Body Modification All throughout history humans have been trying to make themselves look different from one another. Some will do this by what they wear or how they style their hair; however others will try to change their bodies completely. There are many ways to modify your body, some are more painful than others, but all are shocking when they are seen. Some will mark your body to tell a story, others will stretch your body, and the most extreme will shrink your body. Tattoos are a very popular way to express yourself by marking your body; however some people chose to mark their bodies in more extreme ways. Scarification is done by cutting the skin or burnt with a cauterizing tool repeatedly until it’s wide enough to form a raised scar. …show more content…
The Burmese and Tibetans tribes in Thailand are known to do this to their women’s necks using neck rings. About 40,000 women wear these rings around their neck to show their beauty and identity, the rings also ensure that the women are only married within the tribes. The neck rings also serve the purpose to protect them from slave traders and tiger bites, but also symbolize the neck of a dragon. When the girls are five years old they get their first few coils around their neck. Later in life the girls will get more and more coils until they are satisfied with the length of their neck. The neck rings press down into the women’s ribcages and collarbone to make the neck appear longer. This causes bruises and discoloration to occur which can be seen when the coils are removed for a medical exam. Removing the rings is a grudging lengthy procedure and is only done when …show more content…
Foot binding began in ancient china during the Tang Dynasty (618-960) and continued until the end of the 19th century. Foot binding began as a practice only for the wealthy women but it eventually spread to the lower classes until about 50% of all women had their feet bound. Women began binding their feet when they were about four years old, the process started in the winter when the cold would numb their feet making the pain more bearable. Bandages were soaked in blood and herbs to soften the feet and were wrapped with 10 feet of wrap and tightened daily to make the foot smaller and shaped like a crescent moon. To achieve a tiny foot some women would put glass shards in their binding to make the toes infected and have to be cut off, many died from the infection they inflicted upon themselves. The ideal shape of the foot was bent like a crescent moon towards the heel and only three inches long, the foot would then be placed in a beautiful tiny shoe and was adored by the men of china. To keep the men from seeing or smelling their infected feet the women would always keep the shoes and bandages on ,except when rebinding, and perfume their feet to keep the foul odor down. Men would choose women for their wives based on their feet; some would even refuse a woman if her feet were not bound. The walk that bound feet caused the women to have been thought to make them more sexually appealing because
Years later during the Ming and Ch’ing eras it became wide spread among all status levels. Footbinding is a mutilation of the feet by wrapping them up weeks upon weeks to force them into the shape of a lotus flower and keep them at a length of three inches. (p.366) “Small feet became a prestige item to such an extent that a girl without them could not achieve a good marriage arrangement and was subjected to the disrespect and taunts of the community.” (p.364). Eventually lower-class women began using binding to find wealthy husbands.
Following a rough period of half a century, the Song dynasty took power in 960. This began a “Golden Age” of Chinese society. However, the role of women did not advance all across the board. It was more in the northern regions that were influenced by nomads. Unfortunately, the new Neo-Confucian influences held almost everywhere else, with the new influences of Buddhism and Daoism. (Strayer 371) In fact, conditions were terrible everywhere else, if not more so than they ever had been before. One example of the terrible factors women had to deal with was foot binding. Foot binding involved the wrapping feet tightly with gauze and stuffing them into specially designed “lotus shoes”. (Foreman) his process, repeated over many years, shrunk a woman’s feet at the expenditure of vast amounts of pain and broken bones. An outside onlooker would ask themselves ‘Why would people do this to their daughters?’, and the answer is quite
Someone with body modifications does not care if others do not have body modifications; however it seems that people without body modifications care a lot more about the people that do. According to the article “The Modern Primitives” by John Leo, Leo confirms my statement by saying that body modifications are a sign of a crisis. In reality, these are people's chosen lifestyles that have absolutely no effect on his everyday life. Within his commentary, Leo discusses the many different forms of body modification such as piercing, tattoos, corsetry, branding, scarring, and S&M. A nose piercing might be on the more “innocent” side of body modification, but scarring by a knife would be on the “more extreme” side, showing the various stages of adversity.
We all are unique in a different way; our body is different just like our face color. Thin, fat, thick, or over weight each one of us is different from everyone else, this is what make us individual. By changing your body it’s like taking away your identity and personality. The author suggest that plastic surgery is being done from one women pulled from exactly the same face structure and mostly they all look the same. Most people think when they get cosmetic surgery done they’re becoming in with their own ideas on what they wanted to look like, but if you really think about most people undergo surgery hoping to look better and to look way different that they use to. It is unfortunate because one shouldn’t feel the need or necessary to alter their face or body to look more beautiful or perfect. People should have a surgery to change their inside instead of outside. Most of the things we do are to feel included and to feel like someone is paying some attention to us. Society don’t really pay attention or care about that one fat girl who sits in the cafeteria by her self with a big nose and an ugly face, but that girl with a long hair, a perfect smile, and face structure is one that everyone remember. It is just so unfair and sad that society have to tell us what beautiful and what
Written by Feng Jicai, The Three-Inch Golden Lotus centers around a woman named Fragrant Lotus, and the influence foot binding has on her life. At the beginning of the story, Fragrant Lotus is introduced as a young child who is raised by her grandmother, whom she affectionately calls Granny. As her sole caregiver, Fragrant Lotus places a great amount of trust in her Granny, but when the time came for her to have her feet bound, she is utterly terrified. Dating back to 961, foot binding was a practice deeply ingrained in Chinese culture, until its abolishment in the early 20th century. A very painful and tedious procedure, foot binding involved repeated breaking of the fine, unmatured bones of a young girl’s feet. The feet were then bound extremely tight with cloth strips until it was able to fit a three inch shoe. A custom passed from generation to generation, foot binding was viewed as the rite of passage from girl to woman. In addition, bound feet, also referred to as “lotus”, were viewed as a measure of a woman’s beauty and was a heavy determinant of her marriage capability. Granny, a wise woman, knew of the good fortune a perfect pair of lotus would bring, and painstakingly invested in her granddaughter’s future. What followed for Fragrant Lotus ...
