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What, did you think face-stretching and skin-piercing were modern fads? Not by a long shot! People have been undergoing painful procedure to modify their bodies (and their looks) for thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of years.
(Image credit: Flickr user Rita Willaert)
Lip stretching is a body modification that goes back 10,000 years and had been practiced all over the world, from Siberia to South America, from the Middle East to Europe, although there is no evidence that the custom traveled from one area to another. The procedure survives only in Africa and among some Amazonian tribes in South America. The practice is seen among women in the Mursi and Surma tribes of Ethiopia. The lower lip is pierced and a peg is inserted, to be replaced with a larger peg as the skin stretches. A plate or labret is inserted when the piercing is large enough. Traditionally, this is done as a young woman prepares to marry, but is now a personal decision rather than an obligation.
(Image credit: Wikipedia user Robrrb)
Skull binding has been practiced at various points in history in widespread parts of the world, with some evidence of Neanderthal skulls that had been shaped around 45,000 BCE in Iraq. The custom of head shaping has been most notable among skulls excavated in Peru, where the practice dates back 9,000 years. The skull can only be shaped during infancy. The bones eventually harden to the point that skull modification would only break the cranial bones. An infant’s skull would be wrapped with cloth (sometimes with wooden boards added) to restrict its expansion sideways, causing the head to grow long and tall instead. This practice was usually restricted to the wealthier classes. Reproductions of such skulls can be purchased online.
(Image credit: Flickr user Northampton Museum)
There is an argument over where the story of Cinderella came from, China, Egypt, or Greece. But the ancient tale of Ye Xian contains a rather creepy clue that the story originated in the land of the original foot fetish. In the Chinese version, the king never even meets our heroine at the ball -he becomes obsessed with finding her solely because of the miniscule size of the shoe she left behind. This makes sense in light of the traditional practice of foot binding. It is estimated that somewhere between a billion and four billion women in China had bound feet between the 10th and 20th centuries.
(Image credit: Flickr user Okinawa Soba)
Foot binding began in the late T’ang dynasty and lasted for about a thousand years, until the 20th century when the practice was outlawed. Why it ever started is the stuff of legends. Some say the public wanted to emulate a Emperor’s favored concubine who had unusually small feet. Others tell of an Empress with club feet and followers who bound their feet in sympathy. There are even tales of an Emperor who ordered his female subjects to undergo the procedure. Whatever the reason for the first foot to be bound, the custom caught on. The reason most often given is that small feet were sexually alluring. Now, anything can be sexually alluring if you are told that it is. Why would crippled, deformed feet make a woman more attractive? The underlying reason is that a woman with bound feet is a status symbol, an indicator of wealth and social standing. Only a man of considerable means could afford to have a wife, concubine, or daughters who couldn’t work.
(Image by Flickr user Okinawa Soba)
The problem with status symbols is that even people without status crave them. In reality, most women in China had to work, whether their feet were bound or not. With their feet mangled in this manner, women were essentially going through life balancing on their heels. As the practice spread from the upper classes to the rest of the population, the only groups that did not bind a daughter’s feet were the Manchus (who still developed a shoe style to imitate the Chinese “lotus walk”), a few ethnic minorities, and some of the women who worked in southern rice paddies. Even poor families doomed their girls to a life of pain, in hopes that she would be able to marry up.
Wolverine has his retractable claws, but real-life technology is catching up with comic book super heroes. Dvice lists eight awesome things you can implant into your body. If someone could have all of these, they would rival any pop culture super hero! Shown is a prosthetic speech implant, which can turn your thoughts into audible communication.
In the future: Turn a prosthetic speech implant up to 11 and you’ve got yourself a sonic scream, à la Banshee. Make it waterproof and you’re just as “super powered” as Aquaman Sammy “Squidboy” Paré. Special throat mics already allow for sub-vocal communication, but implants would take that a step further, perhaps facilitating the ability to speak where we normally wouldn’t be able to.
