Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Foot Binding Worked

Episode Date: July 21, 2018

Once in a while, all the necessary factors converge to produce a peculiar nationalized sexual fetish. In China, that fetish was foot binding and over a millennia three billion Chinese women's feet were brutally disfigured for men's pleasure. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen how footbinding worked. It's about an unusual practice that was tradition for about a thousand years in China,

and it's just absolutely fascinating. Were we a little judgier than usual in this episode? I would say that's a fair assessment, but hopefully you won't judge us too harshly, and instead, just enjoy this episode because it's a pretty good one. Take care. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know

from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there, and it's time for Stuff You Should Know, everybody, so settle down. Buckle in, get ready. Hey, congratulations to Kristen Bell,

Stuff You Should Know celebrity fan, Kristen Bell, and her husband, Dak Shepard, had their baby. Oh, hey, congratulations. It's a big congratulations to you, and I don't know if Mr. Shepard listens. I thought you were gonna congratulate her on a Kickstarter movie. Oh, in the Veronica Marsh movie?

Yeah. Well, congratulations on that. My wife is very much looking forward to that. Yes, and your wife is looking forward to meeting the baby. She's on her way right now. Kristen Bell's locking the doors. Oh, my God, what started out is a small fascination with their show, End of the Tragedy.

Dangerous made for TV movie obsession. Anyway, just wanted to say congratulations. Yeah, that's nice of you, Chuck. Sure. I got no congratulations over here. Yeah, interesting that I tied that to this podcast on female torture, essentially. Do you think there's something to that?

No. OK. Well, we live in a world now where we don't have to worry about, although I think they had a son, where any little baby's feet being binded, I guess not babies, but four or five-year-olds. Or bound. Yeah.

Yeah. Bound, binded. Bound. OK. Because the feet were bound. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

Do you think we should explain to everybody what we're talking about? Foot binding? Yeah. I'm glad you congratulated Kristen Bell, because I didn't really have much of an intro for this one. OK, good. Because it's just so fascinating.

I feel like we should just kind of dive right in. Yeah, fascinating and horrible and oddly impactful and areas I never would have considered. Yeah. So we should say that over the course of about 1,000 years, from roughly 970 till about the 1950s, almost on the dot 1,000 years. About 3 billion women in China bound their feet

to basically train them to become small and pointy in a really bizarre custom that just kind of came out of nowhere and stuck around, again, for about 1,000 years. Voluntarily deforming their feet. Well, at the very least, their mothers and grandmothers voluntarily deformed their feet for them. Yeah, it's a very good point, actually. But at some point, they had to take over.

And I guess then it became voluntary. Well, sure, well, we'll get to all that. OK. Spoilers abound. So basically, this was purposeful deformation of the human foot, the human female foot, in order to attract men. Yeah.

There was a standard of beauty, a bound foot. And we'll describe it in a minute. But the idea, the whole thing kind of came from, they think about, like I said, 970 AD, in the court of an emperor named Li Yu. And Li Yu had a favorite girlfriend. Ballerina girl? Yeah.

And apparently, he saw her dancing once on a golden lotus pedestal, because everything was made of gold back then in China. Sure. And she had her feet kind of wrapped up, I guess, like a ballerina or something. Yeah. And he apparently got very, very excited at this.

Visibly excited. So much so that the other ladies of the court noticed this. Wait, did you say visibly excited? Visibly excited. OK. Yes, if you know what I mean. Really? I would imagine.

OK. Hey, this guy's been dead 1,000 years. Like all slander and defamation is like out the window. Sure. It's like it was a rockin' time. It was a southern Tang dynasty. It was. You never know what's going to happen.

Yeah, it made Caligula look like watching it as an adult. Yeah, boring. Yeah. So really Lee Yu was very much entranced by this enough that other women in the court noticed it. And they started wrapping their feet as well. Yeah. And it just kind of took off from there.

And it took a weird turn pretty early on. Well, what's the turn? Well, the turn is originally apparently the first, the woman who started this whole thing, just kind of wrapped her feet in bandages to, I guess. Oh, OK, I see what you mean. That turn. A literal turn.

Yeah. Well, it became a status thing at first, because wealthy women did it. And then it sort of spread, and it also would end up preventing women from doing manual labor. Well, not prevent, but it made it tougher. So it was sort of a status thing that meant if you had the bound feet, you're not out there

working in the fields. Yeah, I don't even have to throw a hoe. But then it spread throughout China. And only a few places, actually it was more than this article let on. I did some more research on that. I saw where 50% to 60% of the women ended up binding their feet in China.

