The Psychology of Eating: From Healthy to Disordered Behavior

Dieting 117

to explore the history of dieting and the impact of the dieting industry and
then to assess the central role for control.
For as long as records have been kept and history has been written, the
female body has been seen as something to control and master. Whether
it was in the form of foot-binding, female circumcision, or the wearing
of corsets or bustles, women’s bodies have been viewed with an eye
to changing them. Feet, breasts, waists, thighs, and bottoms have either
been too large or too small according to the fashion of the day. Padding
was used to add size or binding used to reduce. No aspect of the female
body has ever been accepted simply as it is. Dieting is the modern-day
equivalent (Ogden, 1992). To understand the current preoccupation with
dieting it is necessary to understand the history behind the need to change
the female form. Although men and women may vary over the years,
fashions change, and economic climates alter, men are generally larger
than women. They are taller, are wider, have larger feet, and have broader
waists. Changing the female body has often meant emphasizing these
differences. This has taken the form of practices such as foot-binding,
corset-wearing, and breast-binding.

Chinese foot-binding

An old Chinese saying stated, “If you care for a son, you don’t go easy on
his studies; If you care for a daughter, you don’t go easy on her foot-binding.
(Ts’ai-fei lu)” (cited in Daly, 1978, p. 133). Women tend to have smaller
feet than men, and the Chinese tradition of foot-binding emphasized this
difference. As a central part of Chinese life for about a thousand years, it
only began to die out at the beginning of the twentieth century when the
Kuomintang encouraged the “letting out of feet.” Young girls had their feet
bound at about the age of seven. The mutilation process was carried out
by the girl’s mother and other close female relatives, who would bind each
foot so that the large toe pointed upwards and the other toes were tightly
bound under the foot. The young girl would then be made to walk and put
her weight onto the newly bound foot; the bones would break and the struc-
ture of the foot would be rearranged to conform to the “lotus hook” shape
(Daly, 1978). This was an excruciatingly painful process and the young girl
would be left with three-inch long “hooks” or stumps which meant that she
could not run, had to hobble when she walked, or even had to be carried. A
foot-bound woman, however, was marriageable material. “Lotus hooks” were
regarded as objects of desire for men, one of whom has been quoted saying,