This would have been a good deal drier if the author hadn't added in many references to older literature and anecdotes by a variety of women, which I heartily enjoyed. However toward the middle I felt as if the author was meandering when it came to the main thesis, as it were. There's a chapter entitled "Edible Beauty" - it basically outlined the hedonistic lifestyle of the emperor and the upper class in Hangzhou. If you read only that section out of the whole book, you would not have known Aching For Beauty was about footbinding.

Men are gross, no matter what country they're from. I think Wang's idea that women "bonded together" over this issue is true. However, it was more of a reaction to shared suffering rather than women becoming part of a "beauty culture".