I must confess that, like many women, I simply don’t get pornography. That is, the idea of it is in no way stimulating to me, neither sexually nor intellectually. This is no doubt as much a result of my having been raised in the America of the 1950s as it is of any high-minded principle on my part. After all, can you imagine Mamie Eisenhower looking at dirty pictures? I’ve never seen a pornographic film, aside from Terminator, that is, and I’ve never looked at the photos in any of the famous magazines, nor have I read the articles. I can’t honestly say that I disapprove of pornography; my ignorance precludes the right to have an opinion.
Once, however, I did have to read some, this in conjunction with research I was doing for another project, and I ended up reading, of all unlikely things, Chinese pornography of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Well, you’d think we’re all the same, wouldn’t you, believe that the same things serve as sexual stimulators for all of us, that there’s a sort of across-culture set of erotic parts or actions? Nope.
From what I read in and about Chinese pornography, the prime erotic object for Chinese men (and whoever writes about the erotic objects of women?) was—you guessed it—that tiny little foot, that mutilated, stinking, bound appendage, ideal size three inches, and don’t think about marriage without it, dear. It was done to little girls, usually by their mothers or aunts, when they were three: the toes were bent under, bound below the sole of the foot with specially made cotton bandages, which were removed only to be changed, perhaps to have the pus or blood washed out, then immediately replaced with others. To conceive of the resulting pain requires no explanation and less imagination. It lasted for the rest of her life.
The effusions of the men who regarded these rotting little buds, which became the epicenter of erotic fetishism, are not far from the veiled excesses of The Romance of the Rose, though they lack the delicacy of that poem. Just listen. “Every time I see a girl suffering the pain of foot-binding, I think of the future when the lotuses will be placed on my shoulders or held in my palms and my desire overflows and becomes uncontrollable.” We all know what that means, don’t we, girls? Or this little jewel: “Oh little foot! You Europeans cannot understand how exquisite, how sweet, how exicting it is! The contact of the genital organs with the little foot produces in the male an indescribable degree of voluptuous feeling, and women skilled in love know that to arouse the ardor of their lovers a better method of all Chinese aphrodisiacs is to take the penis between their feet.” Your stomach able to take one more? Okay, then this: “The smaller the woman’s foot, the more wondrous become the folds of her vagina.”
More committed feminists than I have argued that pornography is degrading to women because its ultimate aim is the degradation of women, based as it so often is upon their physical suffering. Reading all this Chinese crap one sees that these texts are meditations upon the helplessness of women, a helplessness that renders them completely at the disposal of male desire. The Chinese are said to be a subtle people, and here they certainly are, for they have eliminated the ugly clanking of chains and handcuffs, all those knots and ropes. There’s no need to chain her to the bed, after all, if she can’t walk.
I’d like to believe that most people today, regardless of sex, would find all of this pretty horrible, so what I found as unsettling as the actual Chinese texts was the manner in which the custom was written about by Western scholars well into this century. In 1976, The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe could state that “The Chinese regarded the bound foot as the most erotic and desired portion of the entire female anatomy.” Note that neat use of the generic “Chinese.” I’m curious to meet the Chinese woman who found the bound foot erotic. The book also referred to the “discomfort to which the growing girl developed a good deal of immunity.” “Discomfort,” for chrissake? And how would he know, anyway? Did he get his feet bound? Another scholar opined that footbinding would “discourage women’s interest in dancing, fencing, and other popular physical exercises.” Yeah, for instance, standing upright, walking, and running. One lamented the fact that foot-binding put an end to the “great old art of Chinese dancing.” Must one point out that it also put an end to the even older art of Chinese walking?
I leave it to you to decide which is more horrible. Is it worse to do it to young girls or to dismiss as unimportant the fact that it was done, basing your judgment on the assumption that what happens to women doesn’t matter anyway? In the end, there’s probably very little difference.
Given the choice between the two, I think I’d rather go see Deep Throat.