Bound For Beauty Essay

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Jamie Cachia Professor Corona 2nd May 2014 Bound for Beauty Under the guise of making themselves attractive to men, Chinese women endured painful foot-binding rituals that left them scarred for life. We may view such a cultural practice as extreme but are twenty-first century women any less bound to androcentric ideas of what is attractive than our forebears? Foot-binding in ancient china was designed to make women dependent on their men and proved to be a symbol of male ownership that restricted women to their homes, since women whose feet were bound could not venture far from home without an escort or the help of servants. This practice, which began with the Tang dynasty in tenth-century China, started with the upper class. Mothers began binding the feet of their daughters as young as five years old. “A girl’s foot was made small, preferably only three inches long, by pressing the four smaller toes under the sole or ball of the foot in order to make it narrower. At the same time it was made shorter by forcing the big toe and heel closer together so that the arch raised in a bow shape. As a result the arch was broken and the foot could bear no weight except on the heel.” (Fairbank, 285). How one could view such deformity as a form of beauty, and endure such pain, suffering, and torture to satisfy what is essentially a sexual fetish, is hard to believe. Even today, women continue to endure pain and suffering in order to satisfy the sexual desires of their men. Is it difficult to see that the idea behind this is control and in many cultures including ours, women are brainwashed into believing the unattractive to be attractive. The practice of foot-binding and how it relates to cultures across the globe may not be jus... ... middle of paper ... ...e lengths to please men. How far have we really come from tenth-century China? We may have changed our mode of torture but based on the evidence women will still go through extreme practices to make themselves attractive to men. Women today will always go above and beyond to look appealing to men. Whether it is minor adjustments such as hair color and makeup to extreme adjustments like plastic surgery and Botox women are continuing to go great lengths to look good for the opposite sex. Fairbank, John king. Footbinding. . . :. , 282-287. Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. "Footbinding and masochism: a psychoanalytical exploration.". . (2004) Women’s Studies Turner, Christena L. “Locating Footbinding: Variations across class and space in the Nineteeth and Early Twentieth Century China” 1997 Journal of historical sociology Encyclopedia Britanica, Body modifications

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