July 21, 2018 • 28 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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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's me Josh and for this week's s
Y s K Selects, I've chosen How Footbinding Worked. It's
about an unusual practice that was tradition for about a
thousand years in China, and it's just absolutely fascinating. Where
we a little judge you or the usual in this episode,
I would say that's a fair assessment, but hopefully you
(00:21):
won't judge us too harshly and instead just enjoy this
episode because it's a pretty good one. Take care. Welcome
to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
(00:42):
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, so settled down,
buckle in, get ready. Hey, congratulations to Kristen Bell stuff
you should know celebrity Van Kristen Bell and her husband
Dak Shepard had their baby. Oh, hey, congratulations, A big
(01:04):
congratulations to you. And uh, I don't know if I
thought you're gonna congratulate her on a kick Starter movie. Oh,
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
way right now. Kristen Bell's locking the doors. Oh my god.
(01:25):
What started out as a small fascination with their show
and tragedy dangerous made for TV movie obsession Anyway, I
just wanted to say congratulations. Yeah, that's nice if you
chucked sure, Uh, I got no congratulations over here yet.
Interesting that I tied that to this podcast on like
female torture essentially. Do you think there's something to that? Well,
(01:48):
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. We're bound? Yeah, yeah, bound, binded, bound, Okay,
because the feet were bound? Yes, yes yeah. Um, do
you think we should explain to everybody what we're talking
(02:10):
about foot binding? Yeah? I'm glad you. UM think 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.
Fascinating and horrible and like oddly impactful in areas I
never would have considered. So we should say that over
(02:33):
the course of about a thousand years, from roughly seventy
until about the nineteen fifties, like almost on the dot,
a thousand years, about three billion women in China um
bound their feet to basically train them to become small
and pointy in a really bizarre custom that just kind
(02:58):
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 their
feet for them. Good. 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 abound. So basically this
(03:22):
was purposeful deformation of the human foot, the human female foot, uh,
in order to attract men. There was a standard of
beauty abound foot. Um. And 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
(03:44):
the court of an emperor named Lee. You and Lee
you had a favorite girlfriend ballerina girl. Yeah, and apparently
he saw dancing once on a golden lotus pedestal because
everything was made of gold back then in Ya, And um,
she had her feet kind of wrapped up, I guess,
like a ballerina or sometime. And he apparently got very
(04:08):
very excited at this, visibly excited, so much so that, um,
the other ladies of the 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.
(04:29):
It was the Southern Tank Dynasty. It was you never
know what's gonna happen. Yeah, it made Caligula look like
watching it as an adult, Yeah boring. Yeah. So um
so really the lee you was very much entranced by
this enough that other women in the court noticed it
and they started wrapping their feet as well, and it
just kind of took off from there, and it took
(04:49):
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 of wrapped her feet
and bandages. Yeah 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
(05:10):
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
it tougher. So it was sort of a status thing
that meant like, if you had the bound feet round out,
they're working in the fields, I don't even have to
throw home. But then it spread throughout China and only
(05:31):
a few places, actually it was more than this article
led on and did some more research on that. I
saw like where fifty to sixty percent of the women
ended up binding their feet in China. And this says
like acent except in these provinces. Well I think they
were saying about close to a of the higher classes. Okay,
but yeah, there was so maybe about half of the
(05:52):
Chinese population total. Yeah, that makes sense. So the strange
turn it took, though, was to go from simply wrapping
their eat to actually the binding process, which is malforming
your feet at a young age like four to seven
years old for life, to where when your shoe is off.
It looks like you're wearing your foot looks like a
(06:14):
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 inches long, three inches like that's it,
and it's pointed. And you do this by training your
(06:37):
foot and your bones too to 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 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
(07:00):
of 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 the Communists taking over
to really get rid of it, and footbinding went the
way of disco. Um by just practical necessity, UM, women
(07:25):
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
or should we do it later. Let's do it now. Okay,
let's just mess with the structure the end of it.
