Sexual practices of foot binding

For many people, the idea of sexual techniques being demonstrated on TV and slogans such as "I want orgasms! In fact, the answer to this question depends on how we define "traditional. In most people's conception, sexual attitudes in the West are relatively open, while those in China are relatively reserved. Chan Hing-ho, a researcher at France's Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques, who holds a doctorate in literature, says that when people compare China and the West, they generally compare modern China with the modern West. But they are quite unaware that sexual repression in the West in the middle ages was far more severe than in ancient China.

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The photographer Jo Farrell tracked down 50 surviving women whose feet had been bound. Many could no longer walk, and kept their disfigurement hidden. Her career-long interest is in documenting disappearing cultural practices, and in she got chatting to a Shanghai taxi driver about foot binding. She became the first woman in my project. What followed was a nine-year journey across China , tracking down the last survivors of foot binding.

Deliberately crippled to conform to male ideals of beauty, these strange, pathetic creatures - to Western eyes - embodied the mysterious ways of the East. Carefully sanitised by euphemistic nonsense, foot binding was considered a quaint cultural taste that no outsider could ever fathom. In reality, the underlying appeal was explicitly sexual. Crippled feet required one to walk in a certain mincing manner to avoid toppling over; as a result, it was believed, the inner thigh and pelvic muscles became unusually tight.