Duan Chengshi no relation beauty
Beauty and erotic appeal
Before footbinding was practised in China, admiration for small feet already existed as demonstrated by the Tang dynasty tale of Ye Xian written around 850 by Duan Chengshi. This tale of a girl who lost her shoe and then married a king who sought the owner of the shoe as only her foot was small enough to fit the shoe contains elements of the European story of Cinderella, and is thought to be one of its antecedents. For many, the bound feet were an enhancement to a woman's beauty and made her movement more dainty, and a woman with perfect lotus feet was likely to make a more prestigious marriage. Even while not much was written on the subject of footbinding prior to the latter half of the 19th century, the writings which were done on this topic, particularly by educated men, frequently alluded to the erotic nature and appeal of bound feet in their poetry. The desirability varies with the size of the feet—the perfect bound feet and the most desirable (called 'golden lotuses') would be around 3 Chinese inches (around 10 cm or 4 in) or smaller, while those larger were called 'silver lotuses' (4 Chinese inches—around 13 cm or 5.1 in) or 'iron lotuses' (5 Chinese inches—around 17 cm or 6.7 in—or larger, and thus the least desirable for marriage). Therefore, people had greater expectations for footbinding brides. The belief that footbinding made women more desirable to men is widely used as an explanation for the spread and persistence of footbinding.Some also considered bound feet to be intensely erotic, and Qing Dynasty sex manuals listed 48 different ways of playing with women's bound feet. Some men preferred never to see a woman's bound feet, so they were always concealed within tiny "lotus shoes" and wrappings. According to Robert van Gulik, the bound feet were also considered the most intimate part of a woman's body; in erotic art of the Qing period where the genitalia may be shown, the bound feet were never depicted uncovered. Howard Levy, however, suggests that the barely revealed bound foot may also only function as an initial tease.An effect of the bound feet was the lotus gait, the tiny steps and swaying walk of a woman whose feet had been bound. Women with such deformed feet avoided placing weight on the front of the foot and tended to walk predominantly on their heels. Walking on bound feet necessitated bending the knees slightly and swaying to maintain proper movement and balance, a dainty walk that was also considered to be erotically attractive to some men. Some men found the smell of the bound feet attractive, and some also apparently believed that bound feet would cause layers of folds to develop in the vagina, and that the thighs would become sensuously heavier and the vagina tighter. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud considered footbinding to be a "perversion that corresponds to foot fetishism", and that it appeased male castration anxiety.
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