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
(07:47):
the world is doing, and it doesn't make you look
good by the way. Uh, social Darwinists got on it
and like, yeah, you know what, we're not going to
survive as a country because like half of our ppulation
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
(08:11):
unusual back then. And uh, they had three phases to it.
One was that it made you look bad and look
strange to the rest of the world too. That taught
the advantages of having normal feet, like walking without pain.
And then they formed um natural foot societies where people
would pledge not to do this to their daughters or
(08:32):
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. If you
didn't have bound feet, then guys would just pass you over.
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 was formally outlawed,
(08:56):
but they had government inspectors that would come around and
make sure you weren't binding feet any longer, and they
would like hide girls that they still want 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.
(09:19):
They were ugly, there was something wrong with you. And
even more to the point, uh, no man would marry
you because bound feet were so idolized in Chinese culture.
Um that if you were just totally plain or even
horrendously ugly and every other way, but I really knock
(09:39):
out bound feet like that was enough for you. You
were a butterfly, You're gonna do pretty good. That's 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. Yeah, so let's talk about this.
(10:17):
There's there's an actual process, fairly straightforward, although extremely painful
and dangerous. Um. If you, like I think you said,
you you grab like your four year old daughter, you
say it's time prepare for a lifetime of pain and
suffering starting now. And you take your feet and you
soak them in hot water for a few hours in
(10:40):
animal blood too. Oh yeah, what did that do? The
same thing? Softened? It softened up? Okay, so like that
was the 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.
(11:01):
Are like, Okay, I don't really like the tonio clipping part,
but the foot soak more than makes up for it. Um,
And 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. Ye. Who imagine these ladies too,
(11:22):
if they were the village lady that did it, they
probably didn't take much guph No, probably not. You know,
they probably don't mess around. Imagine they came in there
and just sort of took care of business like they've
heard it all before. But for his 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
(11:44):
ways to do it wrong that can lead to problems. Good,
there's actual risk factors. So uh, the one other thing
I left out was a sprinkled talc in there to
keep it from perspiring because you wanted to be dry.
And then they start bending things right, yeah, Well then
the cotton comes out the bandages about two inches uh wide,
about ten feet long, and they would soak those in
(12:06):
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 shrink up. After they're 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
(12:26):
and then starts to do little figure eights to keep
them in place. You leave the big toe exposed, yes,
and you leave the big toe exposed in the heel exposed,
and you just cinch 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
(12:48):
towards the ball of the foot. So the point of
your feet is now your big toe, The slightly wider
part behind it is the ball of your foot, and
then behind that is your heel, and underneath it all
your four poor, poor little toasts and the top of
your foot is that this really unreasonable, odd looking arch.
And because that's like you're in a high heel. Yeah.
(13:09):
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 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,
(13:31):
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 shoe on there, and that the first steps
with these things. And imagine many steps after order excruciating,
the painful. Yeah you know. Well yeah, um, here's the
here's the craziest part. If you ask me, you do
(13:54):
this every day for years, well every couple of days, okay,
every day or every other day is what I them
to diminish it. Yet for a 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 would like
(14:16):
need the broken foot, keep it broken and uh dry
it all out real good because infection, like the toes
would cut into the foot if they weren't clipped properly.
So infection and gang green it'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
(14:38):
of dead tissue UM due to to poor circulation UM.
So the foot could just fall off. And like you
were 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
then even worse than that, if you didn't wrap them
pretty quickly after you bathe them every day or the
(14:58):
other day, um, the it could start to lose their shape,
which apparently was as painful as in the initial footbinding procedure. Yeah,
like once your foot has started to take shape, if
you wanted to say, now you know what, 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
(15:20):
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 and you were bathing and wrapping
your own street 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
(15:41):
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, 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
(16:03):
a turn on. Yeah, and man, it was a turn on.