The ancient Chinese custom of footbinding caused severe life-long suffering for the Chinese women involved. When researching the subject of footbinding, one of the difficult things is finding factual knowledge written before the 20th century. Most of the historical data has been gathered from writings, drawings and photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries. Additionally, the research indicates that the historical documentation was mainly from missionary accounts and literature from various anti-footbinding societies. These groups had a bias because of their opposing viewpoints. The first documented reference to footbinding was from the Southern Tang Dynasty in Nanjing (Vento 1).
O-lan's physical appearance showed her as a very modest woman. When Wang Lung sees her, he stares at O-lan seeing that, "plain though her face was and rough the skin upon her hands the flesh of her big body was soft and untouched . . . her body was beautiful, spare, and big boned yet rounded and soft" (26). From her physical qualities, it is clear that O-lan isn't a spoiled woman who sits around all day, but a hard worker. She is described as an ugly, flat-footed, stolid-faced woman. Many times, Wang Lung secretly wishes that O-lan didn't have such big feet. During the time of this book, women's feet were bound so they would be smaller. O-lan had big feet because they were never bound. This was another aspect of Chinese life that seemed designed to make women suffer was the practice of altering the feet of girls so they could barely walk. The Chinese custom of foot binding was meant to please men esthetically and to enhance a man's status by showing he was wealthy enough for his wife or concubine not to work.
We, as humans, face the most difficult challenges: conformity. We inadvertently aim to be what we see depicted in the environment around us. In many instances, we do so under extreme circumstances without regard to the consequences. Around the globe, different beauty practices of enduring violence and pain, mutilation and self-mutilation can be found in almost every culture. In the Chinese culture, binding one's feet are done in order to achieve a certain length. Foot binding has disappeared from modern-day China, but it was once accepted and a promoted practice among many Chinese women. The origin of such culture, beauty practice is somewhat a mystery; there are many theories as to why women began to bind their feet. The reasons why women began binding their feet are not the only field of importance, why it became popular for women to bind their feet, how and why it became accepted in the Chinese culture and the consequences due to these practices are considered as well. Foot binding was known as a cultural practice that represented femininity and eroticism through physical and mental violence. In this cultural practice, it is believed that foot binding speaks multiple languages; seduction, eroticism, virtue, discipline and sacrifice. Both mother and daughter mutilated their feet in hopes of fulfilling
“Body Art as Visual Language” by Enid Schildkrout talks about the different forms of body modifications, and their meanings within different cultures. For example, Schildkrout says “Head shaping may be a sign of high status in one culture and low status in another, but to a total outsider, these practices may appear to be simply mutilation.” In this quote, the author talks about how one body
Also in China girls are made to bind there feet up at an early age so
Tradition of humans permanently marking their bodies has consistently been utilized as a means of identification. Greeks used it as a form of punishment and branding of those considered as “others” which comprised of slaves and convicts- ideology that was then carried over into Roman culture as a tool of state control (Fisher, 2002). Indigenous tribes that lacked a written language applied tattoos as a system of visual communication. Both the Osage and Omaha tribes tattooed themselves based on success in warfare, bearing a skull on the back of their heads to signify victory in battle. Inuit men would mark on themselves how many whales they hunted, while ink on women conveyed marital status (Porcella, 2009). Despite a long-standing history in other cultures, it is emphasized that the Polynesian and Japanese cultures are largely responsible for the diffusion of tattoos into Western society.
Body modification by definition is deliberating altering the human body. Most people at one point has altered his or her body at one point whether is to dye his or her hair or to get piercings or getting a tattoo. Since there are many different types of body modifications, most people do not think about extreme body modifications such as piercing in the genitals, splitting the genitals, horn implants, body suspensions, and many more. Body modifications can be deviant and they do lead people to perceive those individuals as criminals, and body modifications can effect on a person’s life.
Tattooing is the art of marking the skin with indelible patterns, pictures, or legends by making pricks and inserting colored ink. The word itself has its origins in the South Pacific. The art had been referred to as pricking, scarring, or staining until explorer Captain James Cook encountered the indigenous peoples of Tahiti. (Wilkinson 6)
In her article "The body as attire," Dorothy Ko (1997) reviewed the history about foot binding in seventeenth-century China, and expressed a creative viewpoint. Foot binding began in Song Dynasty, and was just popular in upper social society. With the gradually popularization of foot binding, in the end of Song Dynasty, it became generally popular. In Qing Dynasty, foot binding was endowed deeper meaning that was termed into a tool to against Manchu rule. The author, Dorothy Ko, studied from another aspect which was women themselves to understand and explained her shifting meaning of foot binding. Dorothy Ko contends that “Chinese Elite males in the seventeenth century regarded foot binding in three ways: as an expression of Chinese wen civility,
From this statement, foot binding symbolizes national identity, which distinguishes itself from other nations. Under this circumstance, barbarians are trapped in this plight that obeying the rules of Han people would demonstrate their civility but lose their military force but disobeying the principles of such people seems prove their rude, brutal nature and behavior. In this way, foot binding is entrusted with a double mission from the perspective of ethnic, cultural, social factors by pinning women in a contradictory logic. Nonetheless, since Huang Taiji crowned himself, he commanded all the people to follow his rule by prohibiting anything relevant to Ming Dynasty, no matter in attire, hairstyle or foot binding. All the previous traditional culture are forsaken under any circumstance and anyone who against the rule would be punished severely.