And this says 100% except in these provinces. Well, I think they were saying about close to 100% of the higher classes. OK. But yeah, there was, I guess that makes sense. So maybe about half of the Chinese population total? Yeah, that makes sense. So the strange turn it took, though,

was to go from simply wrapping their feet to actually the binding process, which is malforming your feet at a young age, like four to seven years old, for life, to where when your shoe was off, it looks like you're wearing a, your foot looks like a high heel. You're disfigured. Yeah.

You can't walk very well. You can't, again, you can't work in the fields. And your foot has been brought to a point, basically, that's ideally three inches long. Three inches. Like that's it. And it's pointed. And you do this by training your foot and your bones

to deform. Yeah, and when I say it looks like a high heel, like your foot looks like a shoe, like the heel is separate from the rest of the foot and a big block that looks like the heel of a shoe. And the foot is permanently arched and pointy and the toes are curled under. And it's just, if you look a picture to this,

it's horrific looking. Yeah, and it was so entrenched in the Chinese culture that when it was outlawed for, I guess, the first time in 1912, it continued on. And it took the communists taking over to really get rid of it. And footbinding went the way of disco by just practical necessity.

Women had to work in the field. And if you had bound feet, well, you're in big trouble. Yeah, well, the end of it, should we talk about the end now, or should we do it later? Let's do it now. Let's just mess with the structure. The end of it, there were a lot of factors at play. One was Western missionaries came over there for the first time

and said, yeah, you know, this is really not what the rest of the world is doing. And it doesn't make you look good, by the way. Social Darwinists got on it and were like, yeah, you know what? We're not going to survive as a country because like half of our population is hobbled, essentially. It's like, this is going to be really bad for business one day.

And so they mounted like a real campaign, like an education campaign, which is really unusual back then. And they had three phases to it. One was that it made you look bad and look strange to the rest of the world. Two, that taught the advantages of having normal feet, like walking without pain. And then they formed natural foot societies

where people would pledge not to do this to their daughters or allow their daughter to marry a son, or allow their son to marry a girl who had bound feet. Because that was one of the big deals. If you didn't have bound feet, then guys would just pass you over. Right, so that's what it took to finally eradicate it. When was that?

That was after the 1912 outlaw or the communism? No, it was leading up to that. So 1912 was formally outlawed. Oh, gotcha. They had government inspectors that would come around and make sure that you weren't binding feet any longer. And they would hide girls that they still wanted to. So it was really oppressive and weird.

Yeah, because that campaign that you just described is basically point for point trying to undo 1,000 years of custom. Like if you had unbound feet, like natural feet, you were considered a freak. You were ugly. There was something wrong with you. And even more to the point, no man would marry you.

Because bound feet were so idolized in Chinese culture that if you were just totally plain or even horrendously ugly in every other way, but had really knocked out bound feet, like that was enough for you. You were a butterfly. You're going to do pretty good. That's hilarious. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to believe now.

But when you see these photos and the x-rays and stuff, it's just total deformation. Yeah. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

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app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So let's talk about this.

There's an actual process, fairly straightforward, although extremely painful and dangerous. If you, like I think you said, you grab like your four-year-old daughter, and you say, prepare for a lifetime of pain and suffering, starting now. And you take her feet, and you soak them in hot water for a few hours. Yeah, and animal blood, too.

Oh, yeah, what did that do? Same thing, softened it, softened you up. OK, so that was the whole purpose of the soaking, was to soften the skin, make it more pliable. And I imagine the muscles, too. And then after the soaking, you would scrape away any dead skin. And then after that, their toenails were clipped, you know? Super short.

So there's still kids who are like, OK, I don't really like the toenail clipping part, but the foot soak more than makes up for it. Right. And boy, it turns out I like animal blood. Soak my feet in it. And then either their mom or maybe a learned woman in the village would say, all right, now we're

going to start bending your foot. Yeah, I imagine these ladies, too, if they were the village lady that did it, they probably didn't take much guff. No, probably not. You know, they probably didn't mess around. I imagine they came in there and just sort of took care of business.

Like, they've heard it all before. Right, but for as grisly and grotesque a procedure, it's actually a delicate procedure, too. Because if you can wrap your mind around this, there's ways to do it wrong that can lead to problems. That's a good point. There's actual risk factors. So the one other thing I left out

was they sprinkled talc in there to keep it from perspiring because you want it to be dry. Right. And then they start bending things, right? Yeah, well, then the cotton comes out. The bandage is about two inches wide, about 10 feet long. And they would soak those in the hot water and blood and herbs as well because they want those to shrink up.

It's all about shrinking. They want those to shrink up after they're applied to the feet. Right. And then the old lady comes up and she folds the little foretoes that were just clipped, not the big toe, under as far as she can and then starts to do little figure eights to keep them in place. You leave the big toe exposed.

