Take A Journey into the World of Chinese foot binding

[DCrownover68]

don't worry about reading the small print...it's only about 2/3 accurate anyway

[SinnieZhao]

The font is so small I cant even damn read it =___=

[Tslikkhands96]

and they say chinese are smart

[klein910502]

@Tslikkhands96 I don't see the connection between smartness and this tradition. Some men came up with this idea to enhance their sensual pleasure and to restrict the activities of their wives/concubines. The women have to totally rely on their husbands for survival because they can barely walk. I would call it smart because it really worked.

[ivanaecevit]

I wish I could read all the stories but my eyes arent that good :/

[ExpandYourTribe]

It never fails to amaze me what people will do for social standing. Very very sad. Very much like girls who curently get their clits cut off in many parts of the world.

[Godsclaws]

I had to pause this vid at 1:22 to truly comprehend how fucked up this world can be. I didnt see beauty, I saw hidiously deformed clubs at the end of legs. fucking gross. thats all i have to say.

[073097able]

God made peoples feet beautiful. Those people made girl's suffer for nothing, and made their feet so ugly. My mom wishes she would be there to punish all the people who did that! :/

[TJThanhJackie]

what the heck?! 11 tear old have baby? is that even possible?

[LeighYoungFat]

yeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwww omg lol jahahahhahahah

[stormcloud7999]

i thought this was great and very informative i wouldve liked for the print on some of the stories to be a lil bigger and maybe a few more in depth and closer shots of the actual foot,.i seen that the girls never let their feet back out after this wasnt popular anymore,.i was wondering if any of them ever did and if so,.do they have anymore use to thier feet now then they did or were all the nerve ending just completely dead? thanks for sharing!!

[klein910502]

@stormcloud7999 There are no *girls* with bounded foot any more. Most of women with bounded feet are in their 80s. They can still walk slowly within short distances.

[rvggarcon]

God damnit youtube is for videos NOT FUCKING SLIDES!

[wauquelin]

Well done. Great rare photos. It's obvious u put a lot of work iand time into this. Props to u. Footbinding is one of the most heinous phenomenons to come out of patriarchy and u did a great job portraying its crippling, disfiguring effects in the name of beauty.

[wheatfield0107]

my grandmother's mum passed away two months ago, she is also a footbinding old

lady and she got married when she was 17 year-old.if did't bind her feet ,nobody will marry her.and her family felt shameful.

[ilovewii11]

it could use much bigger font

[xThEtTiEx]

Hehehehe love the 'end of slide show' at the end ^U^ and I love Japanese culture more than Chinese culture, but foot binding has always fascinated me! The only downside to this is the really small writing, but the pictures are enough to spark my mind :)

[Theultimateprime]

too nad we can;t read the powerpoint

[edmcadam]

Very informative and well put together. It's so sad but thank you for posting

[ekocentric]

Whenever I think of foot binding I am reminded of my favorite Pearl S. Buck Book: "The good Earth" about farmer Wang Lung and his long suffering wife O-Lan.

It is indeed good to see all aspects of human life and culture so that we can see how other people differ.

[Weenybean]

Footbinding, Female Genital Mutilation, Chests sliced open and filled with plastic footballs.

Priorities huh?

[wauquelin]

@Weenybean Don't forget facelifts, botox, collagen injections, neck elongation. Nutty shit.

[vickersfan]

sometimes they actually just broke the arches of the feet and then wrapped them up :(

[Zacattackzak]

Wow, how could they think it was beautiful? It's the opposite quite actually..

Fucking Asians..

[dumdidolabumbuladido]

@Zacattackzak its pretty much the same as European wearing the tight corset that almost broke the women's waist, do modern day people like you and me think of very narrow waist as beautiful? i think not. remember, many of these idea of beautification are impose on women by the masculine society

[ArieldaLittleGangsta]

wow i read a book

about it called ties that bind ties

that break

and i heard yellow puss comes out

and stuff :O

i wonder if u can bend back your feet?

awesome vid btw :D

[klein910502]

@ArieldaLittleGangsta It's like having your arm broken for years and wanting it to go back to normal. There are some successful cases but not many.

[Suuuz77]

This is a fascinating story. It's too bad the text is blurry. I can't read every frame. The photos are heartbreaking, though.

[cloydivi888]

i wonder how it must've felt...not that i wanna experience it tho.a bit of my country's culture are of chinese influence.but i'm glad footbinding wasn't a part of it.i just find it very interesting.thanks for this post!

[cloydivi888]

it's ok chinesefootbinding..i found this vid very informative tho..the chinese tradition of footbinding fascinates me.are u chinese?

[chinesefootbinding]

no. dont ask me why but i have this weird obsession with China!! but no im not Chinese. this tradition also fascinates me, thank you! :D

[dumdidolabumbuladido]

@chinesefootbinding

You have done an extensive research on this topic, and on this I congratulate on your hard work. However, the theme of your research are base on depiction and story of footbinding, and the majority of your sources came from the modern period i.e. age of Chinese nationalism and anti-footbinding period, we must recognize that these sources, all of them produced by men, can be biased which simply criticize footbinding in a negative way

[ekocentric]

@chinesefootbinding Personally, I love history more than most people but I gotta tell you, I'm glad that people are all different but if I had my choice to do this and to walk the length of the Chinese wall I'd choose the latter.

P.S. Due to poor physical conditioning it may take me a year or to to stroll the length of the wall....Lol.

[cloydivi888]

how can we read the stories?it sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo small.

[chinesefootbinding]

I KNOW IM SORRY im going to remove the video, remove the stories, and repost the video so sorry about that :)

[dumdidolabumbuladido]

@chinesefootbinding the reason I am saying this, is because if we were to use these sources as the base of research, then, we wound NEVER understand WHY this "brutal, barbaric" custom could have survived for thousand years, and accepted by the mainstream Chinese society. The irony is, in the pre-Modern Chinese society, Chinese consider footbinding as a civility practice, compare with their "duck feet" neighbours, including Mongols, Manchus, whom in Chinese mind, are the true "barbarians"

[dumdidolabumbuladido]

@chinesefootbinding so footbinding also mark as the cultural boundary between the "civilized" and the "savage", but the meaning of footbinding changes at different dynasty, and it mean different thing, to different people as well. If you are interested, I have some materials written by Dorothy Ko, Patricia Buckley Ebrey, their research give us modern readers a new insight of footbinding, leading us to studying the thought of footbinding in women's perspective in pre-modern China.

[chinesefootbinding]

@dumdidolabumbuladido i have read a couple books on footbinding, and im starting a collection, and i have read that it wasnt necessarily accepted by the women, they just did it to get a good husband. i have read a lot of materials, but it is impossible to fit it all into 1 small powerpoint. when i first heard of footbinding, i thought it was a great thing (i was 10 and am 12 now) and i actually wanted them! im not trying to make it negative, quite the opposite actually. i love chinese culture!!

[klein910502]

I am glad that you love Chinese culture. But I have to mention that this tradition is generally regarded as a symbol of the gender inequality in Chinese history that most people are critical of it. Many girls died or became permanently disabled because of the binding and the origin for this torture is merely to satisfy men's peculiar sensuality. Some people might find your obsession with bound-feet offending.

[rosie11954]

This was a very interesting story!! Great Job! Although some of the words were hard to read because they were so small. Like the stories of the women with bound feet.