From an Anthropological Standpoint

My friend and I were discussing a book she was reading the other day. It is a story about women in China and it records a foot binding event that took place in the heroine's life. She, at the age of 8 (late by the standards at the time) had her feet bound to look like "lotus blossoms". It's really very disturbing to see photos of women who have had this ritual done and then to hear an actual account of how it took place. Our conversation then turned to all the different cultural rituals that take place, things from lip and ear disks to neck rings to genital mutilation. My friend made the comment about how grateful she was that our society doesn't do things like that and I couldn't help but point out that first, each culture finds those things appropriate for their members and second, Americans have their own weired ritual in plastic surgery. I think that somehow we assume that since we elect to have our bodies augmented and we do so under anesthesia that it's appropriate. I think it will make a great topic for a book in 150 years when anthropologists dig up skeletons of females with strange, gel-like disks on their rib cages. Can't you read it now? "One hundred fifty years ago, American culture valued large breasted women and it was not uncommon for women of many ages to have gel-like implants placed in their breast tissue, enlarging the breasts, often times at great personal risk to the woman participating in the procedure."