Femininity Read Online Free PDF Page A

privileged position and a moral requisite for
     correct behavior, and each ingenious constriction was sentimentalized by men as erotic
     in its own right, apart from the woman it was designed to improve.
    Bernard Rudofsky, a provocative social critic, has theorized that men find deep sexual
     excitement in the hobbling of women. Such a statement is darkly inflammatory but impossible
     to dismiss. To envision a Chinese nobleman’s wife or courtesan with daintily slippered
     three-inch stubs in place of normal feet is to understand much about man’s violent
     subjugation of women; what is less clear is the concept of exquisite feminine beauty
     contained within the deforming violence: the sensuous incapacitation and useless,
     ornamental charm perceived in the fused, misshapen bones. A lotus blossom with a willow
     walk: romantic imagery for man’s improvement over nature. Pruned from childhood, her
     tiny foot was said to resemble the lotus, a most revered flower, and with the support
     of a long staff or leaning against ahusband or servant, she walked like a whisper of wind through the willows, swaying
     tremulously with each timid step. Making love to the lotus foot, an elaborate art
     of manipulation, postures and poses, was a dominant theme in Chinese pornography for
     eight hundred years while the custom of footbinding flourished.
    Distasteful though it may be, the bound foot illustrates several aspects of the feminine
     esthetic. It originated in the rarefied atmosphere of a decadent upper class where
     the physical labor of women was not required, and it became an enviable symbol of
     luxury, leisure and refinement. It isolated a specific part of the female body which
     differed from the male body in some respect, in this case a slightly smaller foot,
     and cruelly exaggerated the natural difference in the cause of artistic perfection.
     It imposed an ingenious handicap upon a routine, functional act and reduced the female’s
     competence to deal with the world around her, rendering that world a more perilous
     place and the imbalanced woman a more dependent, fearful creature. It rendered a man
     more competent and steady—in other words, more masculine—by simple contrast. It romanticized,
     and thereby justified, the woman’s tottering gait by turning it into a sexual attraction,
     and it elevated her “perfected” part, her tiny, useless foot, to the realm of ornamental
     beauty. It instilled in every woman a deep sense of insecurity born of the conviction
     that some natural part of her was profoundly ugly (in China the common term was “goosefoot”)
     and required some extreme corrective measure. And finally, it demanded the shared
     complicity of mother and daughter in the desperate work of beautification and the
     passing on of compliant, submissive feminine values, for the anxious mother was the
     agent of will who crushed her suffering daughter’s foot as she calmed her rebellion
     by holding up the promise of the dainty shoe, teaching her child at an early age that
     the feminine mission in life, at the cost of tears and pain, was to alter her body
     and amend her ways in the supreme effort to attract and please a man.
    A different approach to the feminine esthetic prevailed in the West, where the entire
     torso from breast to hips was believed to require artistic improvement, and the ingenious
     device thathampered a woman’s motions as it molded her figure to a romantic ideal was the imprisoning
     corset with its inflexible stays of whalebone or steel. We know from the art and documents
     of the sixteenth century that two powerful queens, Catherine de Medici of France and
     Elizabeth of England, were among the first to wear the compressing cage, taking on,
     as it were, the armor of their noble knights to push the soft flesh and rib cage inward.
     How fascinating that history’s first tight-lacers should have been the Medici and
     the Virgin Queen, two bold, ambitious women who were called