Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

rocks. The harshest treatment was meted out to prostitutes. Nails were driven through their hands and feet; they cried aloud for several days before expiring.

One form o f torture was to tie-up a woman so that her

legs dangled in midair and place bricks around each

toe, increasing the weight until the toes straightened

out and eventually dropped off. 11

END OF F O O T B I N D I N G E V E N T

One asks the same questions again and again, over

a period o f years, in the course of a lifetime. The questions have to do with people and what they do — the how and the why o f it. How could the Germans have murdered 6, 000, 000 Jews, used their skins for lampshades, taken the gold out of their teeth? How could white

people have bought and sold black people, hanged

them and castrated them? How could “Americans”

have slaughtered the Indian nations, stolen the land,

spread famine and disease? How can the Indochina

genocide continue, day after day, year after year?

How is it possible? Why does it happen?

As a woman, one is forced to ask another series of

hard questions: Why everywhere the oppression of

women throughout recorded history? How could the

Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding

111

Inquisitors torture and bum women as witches? How

could men idealize the bound feet o f crippled women?

How and why?

T h e bound foot existed for 1, 000 years. In what

terms, using what measure, could one calculate the

enormity o f the crime, the dimensions o f the transgression, the amount o f cruelty and pain inherent in that 1, 000-year herstory? In what terms, using what

vocabulary, could one penetrate to the meaning, to the

reality, o f that 1, 000-year herstory?

Here one race did not war with another to acquire

food, or land, or civil power; one nation did not fight

with another in the interest o f survival, real or imagined; one group o f people in a fever pitch o f hysteria did not destroy another. None o f the traditional explanations or justifications for brutality between or among peoples applies to this situation. On the contrary, here one sex mutilated (enslaved) the other in the interest o f the art o f sex, male-female harmony, role-definition, beauty.

Consider the magnitude o f the crime.

Millions o f women, over a period o f 1,000 years,

were brutally crippled, mutilated, in the name o f

erotica.

Millions o f human beings, over a period o f 1, 000

years, were brutally crippled, mutilated, in the name

o f beauty.

Millions o f men, over a period o f 1, 000 years,

reveled in love-making devoted to the worship o f the

bound foot.

Millions o f men, over a period o f 1, 000 years, worshiped and adored the bound foot.