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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
My purpose in this paper is to present a non-Marxist conception of exploitation. While this analysis of exploitation may share features with a Marxist conception, its acceptability is not dependent upon a prior agreement with that world view.
1 "The success or failure of footbinding depended on skillful application of a bandage around each foot. The bandage, about two inches wide and ten feet long, was wrapped in the following way: an end was placed on the inside of the instep, and from there it was cornered over the small toes so as to force the toes in and towards the sole. The large toe was left unbound. The bandage was then wrapped around the heel so forcefully that the heel and toes were drawn closer together. The process was then repeated from the beginning until the entire bandage had been applied. The foot of the young child was subjected to a coercive and unremitting pressure for the object was not merely to confine the foot but to make the toes bend under and into the sole and bring the sole and heel as close together as physically possible" as found in Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding, New York, Bell Publishing, 1967. pp. 23-26.
2 Ibid., p. 26.
3 Ibid., p. 29-30.
4 Ibid., p. 41.
5 For the curious, the third volume of The Record of Gathering Radishes, excerpts of which are to be found in Levy's book, detail the connection of the multiple use of the lotus foot during sex play in chapter six "Secret Chronicle of the Lotus Interest", p. 157-171.
6 Ibid., p. 140-141.
7 Ibid., p. 141.
8 Ibid., p. 54.
9 Ibid., p. 110-111.
10 One of the earliest writers, a writer called Ch'e Jo-Shui of the Sung dynasty says: "I don't know when footbinding began. Children not yet four or five years old, innocent and without crime, are caused to suffer limitless pain. What is the use of binding and restraining…?" Ibid., p. 65.
11 The Chien-Lung era 1736-95. See Levy. Ibid., p. 68.
12 Perhaps compulsion is too strong a word here. A colleague, professor Phil Koch, has suggested the possibility that a more powerful group might be exploited by a less powerful group through trickery and deceit. My answer to this apparent counterexample would be to the extent that the more powerful group could be exploited in this way if there is a gap in their power which offers a temporary advantage to the exploiting group. Trickery and deceit imply a lack of manners on the part of the exploited who are perhaps compelled by hidden factors. Nevertheless I am not fully satisfied with this as an answer.
13 Levy reports that the Sung Philosopher Chu Hsi supported footbinding because it promoted chastity by confining woman's place in the home and that it was seen as a "means of spreading Chinese culture and teaching the separation of men and women". Ibid. p. 44. Also, "Traditional apologists asserted that footbinding, by making the woman's foot smaller than a man's, more clearly defined visual points of difference between the sexes" Ibid. p. 30-31.
14 See for example Bruce Holbrook, The Stone Monkey: an Alternative Scientific Reality. He argues among other things that the focal point of Chinese medicine was "health" both individual and social. Morrow, New York, 1981, 408 p.
15 This assertion does not appear to me to require defence. Even in times and places which put in practice at least no high premium on human life. Given a level of development, there were institutions directed explicitly towards the alleviation of the pain of the innocent. See for example William R. Jones "The Clinic in three Medieval Societies", in Diogenes No. 122, Summer 1983, p. 66-101.
16 Hence the use of incarceration as punishment, the use of "lesser evil" to check a greater evil.
17 Of course it might be argued that it is not the slight perceptual differences as such which make for the moral distinction between the sexes but rather either (1) the accumulation of the additive sum of these differences or that (2) the small physical differences simply mark some deeper hidden morally significant difference. In response to (1) it may be asked "which combination and what makes that combination relevant to differences in treatment?" and in response to (2) there can be a demand for evidence, and appeal to such non-question begging evidence is notably lacking in the Confucian rationales.
18 Levy writes "Footbinding was part of a set of rules which insisted on coercing women and treating them as intellectual inferiors… Op. cit. p. 65, and he quotes the last century author Kuan-Yung as opponent of the custom who says, "Men commonly regarded being born as a female retribution for the evil of a former life; a mother might remind her suffering daughter that she was subjected to the pain of footbinding because of an evil done in a previous existence". Ibid., p. 70.
19 This was clearly recognized by Ching Kuan-Yung "the custom of footbinding is unknown throughout the vast universe with the exception of China. Now there is nothing that parents will not do through love of their children, with the one exception of this cruel and senseless custom in which they indulge… The injuring of her physical well-being is looked upon as beautiful, and doing such a profitless thing is regarded as profitable. This is the height of lewdness", p. 71.
20 The whole question of what is "natural" and what is "unnatural" is of course notoriously tricky, while my concept of the "advantageous" coincides with the notion of naturalness: it is not synonomous. The primary advantage is that which enables or enpowers in a direct biological fashion while the secondary advantage only occurs in the mediation of social constructs.
21 Op. cit., p. 110.
22 Ibid., p. 110.
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