So you just figure eights with the bandages. Yes. And you leave the big toe exposed and the heel exposed. And you just cinch those little front toes under. They break the toes. It breaks the foot bones. Sounds horrific because it is. Right.

And it brings the heel closer toward the ball of the foot. So the point of your feet is now your big toe. The slightly wider part behind it is the ball of your foot. And then behind that is your heel. And underneath it all are your four poor, poor little toes. Yep. And the top of your foot is at this really unreasonable, odd looking arch.

Right. And it looks like you're in a high heel. Yeah. By making it arched, you're allowing that distance that was once between the ball of the foot and the heel to go up rather than between the two. You're bringing them together. And so all this has just been done to a four-year-old.

Four-year-old is probably crying in pain. And after you finish with the bandages, the old lady or the mom would probably sew them. Yeah. Because especially if you're dealing with a four-year-old, it's going to try to get these things off. And then they say, all right, start walking. Yeah, they put a little shoe on there.

And the first steps with these things, and I imagine many steps afterward, are excruciatingly painful. Yeah. You know? Well, yeah. Here's the craziest part, if you ask me. You do this every day for years.

Yeah, well, every couple of days. OK, every day or every other day is what I got. I'm not trying to diminish it, yeah. For a couple of years, it takes a couple to a few years for these things to be fully deformed into what are called lotus petals. Yeah. Or new moons or whatever.

Because it's a bandage, you unbind and they actually would need the broken foot to keep it broken. Right. And dry it all out real good. Because the toes would cut into the foot if they weren't clipped properly. So infection and gangrene was too tight. All big threats to losing their feet.

Right, because if you wrap them too tight, they can become gangrenous. Because you get gangrene, which is a massive loss of dead tissue due to poor circulation. So the foot could just fall off. And like you were saying, if you don't clip the toenails, Chuck, you have to do that every day. Oh, yeah.

Or every time you unwrap and then wrap your feet. And then even worse than that, if you didn't wrap them pretty quickly after you bathe them every day or other day, they could start to lose their shape. Which apparently was as painful as the initial foot binding procedure. Yeah, like once your foot has started to take shape, if you wanted to say, no, I don't want to do this anymore.

It was just as painful for the foot to undo itself. Because it's already like malformed. But there was, like you didn't think that. I think once this happened to you from your mom or whatever, and you grew a little older and you started to take over for yourself, and you were bathing and wrapping your own feet every other day, you understood why you were doing this.

Because foot binding was so important that you could be just completely poverty stricken. And some rich dude would still be like, I like your feet a lot. It goes like 2 and 1 half inches. Yeah, I can't even breathe right now. Because your feet are so deformed that I want to marry you. It's so weird.

Yeah, so there's a. And beyond being wrong and gross and oppressive and all that stuff, it was just so odd to me that that was like a turn on. Yeah, and man, it was a turn on. Like foot binding was highly, highly erotic. Yeah, it's like nice feet, trust me, I get that. But these deformed, I just don't get it.

But this was pretty much a national foot fetish. Yeah. And it was nationalized, it was cultural, and it was extraordinarily widespread. Like we said, about 3 billion women over the course of 1,000 years bound their feet. Yeah, and it had a lot of odd effects, side effects that went along with it.

Yeah. When 3 billion people do something that hobbles them, there are going to be some weird repercussions. Yeah, you don't think about. One thing it definitely did was it fostered dominance over women because of the simple fact that if a woman's being beaten, she can't run away. A woman can't travel very far, period.

So they're going to hang around their village and their house. And so it just, it's like hobbling somebody. All of a sudden, they can't get around as well. So they're just dependent on you. Right, and they really aren't traveling much. Not a lot of traveling going on when your feet are bound. And then also the fact that they have women with bound feet

had trouble walking meant that the architecture of China kind of was created to help this out. Like they had to lean on windows or walls, I mean. So buildings were built close together so that average woman could lean on a wall while she was walking. Yeah, and there weren't a lot of six-story walk-ups in ancient China.

Man, that would have been cruel. Everything was one story as a result. So it, yeah, it had a weird impact on the architecture. And what else, colonization? Yeah, that was a really big one. I never considered that. Yeah, you know, most people realize that China didn't do a lot of exploring

while the rest of the world was. It just kind of isolated itself and shut itself off. And one of the reasons given for that was that the women were foot bound. And they couldn't travel like women in other countries who could walk normally did. So with the Chinese women unable to travel and I guess see the sites,

their men didn't want to leave them. So they stayed at home. And actually the areas that didn't practice foot binding are the ones that actually did go out and colonize other places like the Philippines. They were Southern China, yeah, or the Old West. Like every great Old West show has like the one Chinese immigrant family.

