Skip to main content

Tortured Feet

Since it already takes a googobs of money to own many pairs of Jimmy Choos and Manolo Blahniks so getting a toe liposuction to look pretty in them is no big deal in monetary terms. That said, even the idea of shaping toes so they can fit a pair of designer shoes is strongly reminiscent of Chinese foot binding

Foot binding started out as a way for a woman to look beautiful but came to be considered a cruel and inhuman practice. Toe liposuction is now haute coutre but if the long term prognosis is anywhere as dire as foot binding, some day it will get banned too. By then it may have transcended its original role as a way to look perfect in a pair of Jimmy Choos.

"Foot binding not only crippled the women who went through the process but as well as crippled women in China for centuries. Being crippled by foot binding, they had such a little role in the government. It was a custom that started out to define beauty but ended up defining the way the society was."

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Prerona said…
i had read some place that wearing different show heights on different days is whats best for your back. i wonder if there's an anologous mantra for roominess in shoes! lol. not that i'd know - i suffered our own version of childhood footbinding - was never allowed to wear anything but sensible shoes as a kid, and that left me with a total inability to wear pretty shoes as a grown up
5:16 PM
Heartcrossings said…
I went through your version of childhood footbinding too. I was able to wean myself out once I came of age and independent :)
6:23 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more