Female genital mutilation exposed in Swedish class

[tblue37]

79. Like torturing and crippling little girls by binding and crushing their feet.

Last edited Sun Jun 22, 2014, 01:11 AM - Edit history (1)

When that was a cultural norm in China, a woman with "big" (normal) feet would be considered crude and unattractive, since having "tiny" feet was seen as a sign of social status and wealth (because such a crippled woman could not work). Eventually, being left uncrippled meant a woman was a peasant and therefore not desirable except as someone who would do all the scut work.

Mothers would bind their daughters' feet to make sure they would not be viewed as undesirable and unmarriageable.

In her novel The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck creates a female character whose feet were never bound. The woman always laments the fact that she is undesirable, and that although she works hard, her husband is only attracted to his concubine with tiny "lotus feet. To make sure that her own daughter will not suffer such obstacles in her life, the woman makes sure her feet are tightly bound while she is still a tiny toddler, even though the child screams, weeps, and begs her mother to stop hurting her.

Foot binding literally crushes all the bones of the feet and bends them inward, as though they were being squished in a trash compactor. It is torture, and it cripples the girl for life.

When tiny, tiny waistlines were most desirable for women, they either squished their ribcages with corsets or even had ribs surgically removed. They could scarcely breathe when wearing the corsets.

Now that huge breasts are all the rage, girls in their teens are being given breast augmentation surgery as birthday or graduation gifts by their foolish parents. Even if the girl doesn't suffer catastrophic complications--which, as you know, are always a risk of even minor surgery, much less such major surgery--they are significantly increasing their risk for other health problems in the future.

Look at Priscilla Presley's face. A once attractive woman deformed her face bizarrely in an attempt to achieve a look considered culturally desirable.

FGM is, I think, the worst of the contemporary practices that harm women in the name of making them desirable, but it is not isolated. It is merely at the most extreme end of a horrifying continuum.