I agree that the women were victims of having to "adjust" their bodies. However, I think Chinese women whose feet were bound DID consider it attractive. Here's an NPR story about it:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8966942
Well, it does help one psychologically to come to love one's deformity. Helps people move on with their lives with a better attitude. Since footbinding is done ideally when a girl is young, she would be just another child who had no choice and through constant indoctrination from her female relatives and men, came to like and find attractive what she had.
African women who favor female circumcision think that women's genitals are ugly without it.
Some do, I'm sure. Or else they're speaking the party (men's) line. Most of the literature I read on the subject is that older women's attitude is if they "had to suffer, then so does the younger generation". It had nothing to do with sexual aesthetics.
A fellow but older student I had in my speech class at college said he lived in Indonesia for awhile after getting out of the Navy. The men there found it strange that he wanted and enjoyed talking with their wives. They got to talking about marriage and relations between spouses and the men quite confidently assured him that their wives "found their [sexual] pleasure in pleasing them". When the student turned to the wives and asked if this was true, the wives all looked at each other then quickly nodded, "Oh yes, we get our pleasure from pleasing our husbands."
Women speaking the "party" line.
Western women who wear high heels or shave their legs think that's what's necessary to be attractive.
Depends. Why are women wearing high heels? I personally think my feet are unattractive and are more so in flat shoes. High heels makes them look much more pleasing to the eye, more streamlined. And I know a bunch of ethnic women who don't bother shaving, so it's not as cut and dried in the West as we might think.
But I was thinking earlier tonight: It's funny that what's considered attractive for women often has so much to do with keeping women from being strong and/or functional. Bound feet or high heels keep them from running. Expensive dresses in luxury fabrics keeps them from rugged activities. Long painted nails keeps them from using their fingers. Makeup, etc., inhibits their time to do other things.
You could look at it that way. They are also things that makes women
different from men. What men - straight men anyway - tend to find attractive in women is that we're different from them. So the more we are different, the more attractive they find it. Since men tend to spend a lifetime in unconscious competition with other men, they tend not to like competition from a possible sexual partner - it's threatening - so if a woman can look more helpless and more vulnerable
and not so threatening, then they like that too.
Most sandals, no.
I can't run in any.
And you notice that only women wear sandals to work.
Only in this country. I see quite a few African and Indian men wearing sandals
everywhere.
Men's work shoes aren't ideal for running. But I bet there weren't many men who felt the need to take their shoes off on 9/11.
I bet there were a few who wanted to. Leather-soled shoes are extremely slippery. I remember reading about one Port Authority officer on 9/11 who was walking through the underground before the collapse of the Towers, bemoaning the fact that he was ruining his patent leather shoes in the water from all the sprinklers.
Then of course a second later, he comes to and realizes,
I'm going to die in these shoes.
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