Like footbinding was highly highly erotic. You guys like nice feet,
trust me, I get that, but these deformed Uh, I
just don't get it. But this is pretty much a
national foot fetish. Yeah. Um. And it was nationalized, it
was cultural, and it was extraordinarily widespread. Like we said,
(16:26):
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 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
(16:46):
it foster dominance over women because of the simple fact
that if a woman's being beaten, she can't run away. Um,
a woman can't travel very 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
(17:07):
just dependent on you, right, and they really aren't traveling much,
not a lot of traveling going on on your feet
are bound. Um. And then also the fact that you
they have women with bound 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
(17:29):
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 story walk ups in 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 in uh what else colonization, Yeah,
(17:54):
that was a really big one that yeah. Um, you know,
most people realize that China didn't do a lot of
exploring um 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.
(18:18):
So with the Chinese women unable to travel, and um,
I guess see the sites. Uh, their men didn't want
to leave them, so they stayed at home. Yeah. And
actually the areas that didn't practice footbinding are the ones
that actually did go out and colonize other places, like
the Philippines. They were so Southern China. Yeah, or the
(18:40):
Old West like every Great Old West show has, like
the one Chinese immigrant family with the ponytails. Yeah. Um.
The article points out, like we're being hard on it
because it's easy to look and today it's some antiquated
practice is really cruel and unusual and weird. But um,
at the time they in the women you know, wanted
(19:01):
their feet bound. There were great bonds between the generations
because it was such a cultural thing between the women.
They would sew their shoes together. Um. I listened to
this one MPR Fresh Air that interviewed someone 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
(19:21):
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 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
(19:43):
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
we need to talk about is sexy time, because we
talked about foot fetishes and things, but it really like
something happen and in the water at this time where
Chinese men really really got into it and they would
(20:07):
take the shoe off in these odd deformed feet and
they would like do weird things like drink the water
that they bathe their feet in, or put nuts between
the toes and eat 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
(20:28):
really yeah, and even outside of that, I guess one
of the more normal things to do is to bury
your face in the center of the bottom of the
foot and really get like a good whiff boat motor boat. Notice,
smell it and then chuck. We should point out that
if you're doing that, if you're burying your face in
(20:50):
the deformed foot of a foot bound woman. Um, one
of the things that happens pretty commonly when your 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
(21:10):
other smell like it in the world, Nothing as sexy
as a deformed foot with leaking, stinky pustules. Yeah. 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 um and uh, there the shoes. We didn't talk
(21:35):
about the shoes if they play a role in that
eroticism as well. All about the strengthening 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. So um.
(21:57):
And then so the average woman with foot bound shoe
or with with bound feet. I'm sorry everybody, Um, 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 season. So
sixteen some women had hundreds of these, and they were
(22:18):
designed to really like show off, like, hey, look at
my bound feet, buddy. You know that's what they were
there for. Um. 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
(22:39):
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. Here's a picture of what you're
supposed to do tonight. Yeah, and slippers period. I think
we're just it was almost like the lingerie of the time,
because they would the bedroom slippers were more like uh embroidered,
like more sexily as well in just your average like
(23:01):
you know, I gotta go to the shop and pick
up some rice shoes, you know. So the Chinese communists
came along now and 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 starve death. That led to the real conclusion
(23:24):
of footbinding, and apparently today they say with great authority
that no one does it any longer. Yeah, that's good
to know. I'm surprised that it completely died out, because
do you think there'd be like some remote families here there?
But yeah, I mean, it's well, welcome to the modern age,
(23:45):
this is what I say. And that just a bizarre,
strange chapter, thousand year chapter and one of the most
populous nations on the planet's history, and very few people
know about it. Well, now a lot more people do,
that's right. Uh, you got anything else? No, you know,
you can't, like there's no place we can direct people
(24:06):
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. We haven't done that. No, we did male circumcision.
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
(24:27):
see some pictures of some um unshod bound feet, you
can type foot binding in the search bar how stuff
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
(25:17):
gonna call this. We're plugging something, and we when we
asked to plug things, we get a lot of people
right in for like good charities, and we can only
do a certain amount of otherwise we'd be reading charity
plugs all the time. So apologies to those who don't
get there's read. But this is from Kate. Have a nicht,
she said, don't wry about saying my last name wrong.
