The Lotus Lovers

THE LOTUS LOVERS The Complete History of the Curious Erotic Custom of Footbinding in China by Howard S. Levy * Chinese Erotic and Sexual Classics In Translation * Foreword by Arthur Waley, Introduction by Wolfram Eberhard

NAGAO RYÜZO

sociologist

Observer of Chinese customs for more than forty years

Foreword

I have for long been interested in footbinding not so much as an isolated Chinese institution but rather as the most striking example of the strange things that women do or have done to them, in almost all cultures, in order to make themselves more attractive to men. One non-Chinese example of such propensities, which has intrigued me for fifty years, is the habit of women in old Japan of shaving off their eyebrows and painting false eyebrows higher up on the forehead, and again of blackening their teeth. One thinks of the women in Africa who elongate their necks and adorn them with innumerable necklaces; and others who wear large round disks suspended from their lower lips. One of the values of Mr. Levy’s well-documented book on footbinding in China is that it will give material to anyone writing a general anthropological study of such selfmutilations or selfmodifications in all parts of the world.

On the psychological side this book would have fascinated Havelock Ellis, who in discussing sexual abnormalities stresses the attractiveness to some men of lameness or an uncertain gait in women. There is no doubt that this and other small perversions became institutionalized in the cult of the bound foot in China, and Mr. Levy’s book plainly shows that the perhaps more familiar sexual fixation on boots and shoes played its part in the appeal of the footbound woman’s minute shoes. In short, Mr. Levy’s book has among its many merits that of supplying material for future general works on both anthropology and sexual psychology.

Arthur Waley

Acknowledgments

The research on footbinding required that more than 1,500 pages of material be examined, most of it in Chinese. My wife, Henriette Liu Levy, gave me invaluable assistance, aiding me in reading and in clearing up problem areas with a minimum of wasted time. Preservation of the footbinding record is due to the prodigious accomplishment of one man, Yao Linghsi, who accumulated much of the available primary evidence in the nineteenthirties, when the custom was still flourishing. My contribution to the study of footbinding has been to draw largely upon Chinese sources and translate, collate, and rearrange materials according to theme. Mr. Maurice Schneps, Editor of Orient/West, read the manuscript in draft and indicated ways in which it might be improved. Mr. Walton H. Rawls suggested revisions in content and arrangement which proved invaluable. Bibliographical assistance was rendered and important references were brought to my attention by Dr. Edwin G. Beal of the Library of Congress and Mr. Kanenobu Watanabe of the Toyo Bunko Research Institute.

Howard S. Levy 

Introduction

We are flooded by books on China which try to explain what happened in the last decade and what might happen in the future. The great majority of these books discuss the astonishing fact that China, so proud of its long history and unique culture, should be the only country which has of its own will embraced an ideology of the West which is totally antagonistic towards all values of the East; whereas, for centuries China resisted the attempts of missionaries to convert the country to another Western worldconcept.

Many authors tend to contrast the stability and so-called stagnation of pre-Communist China with the rapid transformation of the present time and give the impression that China was a backward country until 1948. More recently, others have attempted to correct this picture by showing, for example, that the nineteenth century was a period of thorough change, and that much of what is now credited to the Communist regime had already begun some eighty years ago and was widely spread before World War II. More and more, all these discussions—if they are serious—circle around the problem: is Communist China heir to the old imperial, Confucian China, with only a few new techniques and trimmings, or is it a new society—of the East European variety of Western society? Since this is intrinsically a sociopsychological problem, sociologists as well as psychologists have started to go beyond the well-known generalizations about “national character” and have tried to develop methods to get reliable insight into the psychology of the Chinese. This attempt is made extremely difficult since China, together with all other Communist countries, does not allow foreigners to do social science research along modern lines. The aims of their work in this field, as they freely admit, are political and practical, and the work is done with methods which in the West are regarded as antiquated. Fortunately, there are still some other ways open. There are today three Chinas: the Mainland, Taiwan, and the Overseas Chinese (including Hong Kong); in two of them, modern social scientists can work and find congenial, moderntrained Chinese colleagues with whom they can collaborate in the study of modernized Chinese. Furthermore, there are more than two thousand years of a tremendous literature in Chinese at our disposal, covering innumerable topics. The examination and analysis of this literature has just begun.

What has footbinding to do with all this? Footbinding is one element, among many others, belonging to the central problem of the position and role of women in Chinese society, a sociological and psychological problem par excellence. Rarely does one see today a Chinese woman who still has bound feet. The custom is dead. Most Westerners who saw bound feet did not try to find answers to their questions, but simply detested and deplored the custom. They justified their objections by saying that footbinding was “unnatural.” But, what is “natural”? A part of being human is that people do not even let basic “instincts,” like hunger and sex, operate “naturally”; these impulses have been harnessed by social institutions, and various societies have found different ways to do this. Then it happened in the nineteenth century that Western society set up the cult of “nature” and began fighting against what certain people considered “unnatural.” Yet, even today, few Western men dare or wish to let beard and whiskers grow as they grow naturally, and few women are proud of hair on their legs and in their armpits. All men and women shape their hair in different coiffures, and many remove their body hair. Most Western women “bind” their breasts and many their waists, and these “unnatural” forms are called an improvement over nature. No part of the body has not been the object of special attention at one or another time and in one or another society; many have been of sexual importance. For example, most Westerners have preferred and still prefer women with small feet; many people adore the feet of ballet dancers, which do not appear too different from the bound feet of the Chinese; millions of men enjoy seeing women in shoes with heels so high that the foot appears to be deformed, that walking becomes precarious, and that the whole movement of the body is changed. What men in the West feel when they see all the “unnatural” female apparel is surely not too different from what a Chinese felt when seeing a bound foot. We should keep this in mind before passing judgment upon the traditional Chinese’s love of small feet.

Each custom and even each fashion somehow express social or psychic values of the whole society, or of that part of society which cherishes the custom; behind each custom there is a whole system of ideas. The study of customs and fashions often opens up insights into aspects which are inaccessible otherwise, either because the topic is taboo or because the psychology behind the custom is unconscious to the person performing it.