http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/OddPics/Bound.html

That's pretty freaky. Anyone know if they're real? I know that site isn't too reliable, but I've heard of this from other places.

Hi Clockworkgirl:

Yeah, I think it's real, and I agree; I've heard of that practice in other places too besides China. I've thought of why these people would do this, and some cultures also do headboarding to shape the head to an oval shape. I speculated(and this is only speculation) that in cultures that had contact with ET's, maybe they were trying to mimic the physical appearance of their "gods". Just an idea.

http://ashiana.conforums.com/index.cgi

~ Isis

Yeah, it's true...Here is Wiki's info about it.. sounds painful..

Yeah, Nyx; I heard it's very painful. I sure wouldn't want to inflict that kind of pain on any person, especially my relatives.

http://ashiana.conforums.com/index.cgi

~ Isis

Heck, pretty much every culture has some sort of physical mutilation that they use as a form of beauty treatment. Look at the girdles the English used to wear.

I had heard it was done so that the woman couldn't literally run away from thier husbands, families etc.

I've seen stories of women here in the U.S. who practice it just because.

In the name of beauty ... ouch ... I'd rather be ugly then suffer pain, just to be pretty or display what is considered 'pretty'.

Makes my feet hurt ..

I couldn't find that myth on snopes but i believe i've heard that it's true.

Omg. These are the weirdest pair of feet ever. O_o;

It was considered to be indicative of high class/wealth. If the women in your family had bound feet, they couldn't do much work, so they needed servants. They also had to be carried everywhere. Obviously, one had to be wealthy to afford servants. But IMHO, it's stupid.

wait, that was something they considered attractive? i just looked at the pictures, and those are the nastiest feet ive ever seen.. feet skeeve me as it is, but that is just SICK!

foot binding ... called chanzu was done to young girls before the 20th century in china. it began in the Tang Dynasty and was a statis symbol showing wealth. the idea was to make the foot no larger than 3 inches. it was also suppose to be a sign of beauty, the smaller the feet the better chance she had of getting a richer hubby.

when i was younger i remember reading a book about this american missionary (female) who was so shocked about the damage that was done to these girls feet that she helped to change the ritual of it being done. of course, you still have some doing it even today especially in the out of the way places.

Women with small feet were at one time concidered attractive in that culture. Foot binding was done to make thier feet smaller. Over time it got carried too far and ended up with grown women who could not walk.

As for being painful, I really don't know. The binding process would be started when the girl was still an infant and continued for most of her developing years. By the time she reached adulthood, she no longer wore the foot bindings but, her feet would be perminantly deformed.

ColdEthyl will agree with me on this, "Flush the Fashion".

Before we click our collective toungues at them, royal European women at one time would swallow live tapeworm larvea and/or have their lower ribs surgically removed to give themselves a "more sightly waistline", (sic). Their words, not mine.

women now wear high heel shoes that deform their feet. I love how Western women always look down their noses at foreign female mutilation. Meanwhile Tara Reid's frankenboob is de rigueur for the cosmetic surgery world as well as cheek implants and plastic faces such as Nicole Kidman and Heather Locklear.........pahleeze.

http://jpubhealth.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/c...bstract/24/2/77

Women are having surgery to accommodate their shoes.

http://www.aofas.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3285

I have some pointed toed shoes and boots that look awesome on.. but hurt like hell... looking good isn't enough of a reason for me to endure that kind of pain.. that footwear is happily collecting dust in my closet..

SOURCE:

basically in midevil china they bound their feet, similar to corsets, both were worn to "enhance beauty".

Lets face it, lots of people still use what some might call self mutilation today. What with plastic surgery and all, some would say its different..... but they are still altering their natural apperence for the sake of vanity (not all).

Let's see: huge silicone breast implants, stiletto heels, injections of bovine toxins into one's face, lipo suction here and there....I'd say this kind of thing still goes on.

Give me a natural, normal woman any day. I hate all this freaky human behavior from bound feet to elongated necks.
On and men who like big silicon implants are usually little mummy’s boys harking back for mummy’s breast. Sad.

It is a brutal insight into the world of Masochism.

Amen my friend.

That's just wrong.

Who wants to be a "Clone"?