(25:39):
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. 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. I'm ready to
go to Jack. So during listener mail, guys, you uh
(25:59):
supported some the awesome charities and groups that try to
make the role a better place. A friend of mine
works for such a place. It's a coffee brewing company
called Brown Water Coffee, which got started here in Bozeman
a few years ago and is now based in Denver.
The great thing about these guys is it fift cent
of their profits go directly to getting clean water to
those who need it, hence the great double meeting of
(26:19):
the name brown Water. Uh. They're also a small company
with only a handful of employees, but so far I've
done an amazing job. Not only is it a great cause,
but their package design is awesome. And I can say
that because I'm a recent drad of graphic design from
Montana State University. Go Bobcats. The coffee is fantastic. Actually,
it's really some of the best I've ever had, so
(26:40):
she highly recommends seriously. They sell it in shops mostly
in the Northwest at the moment, so unfortunately won't be
able to get your hands on it, but if you
send me an address, I would be more than happy
to send them along. Do they sell it online? You
would think, so sell it online, she said, check them
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up and running after a quick redesign, so I'd be
(27:00):
at static if you mentioned them on the show. Shout
out to Ricky owner and founder, and Katie graphic designer
and Stevie who was the master brewer at Brown Water Coffee.
So hopefully by the time this comes out, they'll have
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I would think in this day and age, you've got
to be able to find something out online. I would
(27:21):
think so by the time that comes up, So get
with it, Brownwater Coffee. If you haven't already, Thank you, Kate. Yeah,
thanks for writing and Kate, it's pretty awesome of you.
I feel like they owe you some coffee or something
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(27:41):
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dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
(28:07):
visit how Stuff Works dot com. M
Hey, everybody, it's me Josh and for this week's s
Y s K Selects, I've chosen How Footbinding Worked. It's
about an unusual practice that was tradition for about a
thousand years in China, and it's just absolutely fascinating. Where
we a little judge you or the usual in this episode,
I would say that's a fair assessment, but hopefully you
(00:21):
won't judge us too harshly and instead just enjoy this
episode because it's a pretty good one. Take care. Welcome
to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
(00:42):
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, so settled down,
buckle in, get ready. Hey, congratulations to Kristen Bell stuff
you should know celebrity Van Kristen Bell and her husband
Dak Shepard had their baby. Oh, hey, congratulations, A big
(01:04):
congratulations to you. And uh, I don't know if I
thought you're gonna congratulate her on a kick Starter movie. Oh,
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
way right now. Kristen Bell's locking the doors. Oh my god.
(01:25):
What started out as a small fascination with their show
and tragedy dangerous made for TV movie obsession Anyway, I
just wanted to say congratulations. Yeah, that's nice if you
chucked sure, Uh, I got no congratulations over here yet.
Interesting that I tied that to this podcast on like
female torture essentially. Do you think there's something to that? Well,
(01:48):
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. We're bound? Yeah, yeah, bound, binded, bound, Okay,
because the feet were bound? Yes, yes yeah. Um, do
you think we should explain to everybody what we're talking
(02:10):
about foot binding? Yeah? I'm glad you. UM think 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.
Fascinating and horrible and like oddly impactful in areas I
never would have considered. So we should say that over
(02:33):
the course of about a thousand years, from roughly seventy
until about the nineteen fifties, like almost on the dot,
a thousand years, about three billion women in China um
bound their feet to basically train them to become small
and pointy in a really bizarre custom that just kind
(02:58):
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 their
feet for them. Good. 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 abound. So basically this
(03:22):
was purposeful deformation of the human foot, the human female foot, uh,
in order to attract men. There was a standard of
beauty abound foot. Um. And 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
(03:44):
the court of an emperor named Lee. You and Lee
you had a favorite girlfriend ballerina girl. Yeah, and apparently
he saw dancing once on a golden lotus pedestal because
everything was made of gold back then in Ya, And um,
she had her feet kind of wrapped up, I guess,
like a ballerina or sometime. And he apparently got very
(04:08):
very excited at this, visibly excited, so much so that, um,
the other ladies of the 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.
