Category:
Body Modifications
Body Modifications
Bust Cream or Food
If it doesn't enlarge your bust, you can serve it for dinner.Source: 1897 Sear Roebuck Catalogue
Posted By: Alex - Fri May 26, 2023 -
Comments (4)
Category: Body Modifications, Advertising, Patent Medicines, Nostrums and Snake Oil, Nineteenth Century
Zoom!
Before it was videotelephone software, Zoom was a bustline enhancer.
Cosmopolitan - Feb 1957
Posted By: Alex - Wed Apr 05, 2023 -
Comments (2)
Category: Body Modifications, Patent Medicines, Nostrums and Snake Oil, 1950s
A Swishing Sound
A letter to the editor that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (August 18, 1994):
Posted By: Alex - Tue Mar 29, 2022 -
Comments (0)
Category: Body Modifications, Noises and Other Public Disturbances of the Peace
Secret Shoulder Straps
Source.
Posted By: Paul - Sun Jan 09, 2022 -
Comments (2)
Category: Body Modifications, Fashion, Inventions, Nineteenth Century
Rejuvenique Facial Toning Mask
Still being made and sold! Get yours via the Amazon link below!
Posted By: Paul - Tue Jan 04, 2022 -
Comments (3)
Category: Beauty, Ugliness and Other Aesthetic Issues, Body Modifications, Inventions, Technology, Twentieth Century, Twenty-first Century
Self-castration in early Christianity
Some ancient weirdness: The First Council of Nicaea, in 325 AD, was a meeting of Christian bishops in which they tried to establish the rules and doctrines that all Christians were supposed to follow. Wikipedia says:Its main accomplishments were settlement of the Christological issue of the divine nature of God the Son and his relationship to God the Father, the construction of the first part of the Nicene Creed, mandating uniform observance of the date of Easter, and promulgation of early canon law.
However, one of the lesser-known rules that the bishops enacted at the Council was to ban men who had castrated themselves from being in the clergy. Because, apparently, self-castration had become something of a fad among early Christians. Enough so that the bishops felt the need to put an official stop to the practice.
The historian Daniel Caner has examined this issue in his 1997 article "The practice and prohibition of self-castration in early Christianity".
Caner notes that the fad had its origin in a passage from the New Testament, Matthew 19:12, in which Jesus appears to endorse the practice of self-castration. As the passage reads in the King James translation:
For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb; and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men; and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.
Most interpreters of the Bible, ancient and modern, argue that when Jesus used the word 'eunuch' he meant it as a synonym for 'celibacy'. Apparently this was a common use of the term 'eunuch' in the ancient world.
Nevertheless, he used the term eunuch. So some early Christians decided the passage should be taken literally. In which case, Jesus seemed to be saying that, while self-castration was not appropriate for all men, for an elite few it was an ideal to strive for. Inspired by this passage, a number of men "took the sickle and cut off [their] private parts."
The most prominent Church father who was said to have castrated himself was Origen of Alexandria (c. 185 - c. 253). But Caner notes that there was an entire sect of early Christians, the Valesians, who embraced the practice. Wikipedia says that, in addition to castrating themselves, "They were notorious for forcibly castrating travelers whom they encountered and guests who visited them."
According to Caner, the more widely adopted Christianity became in the Roman empire, the more the Church tried to present itself as the upholder of mainstream values, and self-castration really didn't fit into that image. Therefore, "Radical manifestations of an ideal de-sexualization... became a 'heretical' threat to the orthodox community."
Posted By: Alex - Fri Jul 02, 2021 -
Comments (5)
Category: Body Modifications, Fads, Religion, Ancient Times, Genitals
Downsizing the human race
I never saw the 2017 movie Downsizing, but I understand that it involved the premise of shrinking people so that they would use fewer resources.Perhaps the speculations of "theoretical biologist" Thomas Easton, published in Omni magazine in January 1983, may have inspired the movie:
The burgeoning birthrate will cease to be a problem once we've bred a race of humans half normal size. That at least is the prediction of Thomas Easton, a theoretical biologist and technical writing teacher at the University of Maine.
"Cut people down to about three feet in height and they won't eat as much food," Easton says. "Cars could then be the size of little red wagons, with all the old gas guzzlers converted to buses. In fact man's appetite for open space and raw materials would decrease to match his stature.
"This new breed of human," Easton says, "would have far more muscle, with the ability to run and jump almost like a cat. Reduced weight would ease the wear in joints, cutting the prevalence of arthritis. Since less blood would be pumped through a small circulatory system, the heart's work load would be diminished and there would be fewer cardiac arrests.
"The technology to shrink humans," Easton says, "will probably be available within a decade. A genetically engineered virus, carrying genes coded to create small people, could be placed in a reservoir or released in the air. Then everyone infected would absorb the genes and produce lilliputian offspring."
"Cut people down to about three feet in height and they won't eat as much food," Easton says. "Cars could then be the size of little red wagons, with all the old gas guzzlers converted to buses. In fact man's appetite for open space and raw materials would decrease to match his stature.
"This new breed of human," Easton says, "would have far more muscle, with the ability to run and jump almost like a cat. Reduced weight would ease the wear in joints, cutting the prevalence of arthritis. Since less blood would be pumped through a small circulatory system, the heart's work load would be diminished and there would be fewer cardiac arrests.
"The technology to shrink humans," Easton says, "will probably be available within a decade. A genetically engineered virus, carrying genes coded to create small people, could be placed in a reservoir or released in the air. Then everyone infected would absorb the genes and produce lilliputian offspring."
Posted By: Alex - Tue May 04, 2021 -
Comments (7)
Category: Body Modifications, Futurism, 1980s
Artwork Khrushchev Probably Would Not Have Liked 33
Nude Woman with Upraised Arms ca. 1926
Gaston Lachaise American
Posted By: Paul - Sat Feb 20, 2021 -
Comments (0)
Category: Art, Avant Garde, Statues and Monuments, Body Modifications, 1920s, North America
Follies of the Madmen #491
"Our gum will alter your irises!"
Source.
Posted By: Paul - Fri Oct 16, 2020 -
Comments (5)
Category: Body Modifications, Business, Advertising, Junk Food, 1910s, Eyes and Vision
Artwork Khrushchev Probably Would Not Have Liked 28
Tatiana Glebova, 1927.
In "Prision," of which there is a preparatory drawing, the painter depicts a world of multiple orientations through diverse interconnected viewpoints, and shows various heads with their musculature visible as if to reveal to us their interminable growth process. Glebova devoutly believed Filonov’s theories on the “universal flowering” and, like him, held that painting should reflect a growth process of the world similar to that of plants, according to which it was permanently active as an independent being.
Source of text.
Posted By: Paul - Thu Aug 27, 2020 -
Comments (0)
Category: Art, Avant Garde, Body Modifications, 1920s, Russia
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| Alex Boese Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction, science-themed books such as Elephants on Acid and Psychedelic Apes. Paul Di Filippo Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1. Contact Us |