Cultures of Fetishism by Louise J. Kaplan Page B

playful caresses. Intercourse in this position, although a bit uncomfortable for me, gave my husband exquisite sexual excitement. His rising excitement would make my own excitements rise to heavenly peaks. 23 The basic formula of the alternating red shoe–bare white lotus scenarios my husband had learned from prostitutes. But he invented many of the vari- ations, and his inventiveness enabled me to participate willingly in the joys of
    these scenes. There was one that particularly excited me.
    Our courtyard garden, which was enclosed by small trees and hidden from view, was open to the sky. On moonlit nights, my husband would like to sit on the stone stool in our garden. He liked me to start out wearing my red embroidered slippers and stand before him fully dressed. He instructed me to clasp his neck with my right arm and balance myself on my right foot only. My left foot was to be drawn upwards. I would take off my left shoe and place the exposed lotus in his left palm. He would encircle my waist with his right arm and kiss me as I leaned forward. He would bite my tongue and then begin caressing it with his tongue as he caressed my left Lotus between his palm and three middle fingers. With our tongues caressing and one Lotus touching earth like a red pepper and the other in his palm like a slender bamboo shoot, we needed no other pleasures. 24
    In the first five years of our marriage we had two sons. Our last child, who came to us almost as a surprise, ten years after our second son, was a girl. A year or so after our daughter’s birth, my husband had begun to become a stranger to me. Though he had been a devoted Lotus lover throughout his youth and the first fifteen years of our marriage, each year after the turn of the century he became more and more aware that footbinding was considered politically incorrect. If it got around that he favored such an antiquated practice, it would diminish his prospects for advancing his career in the government and probably severely curtail the profits from his business deal- ings. He had always been a man who kept up with the times. When he heard that pigtails would soon be outlawed, he immediately cut off his beautiful long pigtail, which for all these long years he had regarded as a mark of his manhood, much as my Lotuses had been the mark of my womanhood. He had worn his pigtail with pride and dignity. Now, he prided himself on his liberal political and social ideas. Yet, despite his willingness to give up his pigtail and despite his advanced social ideals, he had managed to resist the foot emancipation movement until after the earliest years of the century.
    However, the 1910 Revolution, with its emphasis on social equality and the emancipation of women, would set in motion the nationwide events that would eventually bring an end to footbinding in China. After nearly four thousand years (2100BC–1900AD) it took only a decade or so, less than one generation, for the practice to almost disappear. By 1910 most well-to-do families had decided that their daughters would have natural feet. Very few girls born after 1920 had their feet bound. The tragic generations were woman my age and older, any woman who had been born before 1907. 25
    As early as 1897, foreign missionaries were running a natural foot society in Shanghai. They petitioned the Emperor that children born after 1897 should not be recognized as citizens unless they had natural feet. The year after my second son was born the Empress Dowager, under pressure, issued “The Anti-Footbinding Edict of 1902.” After the 1910 Revolution, there were foot emancipation edicts announced every day. 26 There were public demonstrations and newspaper editorials denouncing the practice as a sign of barbarism and reactionary political directions. In most towns and villages the local governments recommended coercive measures to assure the abolition of bound feet. Girls under fifteen were told to unbind their feet, or were for- bidden to bind