The Lotus foot and female misshapenness

I recently blogged about seeing a picture of a Japanese woman’s bound feet on my Yahoo! page. However, as I started to think on this image, it evoked for me the question about the degree to which it is a metaphor of women in our society and particularly within the Church. I realize that the point I’m making is not a new one, but I thought that perhaps the visual aid we have here might at least be an occasion to think about the matter further.

Take a close look at the image (right) and note just how bizarre it looks to see her toes wrapped around and under her feet like that. Even now when I look at it, I still think it’s her hand holding her foot. In other words, her foot is so horribly contorted into a fundamentally unnatural position that it’s hard to process the image accurately because it no longer looks like a normal foot.

The final product of binding, if done correctly, is called the “Lotus Foot” and women with lotus feet wear lotus shoes. A girl’s feet would be allowed to grow until she was about four or five and the feet were about four inches long (the ideal size). Then, in order to begin the deformation, the four lesser toes were broken and pulled down and stretched towards the heel and then set in place by constant binding that hindered growth and ensured the deformation and thus the creation of the lotus foot. (Though it's hard to process, the woman on the left reveals, from a different angle, her lotus feet without their bindings .)

It’s very easy for us to think that the bound foot thing is so “obviously” unnatural, and how we could never conceive of doing such a thing. Yet there are people for whom it is normal. And there was a time in Japanese history when the practice was considered as an achievement of the culture’s ideals.

What the bound foot should expose to us is that it is often normal to assume the unnatural is normal. Just because we assume a degree of normalcy with the way women currently operate in our contemporary environments, even if it appears to be healthy and with little complaint, doesn’t make it automatically in harmony with the divine order of things. Take a look at the foot again and note that some people think this is okay and normal because that’s just traditionally the case.

So isn’t it not only possible but likely that even expectations of women in our society, traditional expectations, require a woman to contort herself and subject herself to social or emotional misshapenness, in order to fit the traditional ideals and norms. I think so. I also think that within the Church in particular, there is a gross and deliberate distortion of women brought on by early social and emotional binding practices.

I was talking to one woman friend recently who was taking one of my classes. She remarked that she didn’t feel like she had that much to say in class. I happened to know that this was completely erroneous and that she did in fact have a lot to contribute (seriously and in a technical way). But what was happening was that she noted that the male students appeared to speak with such confidence and assumed that they must have more to say, since she wasn’t going to speak with such confidence. My argument to her was that as a female growing up in the non-urban Midwestern USA she had been conditioned to assume that she really didn’t have that much to contribute but that men did. By contrast, I noted that within the class the male students really did assume that they had a freedom to assume confidence in what they had to say. Both I thought were the products of social conditioning, since it wasn’t the case that everything the men said should have been said with confidence, and vice versa.

So now, having seen this woman’s bound foot, I rethink this experience in terms of social and emotional or psychological misshapenness. The image is for me a tangible metaphor of the sad reality of women in our society . . . still. It’s all the worse that much of this misshapenness is brought on as an attempt to seek the divine ideal within the Church.