March 21, 2005

• Cool links, although very sad. My mum used to read me Chinese folk tales, some of which featured footbinding. In those stories, the binding was a very necessary and noble thing. Not so in reality...I can't imagine how much that must've hurt. And to think, just today I was complaining about my size ten feet.
• As a cultural fixation, foot binding seems particularly cruel and perverse in that the mutilation was begun at such a young age and became so debilitating.
• shudder.
• The Miss Ugly contest reminds me of reality tv shows in the US like The Swan or Extreme Makeover. I watched a tv program last year featuring a few of the surviving women with bound feet. It was sad to hear their stories of how something that was done to them without their say made them cultural pariahs for most of their adult lives, in addition to painfully inconveniencing some of the women who had to go on to support their families and do physical labor (seeing footage of that kind of work still being performed by these ladies in advanced age shifted me from "ick I must change the channel before they unwrap"- mode to "wow, I'm so impressed and now chagrined"-mode). The production of the kind of shoes they wear is very limited nowadays too as people who possess the expertise to make the shoes are practically non-existant. One group of women seemed to have lucked out, with respect to podiatric health care, by having access to a son in the medical field who specialized in caring for women with bound feet, but I imagine that kind of expertise is rare for them to encounter.
• Horrible, horrible, horrible. What else can human beings do to one another. *refuses to wear heels, a mild form of foot torture
• I wear heels every once in a blue moon. They're pretty, but I'm not willing to wreck my feet for pretty. My grandmother wore pretty heels for years -- in one size smaller than her actual size -- and had some pretty scary looking feet.