BEAUTY AND PAIN

The canons of beauty, several times, follow rituals related to pain, so across the globe we often witness practices of "beauty" which are bizarre and, sometimes, even disturbing. The most emblematic case is that of the Mangbetu tribe of the Congo, which deliberately procures the deformation of the skull because, according to them, the exaggeratedly elongated head is a sign of beauty and intelligence.        

Deformations are also considered a sign of beauty for other peoples, such as Kayan women ("giraffe women") of Thailand, famous worldwide for the heavy brass rings that lead to the neck making it look very long because of the deformation of the collarbone. The weight of the rings, from the initial 3 kg for the girls, reaches even the 10 kg that weigh on the neck, so, if the women then decided to take them off, their head would not be able to hold on, thus causing their suffocation and, consequently, death.

This practice, perhaps originally created to protect the neck from the attacks of tigers, according to several anthropologists is still in vogue to attract the lavish tips of tourists and to make married women less attractive. The same happens to the women of the Apatani Indian tribe who, in order to escape the advances of the men of other ethnicities, decide to embed themselves purposely by inserting large dark wood plaques inside the nostrils.

In addition to deformations, for many peoples even scars are considered a sign of beauty. For example, in Ethiopia more scars determine more beauty, since they correspond to the vital stages of the person. Scarification,  even facial scars, for Ethiopian women does not mean to have disfigured face, but to make themselves more desirable for the men of their tribe. Although this practice may seem very distant from our way of thinking, in reality it is not, just think about tattoos and piercings, which are quite common for us, even the most questionable as the septum or the most showy, as it happens to the Thai women who pierce their cheeks and the women of the Yanomami clans (of Brazil) who are allowed to pass the area around the mouth by long piercing sticks.

Besides the scars, in common Ethiopia is also the labial disc, a clay or wooden plate that the girls carry to signal that they have reached the age to procreate. The plates, which are bigger and bigger up to 20 cm in diameter, also denote their social status (the larger the plate of a woman, the greater the dowry that must be paid to marry her) and are applied by practicing the incision in the lip tissue and, when their diameter reaches 12 cm, it is even necessary to remove the lower incisors, with related chewing problems.

Korean women also experience chewing problems for several months following the broken jaw bone in three parts to get the heart-shaped face, considered beautiful. Getting broken bones is not so unusual, for example, Chinese women consider beautiful feet small, indeed tiny, so the tradition of "the Golden Lotus" (now prohibited by law cause it is considered torture) consisted in bandaging the feet of 5-year-old girls, deforming and breaking their fingers, to get them into a 7 cm shoe even when they grew in stature. This practice was common to the mentality that a woman who endures pain without complaining was considered a good wife.

The body, almost always the female one, is tortured, mutilated and subjected to real torture, when it would be enough to seek only the health and the correct functioning. Across the globe, it seems that the need to appear fascinating and desirable justifies even the most absurd and painful procedures caging people to have to suffer to satisfy the aesthetic standards at the mercy of fashions, entrusting their happiness to a scalpel, an acid or a dangerous ornament. Considering the complete reversal of aesthetic canons only by moving a couple of nations, would not it be appropriate to replace the saying "who wants to look beautiful, a little must suffer" with the more appropriate "is not beautiful what is beautiful, but is beautiful what you like"?