This reminds me of a version of the Cinderella story in which the ugly stepsisters actually cut off part of their feet so that they fit into the glass slipper. My feet are so wide, I wish I could remove part of my foot, including the little toe, but I would never actually do that. Anyway, feet give me the creeps.

My mother gave me a book a few years back called "An Underground Education". The book covers the unsavory part of history. The book mentions this particice. The aouthor said something about the feet when unbound looks like a certain part of the femal anatomy.

Well that was VERY F**KING DISTURBING. I would have been better not seeing those ugly feet, but anyway, interesting post.

Diffinately not "Number Six"!!! I never thought of it that way but, it's totally accurate. I'm sure that people in the future will view it to be just as freaky. Any one here remember Michael Jackson?

The practice of enlarging womens breasts to make them more attractive is as wierd and bizarre as foot binding in China.

Of course the ignorance of people these days makes things like breasts implants seem "normal"

I agree, it's certainly weird. To me something like this simply doesn't look normal, or attractive. Then again, I'm a female (what men think often eludes me). I just know I wouldn't want a set that big!

Personally, implants are the ugliest things I've ever seen.

I love it how all us girls say that we don't care for fashion and things like that but how come plastic surgents still make millions around the world?????

Well, only some of "us girls" are saying this. I'd wager that there are plenty who will do just about anything to conform to the notion of beauty, even if it involves self-mutilation. I'm reminded of Pink's recent music video "Stupid Girls".

Also, not all cosmetic surgery is quite so ridiculous. Some gals are totally flat chested, some have lost a breast to cancer, in such cases the goal is simply to appear more normal. I'm certainly not advocating that folks should not feel free to fix up something that's really bothering them. Like anything else, abuse can occur with plastic surgery as well.

Nah I don't like it.
I suppose the female equivalent is a wimpy male with oversized silicon implanted biceps. I don’t know.

I’ve noticed with men, when it comes to anything to do with females-you’ll find a man somewhere in the world who has some kind of weird fetish- from the obvious to women’s shoes, women’s hair brushes and beyond etc

Not attractive, nice and natural is the only way top go

Probably don't feel very nice either.

They look like some sort of weird lego brick. Like you get a lego person and you either leave it plain or stick half circular bricks onto the front.

^^ Yeah you're right. They're probably rock-like too. They look like you could bounce stuff off of them and put your eye out.

it is true (i believe)

my mum is a specialist nurse and she went to china and japan on a corse thingy and she saw some peoples feet like that
(she didnt take n e pictures if ur wondering but i go by her word)

she also saw them eat an alive fish wich for me is more disterbing

I'd rather eat an alive fish then have my feet done like that

i watched a documentary on that .. the male in china love women with tiny feet thats why they bound there feet like that so yeah ....

My ex mother inlaw has a pair of those old shoes. She inherited them. They were creepy. (of course so is she) I wouldnt want them in my house.

You think foot binding was bad? Read this (this is still done to this day) Warning this is VERY GRAPHICH. ----------- For males, circumcision is a messy but comparatively trivial operation, whereas for females, clitoridectomy is not only painful beyond belief, but is the equivalent of total castration. All of the women whom I know personally, who have undergone pharaonic circumcision and have been infibulated, say they have never recovered from it - physically or mentally - and of course, they are absolutely incapable of experiencing any sexual pleasure. On the contrary, sex is very painful for them.

No doubt, Eastern men have always nourished , and still nourish, a deep visceral fear and distrust of all infant females - some of the bright ones might grow into brainy women who would go after them with meat cleavers, join "Women's Lib", demand equal rights, etc. So, aeons ago, the ancestors of Semitic 'machos' reached the conclusion that the only way to beat the deadly females of their species was to circumcise them first, then lock them up in harems or zenanas.

Pharaonic circumcision and infibulation is regarded as the only one hundred percent effective way to safeguard a girl's virginity. Indeed, it is so effective that, for intercourse to take place after marriage, the husband or matron has to defibulate the bride with a knife to pry her open.

The ghastly screams and shrieks which have terrified so many foreign tourists at night in the vicinity of "Honeymoon" hotels in Port Sudan are emitted by brides being defibulated. A Sudanese journalist commented, "For us they seem perfectly normal, we all know that the first nights of marriage are agony."