(04:29):
It was the Southern Tank Dynasty. It was you never
know what's gonna happen. Yeah, it made Caligula look like
watching it as an adult, Yeah boring. Yeah. So um
so really the lee you was very much entranced by
this enough that other women in the court noticed it
and they started wrapping their feet as well, and it
just kind of took off from there, and it took
(04:49):
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 of wrapped her feet
and bandages. Yeah 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
(05:10):
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
it tougher. So it was sort of a status thing
that meant like, if you had the bound feet round out,
they're working in the fields, I don't even have to
throw home. But then it spread throughout China and only
(05:31):
a few places, actually it was more than this article
led on and did some more research on that. I
saw like where fifty to sixty percent of the women
ended up binding their feet in China. And this says
like acent except in these provinces. Well I think they
were saying about close to a of the higher classes. Okay,
but yeah, there was so maybe about half of the
(05:52):
Chinese population total. Yeah, that makes sense. So the strange
turn it took, though, was to go from simply wrapping
their eat to actually the binding process, which is malforming
your feet at a young age like four to seven
years old for life, to where when your shoe is off.
It looks like you're wearing your foot looks like a
(06:14):
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 inches long, three inches like that's it,
and it's pointed. And you do this by training your
(06:37):
foot and your bones too to 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 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
(07:00):
of 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 the Communists taking over
to really get rid of it, and footbinding went the
way of disco. Um by just practical necessity, UM, women
(07:25):
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
or should we do it later. Let's do it now. Okay,
let's just mess with the structure the end of it.
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
(07:47):
the world is doing, and it doesn't make you look
good by the way. Uh, social Darwinists got on it
and like, yeah, you know what, we're not going to
survive as a country because like half of our ppulation
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
(08:11):
unusual back then. And uh, they had three phases to it.
One was that it made you look bad and look
strange to the rest of the world too. That taught
the advantages of having normal feet, like walking without pain.
And then they formed um natural foot societies where people
would pledge not to do this to their daughters or
(08:32):
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. If you
didn't have bound feet, then guys would just pass you over.
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 was formally outlawed,
(08:56):
but they had government inspectors that would come around and
make sure you weren't binding feet any longer, and they
would like hide girls that they still want 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.
(09:19):
They were ugly, there was something wrong with you. And
even more to the point, uh, no man would marry
you because bound feet were so idolized in Chinese culture.
Um that if you were just totally plain or even
horrendously ugly and every other way, but I really knock
(09:39):
out bound feet like that was enough for you. You
were a butterfly, You're gonna do pretty good. That's 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. Yeah, so let's talk about this.
(10:17):
There's there's an actual process, fairly straightforward, although extremely painful
and dangerous. Um. If you, like I think you said,
you you grab like your four year old daughter, you
say it's time prepare for a lifetime of pain and
suffering starting now. And you take your feet and you
soak them in hot water for a few hours in
(10:40):
animal blood too. Oh yeah, what did that do? The
same thing? Softened? It softened up? Okay, so like that
was the 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.
(11:01):
Are like, Okay, I don't really like the tonio clipping part,
but the foot soak more than makes up for it. Um,
And 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. Ye. Who imagine these ladies too,
(11:22):
if they were the village lady that did it, they
probably didn't take much guph No, probably not. You know,
they probably don't mess around. Imagine they came in there
and just sort of took care of business like they've
heard it all before. But for his 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
(11:44):
ways to do it wrong that can lead to problems. Good,
there's actual risk factors. So uh, the one other thing
I left out was a sprinkled talc in there to
keep it from perspiring because you wanted to be dry.
