Page "Foot binding" Paragraph 19

Bound feet were once considered intensely erotic in Chinese culture, and a woman with perfect lotus feet was likely to make a more prestigious marriage.

Qing Dynasty sex manuals listed 48 different ways of playing with women's bound feet.

Some men preferred never to see a woman's bound feet, so they were always concealed within tiny " lotus shoes " and wrappings.

Feng Xun is recorded as stating, " If you remove the shoes and bindings, the aesthetic feeling will be destroyed forever "— an indication that men understood that the symbolic erotic fantasy of bound feet did not correspond to its unpleasant physical reality, which was therefore to be kept hidden.