David Park has an interesting blog article on Chinese women who have their feet bound for the sake of beauty. David notes:

This practice of binding the feet of women was around for almost 1,000 years in China. And to my utter fright, the reasons for such a practice were aesthetic?!

Years of suffering were required to finally achieve the ideal three-inch long foot and the diminuitive shape of a crescent moon so lyrically described by Chinese poets as the quintessence of a refined female form, much like the western image of a perfectly proportioned 36-24-36 inch figure. Many women found themselves under enormous pressure to match this idealized form, particularly those with positions of wealth or status. This was true of women we spoke to in both urban and rural areas, where even today women over the age of sixty with feet longer than four inches are rare.

Even though David’s article is about binding feet and the oppression that comes with that, I wonder if our repulsion to such things will be matched by future generations’ repulsion to today’s standard of beauty. Western society doesn’t bind feet, but in many ways, they bind the waist. Teenage models are binging every day so they will look emaciated and this is a sign of beauty. The west might not force women to tie something around their feet, but women who do not fit the standard of beauty are bound in other ways. God made us in His image. But I guess as long as there is sin, there will be a binding of some sort for cultural beauty’s sake.