But just what is pharaonic circumcision? I have seen it being done when I was staying as a guest in the home of wealthy Arab friends. A great feast had been prepared to which all female relatives and friends had been invited, and since I was regarded as a guest of honor, I not only had to attend, but was given a ringside seat. The miserable little victim - a beautiful child, incidentally - was grabbed by four women, who threw her upon a sort of pallet on the ground and pinioned her arms and legs. Then the gedda, or specialist, or matron, or whatever you want to call her, kneeled between the little girl's thighs and began the operation by slicing off the clitoris. All of the women present began making the most prodigious din (by ullulations), which they kept up during the whole operation in a futile effort to drown the howls and shrieks of agony of the patient. As soon as the clitoris had been excised, the matron scooped (roughly speaking) it out, then began to pull and tug to extract its roots. Blood gushed left, right and center. This was only an hors d'oeuvre - the next step consisted in shearing off the edges of the inner lips, then carving off the rim of the outer lips, from which the gedda removed a gory ribbon of flesh about 2 centimeters in width. Where the clitoris had once been was a gaping hole from which blood poured. I will spare you a few other details which I would rather not enlarge upon. Finally, the matron stitched up the raw and bleeding flesh, after which she carefully inserted a tiny hollow tube into the lower portion of the vagina, to allow for the passage of urine and menstrual blood. This, so I was subsequently informed, was to remain in place until the scar had formed. The 'operation' had lasted all of twenty minutes. Finally, the patient was bound up with cords from the hips to the knees to prevent her from making any movements which might cause the stitches to burst. For fifteen days, all girls who have been infibulated have to remain motionless, supine, and trussed up like fowls.

LINK http://www.challenging-islam.org/articles/circumcision.htm

And in the US in recent years, foot binding become a semi-popular fetish disciple within the BDSM community (still not quite as popular as corsetting though). Ugh.

Of course, me only being 5'2", I have been wearing 4" heels since I was 15 or so. In my late 20's and early 30's I actually suffered shortened achilles tendons in my legs and could not stand flat footed. It took almost 3 years of carefully reducing the height of my heels (painful!!!) before they were completely stretched back out to normal flat-footed length. I still occasionally wear heels, but I'm VERY careful not to wear them for more than a handful of hours at a time. So ya, even we highly evolved western women do some pretty damn stupid things to our bodies sometimes.

There is the foot of a bound lady at the Huntarian College of Surgeons in London. It's quite shocking to see just how disfigured it is.

They are SICK!!!

~*~

Just the foot? Ugh. That in itself is gross. But being a College of Sugeons, there is probably more gross stuff there as well........

Yeah I agree. It's terrible.

that's just nasty!!

It wasn't only nasty. The women suffered from excruciating pain their entire lives, day and night. Although the feet did enventually stop growing when the women were adults, the toenails continued to grow inwards into the flesh of the feet. Every step was torture. Have any of you read 'Wild Swans' by Jung Chang? It's an excellent book about three generations of Chinese women over the last century. Chang's grandmother still had bound feet, and she describes her sufferings in the book. Horrible! And apparently they stank terribly because of the rotting flesh on parts of the feet...I don't think we can even begin to imagine what these women went through!

I just finished reading a book, where this procedure was done...Alot of these girls were from poor villages, and so they had their feet bound to meet wealthy husbands...It was so explicit, that I had to skip over certain sentences...They didn't have a choice in the matter,it was just done, and many young girls died while this procedure was being done....how horrible....but such was the custom...

its just like in that place where women wear a huge necklace to make there necks longer and if they take em off they could die or something??

omg. how in the heck ar wounded feet sexy or enchance beauty? i mean boobs some guys like *spam filter* so it explains our womenly and even manly reasons to enchance beauty like bigger lips, butts, by surgery yeah it hurts , but no man complains, or women, unless there left even worse than before ofcoarse,
but how was wounded feet supose to enchnce beauty? i think its gross. and my feet hurted just looking at it.

but, i hope no one gets offended, i mean i respect every religion and culture there is, but ..yeah.

wow yeah. it makes me thankful to be from this generation where women have rights now, ofcoarse there's still sexists and always will be somethign wrong, but boy am i thankful to be from these days. well i dont know about other countries if their as free as here, but thank you USA lol .