With the pony tails, yeah. The article points out like we're being hard on it because it's easy to look today at some antiquated practice is really cruel and unusual and weird. But at the time, the women wanted their feet bound. There were great bonds between the generations because it was such a cultural thing between the women.

They would sew their shoes together. I listened to this one, NPR Fresh Air, that interviewed some of these old Chinese ladies that still are some of the last surviving ones. And a couple of them said, I really regret it now, it's been a lifetime of pain. But most of them said, no, we wanted to do it. And this was, I'm very proud of the fact that we did this.

Yeah, and these are women who are confronted with the outside world and they still feel pride about their bound feet. You can imagine how much pride a woman had in her bound feet while it was the norm, you know? Because it was basically the norm in China and these women weren't going out anywhere else. So if you had really nice bound feet,

that was a huge point of pride for you. So one of the other weird things we need to talk about is sexy time. Because we talked about foot fetishes and things, but it really, something happened in the water at this time where Chinese men really, really got into it and they would take the shoe off in these odd deformed feet and they would do weird things like drink the water

that they bathe their feet in or put nuts between the toes and eat the nuts from their toes and just really odd things. I also read that it became another orifice, I guess if you can imagine. Oh, really? Yeah.

And even outside of that, I guess one of the more normal things to do is to bury your face in the center of the bottom of the foot and really get like a good whiff of it. Motorboat? Yeah. No, motorboat. No, to smell it.

Gotcha. And then Chuck, we should point out that if you're doing that, if you're burying your face in the deformed foot of a foot bound woman, one of the things that happens pretty commonly when your feet are bound is that they develop pustules that break and stink. And so there is a, I read one guy,

a contemporary report from several centuries ago saying like there is no other smell like it in the world. Nothing as sexy as a deformed foot with leaking stinky pustules. Exactly. Wow. Yeah, so yeah, there was a definite fetish that grew up around it.

There was a, at least one sex manual released with I think 48 different things to do with a bound foot. A bound foot. Yeah. Wow. And the shoes, we didn't talk about the shoes. They play a role in that eroticism as well. About the strengthening of the muscles.

Is that right? Yeah, that's a big part, yeah. Yeah, apparently there was a theory at least that because they had to walk so funny and oddly that their vaginal muscles were extra strong and thus more pleasurable to the man. Right. So.

And then, so the average woman with a foot bound shoe or with bound feet, I'm sorry, everybody. She had at least four pairs of shoes. You had two or else there was no point. Oh, sure. In having bound feet, you had to have one for each season. Ideally you had at least four pair per season, so 16. Some women had hundreds of these.

Oh, sure. They were designed to really like show off. Like, hey, look at my bound feet, buddy. You know, that's what they were there for. But there was one specific one that were always red. They were your wedding shoes. That's right. And inside, there was erotic embroidery.

Yeah. Which the husband, the new husband and the new wife would look at and like try out together. It was kind of an instruction manual for the bride by her mother or the women of the town. Like, just do this. Here's a picture of what you're supposed to do tonight. Yeah, and slippers, period, I think, were just,

it was almost like the lingerie of the time. Yeah. Because they would, the bedroom slippers were more like embroidered, like more sexily as well. Than just your average like, you know, gotta go to the shop and pick up some rice shoes, you know. So the Chinese communists came along Mao and his comrades and said, you know what, you're a woman.

We don't care. Get to work digging ditches. And oh, your bound feet hurt you. Well, I guess you're gonna starve because we give food based on how much work you did. If you don't do the work, you're gonna starve to death. That led to the real conclusion of footbinding. And apparently today they say with great authority

that no one does it any longer. Yeah, that's good to know. Yeah. I'm surprised that it completely died out because. Do you think there'd be like a few families here there, but yeah, I mean it is possible. Well, welcome to the modern age is what I say. Isn't that just a bizarre, strange chapter,

thousand year chapter in one of the most populous nations on the planet's history? Totes. And very few people know about it. Yeah. Well, now a lot more people do. That's right. You got anything else?

No, you know, you can't like, there's no place we can direct people to voice their outrage because it doesn't happen anymore. No, but I'm sure we're gonna get a lot of suggestions for female genital mutilation. We should probably do that one, female circumcision. We haven't done that? No, we did male circumcision.

I don't think we talked about female. I think we like mentioned it and said, we'll do that later. Oh, well, there you have it. We'll do it again. Okay. So if you want to learn more about foot binding and see some pictures of some unshod bound feet,

you can type foot binding in the search bar at housetoforks.com and it'll bring up this article. And I said search bar, which means it's time for a message break. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in,

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye bye bye.