And then they start bending things right, yeah, Well then
the cotton comes out the bandages about two inches uh wide,
about ten feet long, and they would soak those in
(12:06):
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 shrink up. After they're 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
(12:26):
and then starts to do little figure eights to keep
them in place. You leave the big toe exposed, yes,
and you leave the big toe exposed in the heel exposed,
and you just cinch 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
(12:48):
towards the ball of the foot. So the point of
your feet is now your big toe, The slightly wider
part behind it is the ball of your foot, and
then behind that is your heel, and underneath it all
your four poor, poor little toasts and the top of
your foot is that this really unreasonable, odd looking arch.
And because that's like you're in a high heel. Yeah.
(13:09):
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 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,
(13:31):
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 shoe on there, and that the first steps
with these things. And imagine many steps after order excruciating,
the painful. Yeah you know. Well yeah, um, here's the
here's the craziest part. If you ask me, you do
(13:54):
this every day for years, well every couple of days, okay,
every day or every other day is what I them
to diminish it. Yet for a 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 would like
(14:16):
need the broken foot, keep it broken and uh dry
it all out real good because infection, like the toes
would cut into the foot if they weren't clipped properly.
So infection and gang green it'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
(14:38):
of dead tissue UM due to to poor circulation UM.
So the foot could just fall off. And like you
were 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
then even worse than that, if you didn't wrap them
pretty quickly after you bathe them every day or the
(14:58):
other day, um, the it could start to lose their shape,
which apparently was as painful as in the initial footbinding procedure. Yeah,
like once your foot has started to take shape, if
you wanted to say, now you know what, 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
(15:20):
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 and you were bathing and wrapping
your own street 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
(15:41):
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, 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
(16:03):
a turn on. Yeah, and man, it was a turn on.
Like footbinding was highly highly erotic. You guys like nice feet,
trust me, I get that, but these deformed Uh, I
just don't get it. But this is pretty much a
national foot fetish. Yeah. Um. And it was nationalized, it
was cultural, and it was extraordinarily widespread. Like we said,
(16:26):
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 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
(16:46):
it foster dominance over women because of the simple fact
that if a woman's being beaten, she can't run away. Um,
a woman can't travel very 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
(17:07):
just dependent on you, right, and they really aren't traveling much,
not a lot of traveling going on on your feet
are bound. Um. And then also the fact that you
they have women with bound 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
(17:29):
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 story walk ups in 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 in uh what else colonization, Yeah,
(17:54):
that was a really big one that yeah. Um, you know,
most people realize that China didn't do a lot of
exploring um 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.
(18:18):
So with the Chinese women unable to travel, and um,
I guess see the sites. Uh, their men didn't want
to leave them, so they stayed at home. Yeah. And
actually the areas that didn't practice footbinding are the ones
that actually did go out and colonize other places, like
the Philippines. They were so Southern China. Yeah, or the
(18:40):
Old West like every Great Old West show has, like
the one Chinese immigrant family with the ponytails. Yeah. Um.
The article points out, like we're being hard on it
because it's easy to look and today it's some antiquated
practice is really cruel and unusual and weird. But um,
at the time they in the women you know, wanted
(19:01):
their feet bound. There were great bonds between the generations
because it was such a cultural thing between the women.
They would sew their shoes together. Um. I listened to
this one MPR Fresh Air that interviewed someone 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
(19:21):
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 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
(19:43):
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
we need to talk about is sexy time, because we
talked about foot fetishes and things, but it really like
something happen and in the water at this time where
Chinese men really really got into it and they would
(20:07):
take the shoe off in these odd deformed feet and
they would like do weird things like drink the water
that they bathe their feet in, or put nuts between
the toes and eat 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
(20:28):
really yeah, and even outside of that, I guess one
of the more normal things to do is to bury
your face in the center of the bottom of the
foot and really get like a good whiff boat motor boat. Notice,
smell it and then chuck. We should point out that
if you're doing that, if you're burying your face in
(20:50):
the deformed foot of a foot bound woman. Um, one
of the things that happens pretty commonly when your 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
(21:10):
other smell like it in the world, Nothing as sexy
as a deformed foot with leaking, stinky pustules. Yeah. 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 um and uh, there the shoes. We didn't talk
(21:35):
about the shoes if they play a role in that
eroticism as well. All about the strengthening 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. So um.
