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When did foot-wrapping begin? How old do girls start?
bound feet first began in 969-975, when Li Yu was in power in the Southern Tang Dynasty. A maiden in Li Houzhu was ingenious, and wrapped her feet in a crescent shape with silk and danced on the golden lotus to please the emperor. Later, this practice spread to the people, and the wind of tying feet gradually spread to people's homes. However, some people think that as early as 77-476 BC in the Warring States period, bound feet appeared, and maybe it can be traced back to the Shang Dynasty earlier. In a word, bound feet, an evil custom in feudal society, has a long history, which has harmed countless women in China for thousands of years. It can be said that tying feet is one of the most prominent manifestations of "men are superior to women" under the patriarchal tradition. According to records, folk women began to wrap their feet when they were four or five years old, and when they reached adulthood, if their feet were no more than three inches long, they became the much-admired "three-inch golden lotus". At that time, such little feet were considered as an important aspect of "female beauty". Even a woman with good looks and figure, if her feet are not small enough, will be laughed at and can't get married. "Good Bigfoot" has also become the most unpleasant sentence to abuse and humiliate women. In fact, the "beauty" of little feet is based on the premise that women's body and mind are destroyed. The method of binding feet is to brutally cause dislocation or fracture of metatarsal bones of women's feet through artificial strength, and then fold them on the soles of feet, and then wrap them tightly with foot binding cloth layer by layer. Women who are bound feet walk hard and have great pain, which is more likely to cause disability and death. The folk saying that "a pair of small feet and a jar of tears" is a concentrated reflection of this suffering of women for thousands of years. Once the natural feet are entangled into a "three-inch golden lotus", women must be very inconvenient and greatly restricted in labor and communication. Only when they are trapped at home, they must stand against the wall when standing and walking. Not only is it natural that "men dominate outside, women dominate inside", but "men are strong and women are weak" has become a fact. It is even more difficult for women to be dissatisfied, resist and elope, but they have to endure anger. In fact, this kind of "beauty", which goes against nature and health and is based on destroying women's bodies, is not only an extreme distortion and metamorphosis of beauty, but also has a practical effect of strengthening the oppression and control of women in patriarchal society, as the Daughter's Classic says: "I am afraid that he or she will go out of the house lightly and be bound by thousands of wraps."

Foot-bound is rising because of men's hobbies, and the aesthetic distortion of men is getting out of hand because of the "three-inch golden lotus", until the destroyed feet of women become an important item to arouse men's sexual excitement. According to records, since the Song Dynasty, a kind of "drinking" game has been popular in many brothels. From beginning to end, prostitutes' little feet and their little shoes are prominent, and prostitutes' clients put wine glasses in prostitutes' little shoes to pass, pour and drink. Until the beginning of the 2th century, there were still some men who liked to participate in this kind of "drinking" game and were excited about the opportunity to use the wine glasses in prostitutes' little shoes to drink. As for the sour literati in the past dynasties, they took the discussion of feet as "learning" with great interest, and spared no expense in writing articles and evaluating them carefully, for fear that the aesthetic composition and flirting function of men playing with feet were not clearly explained. For example, in the Qing Dynasty, a scholar named Fang Xuan claimed to be "Dr. Xiang Lian" and wrote an article entitled "Xiang Lian Pinzao", which painstakingly divided the feet into five types, nine types and eighteen types, and thus became famous.

As for the deformed feet with broken bones, dislocated joints, bloody flesh and dripping with pus, why have they become the sexual targets of men in China? This is because, in feudal society, tying feet is a woman's extreme privacy, and people can't watch them at will except husbands and people with close ties, which makes feet implicated in the secret of sex, and even thinks that if they are not properly grasped, they will lead to fornication, and feet are "tools for leading prostitution". According to the sour literati, bound feet not only make women's gait more graceful and enchanting, but also make men "look more and feel more pity" during the day, and "be more affectionate and caressable" at night. The highest standards of the beauty of small feet are also determined by them: one is fat, the other is soft, and the third is beautiful, "and fat and soft can be sought after, but beautiful should be met with god" and so on. Between the lines, all are saturated with affection, admiration and worship for the morbid feet, while appreciating and playing with the destruction and deformity as beauty, which shows how seriously China's male aesthetic concept has been corrupted in the traditional patriarchal cultural background.