Lotus Feet on her toes

Yesterday, I was reminded of how ghastly I look now that I've completely lost my tan thanks to the winter months. The cute red sleeveless chemisier from H&M does not look good with two pale, pale arms sticking out. That, my friends, is only one of a hundred other signs that I see everywhere reminding me of how utterly un-springlike I look. And it made me think how our definitions of beautiful have changed throughout time. My sister and I always joke that we would have been natural beauties and worshipped like goddesses if we'd been born several centuries earlier. Our "vices" now would have been virtues back then instead of being suctioned, yoga-ed and lifted away.

On our trip to Malaysia this past January, we visited Chinatown in Melacca, Malaysia, and Candis and I stopped by at a little shop that made bound feet shoes. The shop-owner is the last remaining shoemaker in the area for women with bound feet. They allowed us to browse around and take photographs. They even displayed some old black and white photos of old women who had their feet bound decades ago. Feet-binding begins at very young ages, and begins with a painful process of tightly wrapping the feet in fabric to reshape the bone structure. With each wrapping, the feet are tightened until they become so mis-shapened that they no longer look like feet and whenever the fabrics are unwrapped, the women experience excruciating pain. the toes and heels are so bent that they lay completely flat under the arch of the foot. The lack of support and the pain cause the women to walk very slowly, and have to be aided by maids everywhere they go. Thus, the Lotus Feet (Got Sen -- Lotus Heel). The walk, the attitude, the position, the state of being.

The tiny shoes that you see are handmade for adult women's feet that have been bound. They are exactly like doll's shoes. And these types of shoes came in all types and fashions, and many were made by the women who wore those shoes. It was the "in" thing -- to make your own shoes. And to bind your feet. Very a la mode.

The prettier and fancier the shoes, the more fashionable. The most beautiful shoes were the ones made of rich, gold fiber and exotic fabrics and colors. And very small. The smaller, the richer, the more elegant and high-class. Because only the poor, un-cultured, lower-class servants would keep their grotesquely big, flat feet unbound in order to shuffle around doing work. The hurried, hasty walk was the walk of those who must work, who were born into servitude, not of the ones that have purpose and meaning in life.

Back then, it wasn't just the pale faces or dark hair or the sensuous, swaying gait of a curvaceous body. It was how you actually achieved that affect -- all the tactics you would employ in order to permanently walk in that way, the way of the high-class ladies of culture.

We now look upon bound feet as a horrific practice of a culture and society that is too foreign and ancient for us to understand. In retrospect, feet binding seems like it was an oppressive practice, a practice (most probably) designed and imposed by chauvanistic, insecure, arrogant, sexist males living in a dominant, patriarchal society. But it can't be simplified by blaming the men who coveted those Lotus Feet or the ladies who were the Lotus Feet.

In Bound Feet and Western Dress, we read about traditions that give way from one culture to the next, from one decade to another, from one family to another. In all of this, we can look at how "beauty" was and is defined. In 2007, we no longer bind feet, but we starve ourselves. We burn our skins under UV rays. We laser beam our eyes. Staple stomachs, lift eyebrows, file chins, puncture cheeks, liposuction thighs and abdomens, and even insert gels and liquids into our breasts.

Looks like we're not just re-shaping the feet. This time, it's an extreme make-over.