I have heard some of the criticisms and criticisms of the criticisms for the
practice of footbinding. As a female, I will say this. There have been many
rough practices that females have gone through,that relates to some aesthetic
nature. I am not extremely familiar with footbinding, but I have studied that
practice some when I took a class in non-western culture. It doesn't take a
rocket scientist to see that footbinding had to have been painful and
damaging to one's body part. I remember studying about women using a corset
to shrink their waist to an unimaginable size for aesthetic reasons, some of
those women suffered permanent damages, I wonder about the permanent damages
of footbinding. I am not condemning a whole culture because of some of these
practices, but it is disturbing thinking about the permanent damage one can
do their feet when they engage in footbinding. Even if this practice was
accepted by the aristocracy and the general public, there were a lot of
things accepted by those same groups in many cultures that was inhumane and
just plain wrong. The best we can do is to love the variety of cultural
history, but learn from them also.
Sincerely,
MC
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