The Lotus Lovers

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I have for long been interested in footbinding not so much as an isolated Chinese institution but rather as the most striking example of the strange things that women do or have done to them, in almost all cultures, in order to make themselves more attractive to men. One non-Chinese example of such propen­sities, which has intrigued me for fifty years, is the habit of women in old Japan of shaving off their eyebrows and painting false eyebrows higher up on the forehead, and again of black­ening their teeth. One thinks of the women in Africa who elongate their necks and adorn them with innumerable neck­laces; and others who wear large round disks suspended from their lower lips. One of the values of Mr. Levy’s well-documented book on footbinding in China is that it will give material to anyone writing a general anthropological study of such selfmutilations or selfmodifications in all parts of the world.

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