The most pronounced and the best known example of such normal foot-fetichism at the present day is certainly to be found among the Southern Chinese.  For a Chinese husband his wife’s foot is more interesting than her face.  A Chinese woman is as shy of showing her feet to a man as a European woman her breasts; they are reserved for her husband’s eyes alone, and to look at a woman’s feet in the street is highly improper and indelicate.  Chinese foot-fetichism is connected with the custom of compressing the feet.  This custom appears to rest on the fact that Chinese women naturally possess a very small foot and is thus an example of the universal tendency in the search for beauty to accentuate, even by deformation, the racial characteristics.  But there is more than this.  Beauty is largely a name for sexual attractiveness, and the energy expended in the effort to make the Chinese woman’s small foot still smaller is a measure of the sexual fascination which it exerts.  The practice arose on the basis of the sexual attractiveness of the foot, though it has doubtless served to heighten that attractiveness, just as the small waist, which (if we may follow Stratz) is a characteristic beauty of the European woman, becomes to the average European man still more attractive when accentuated, even to the extent of deformity, by the compression of the corset.

Referring to the sexual fascination exerted by the foot in China, Matignon writes:  “My attention has been drawn to this point by a large number of pornographic engravings, of which the Chinese are very fond.  In all these lascivious scenes we see the male voluptuously fondling the woman’s foot.  When a Celestial takes into his hand a woman’s foot, especially if it is very small, the effect upon him is precisely the same as is provoked in a European by the palpation of a young and firm bosom.  All the Celestials whom I have interrogated on this point have replied unanimously:  ’Oh, a little foot!  You Europeans cannot understand how exquisite, how sweet, how exciting it is!’ The contact of the genital organ with the little foot produces in the male an indescribable degree of voluptuous feeling, and women skilled in love know that to arouse the ardor of their lovers a better method than all Chinese aphrodisiacs—­including ‘giusen’ and swallows’ nests—­is to take the penis between their feet.  It is not rare to find Chinese Christians accusing themselves at confession of having had ’evil thoughts on looking at a woman’s foot.’” (Dr. J. Matignon, “A propos d’un Pied de Chinoise,” Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, 1898.)

It is said that a Chinese Empress, noted for her vice and having a congenital club foot, about the year 1100 B.C., desired all women to resemble her, and that the practice of compressing the foot thus arose.  But this is only tradition, since, in 300 B.C., Chinese books were destroyed (Morache, Art.  “Chine,” Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des Sciences Medicales, p. 191).