I would like to recommend you a great book called “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan”. It’s a novel which tells a story of two young chinese girls who are soulmates and both have to experience foot binding, a painful process of breaking the bones in order to decrease the feet that they are smaller and more atractive. Because of this practice the girls can’t move theirselves easily. In China the smaller feet you have, the more atractive you are. These two friends are different but both suffer in the same way. They feel like objects, like a property of men. In the book there is shown a social division. The role of a woman in the society boils down mainly to upbringing of the children and to fulfil a “function” of a wife.
This book made mi think of what we are ready to do to satisfy other people, how our society and general rules and trends force us to do. The China’s issue isn’t so distant from our reality, because in our “modern”, western culture we often have to be subordinated to conventions and established canons of beauty, which not always goes hand in hand with what we would like to.
