charity plucks all the time. So apologies to those
who don't get there's read. But this is from Kate.
Have a nicht, she said, dory about saying my last
name wrong, No one does. If you just did you
get a fruit basket? I demand one. It's got to
be German. That's good stuff. She lives in Bozeman, Montana.
(24:26):
She says it's the most beautiful place on earth and
she's just been listening for a few months because her
brother Jack is awesome and turned her onto it waited
to go to. So during listener mail, guys, you uh
supported some really awesome charities and groups that try to
make the role a better place. A friend of mine
works for such the place. It's a coffee brewing company
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a few years ago and it is now based in Denver.
The great thing about these guys is a fifteen percent
of their profits go directly to getting clean water to
those who need it, hence the great double meaning of
the name Brown Water U. They're also a small company
with only a handful of employees, but so far I've
done an amazing job. Not only is a great cause,
but their package design is awesome. And I can say
(25:08):
that because I'm a recent GRADI graphic design for Montana
State University. Joe bobcats the coffee is fantastic. Actually, it's
really some of the best I've ever had. So she
highly recommends they sell it in shops mostly in the
Northwest at the moment, so unfortunately won't be able to
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an address, it would be more than happy to send
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(25:31):
so sell it online, she said, check them out on Facebook.
Soon they will have their website back up and running
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you mentioned them on the show. Shout out to Ricky
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(25:51):
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in this day and age, you've got to be able
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Water Coffee. If you haven't already. Thank you, Kate. Yeah,
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I feel like they owe you some coffee or something
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