(21:57):
And then so the average woman with foot bound shoe
or with with bound feet. I'm sorry everybody, Um, 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 season. So
sixteen some women had hundreds of these, and they were
(22:18):
designed to really like show off, like, hey, look at
my bound feet, buddy. You know that's what they were
there for. Um. 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
(22:39):
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. Here's a picture of what you're
supposed to do tonight. Yeah, and slippers period. I think
we're just it was almost like the lingerie of the time,
because they would the bedroom slippers were more like uh embroidered,
like more sexily as well in just your average like
(23:01):
you know, I gotta go to the shop and pick
up some rice shoes, you know. So the Chinese communists
came along now and 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 starve death. That led to the real conclusion
(23:24):
of footbinding, and apparently today they say with great authority
that no one does it any longer. Yeah, that's good
to know. I'm surprised that it completely died out, because
do you think there'd be like some remote families here there?
But yeah, I mean, it's well, welcome to the modern age,
(23:45):
this is what I say. And that just a bizarre,
strange chapter, thousand year chapter and one of the most
populous nations on the planet's history, and very few people
know about it. Well, now a lot more people do,
that's right. Uh, you got anything else? No, you know,
you can't, like there's no place we can direct people
(24:06):
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. We haven't done that. No, we did male circumcision.
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
(24:27):
see some pictures of some um unshod bound feet, you
can type foot binding in the search bar how stuff
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
(25:17):
gonna call this. We're plugging something, and we when we
asked to plug things, we get a lot of people
right in for like good charities, and we can only
do a certain amount of otherwise we'd be reading charity
plugs all the time. So apologies to those who don't
get there's read. But this is from Kate. Have a nicht,
she said, don't wry about saying my last name wrong.
(25:39):
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. 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. I'm ready to
go to Jack. So during listener mail, guys, you uh
(25:59):
supported some the awesome charities and groups that try to
make the role a better place. A friend of mine
works for such a place. It's a coffee brewing company
called Brown Water Coffee, which got started here in Bozeman
a few years ago and is now based in Denver.
The great thing about these guys is it fift cent
of their profits go directly to getting clean water to
those who need it, hence the great double meeting of
(26:19):
the name brown Water. Uh. They're also a small company
with only a handful of employees, but so far I've
done an amazing job. Not only is it a great cause,
but their package design is awesome. And I can say
that because I'm a recent drad of graphic design from
Montana State University. Go Bobcats. The coffee is fantastic. Actually,
it's really some of the best I've ever had, so
(26:40):
she highly recommends seriously. They sell it in shops mostly
in the Northwest at the moment, so unfortunately won't be
able to get your hands on it, but if you
send me an address, I would be more than happy
to send them along. Do they sell it online? You
would think, so sell it online, she said, check them
out on Facebook. Soon they will have their website back
up and running after a quick redesign, so I'd be
(27:00):
at static if you mentioned them on the show. Shout
out to Ricky owner and founder, and Katie graphic designer
and Stevie who was the master brewer at Brown Water Coffee.
So hopefully by the time this comes out, they'll have
their website up and running. So I imagine if you
search for brown Water Coffee it would come up, right,
I would think in this day and age, you've got
to be able to find something out online. I would
(27:21):
think so by the time that comes up, So get
with it, Brownwater Coffee. If you haven't already, Thank you, Kate. Yeah,
thanks for writing and Kate, it's pretty awesome of you.
I feel like they owe you some coffee or something
for that. Sure. Um, if you have a awesome nonprofit
organization charity that we can help out by giving a plug, um,
(27:41):
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(28:07):
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