How far would you go to be Three Inches Taller?
Last week I was watching Oprah, and the show was on the price people around the world for beauty and to help conform to each society’s standard.
In China, how tall someone is holds such importance there are height requirements to get into College, apply for jobs, and, in some locations, to even apply for a Driver’s License (man…and I used to think needing to be a certain height to get on a Carnival ride was rough).
With taller people getting such preferential treatment, it almost goes without saying potential mates put an enormous level of importance on the height of their future husbands and wives, fully believing taller men and women are destined to have happier lives than shorter ones.
And I guess if you can’t get into college, get a job or even drive a car, there’s some societal-mandated truth to that.
(In case you’re curious, the average minimum height requirements for the majority of items were 5′ 3” for women and 5′ 7” for men, although you need to be at least a 5′ 1” woman to drive a car)
With height being such an incredible determining factor in their education, career and romantic prospects, quite a few Chinese citizens are undergoing an extremely painful Leg Lengthening operation to make them a few inches taller.
In the height-increasing operation (this is a bit graphic. and nasty.) doctors saw through patients’ flesh and bone below the knee to insert what looks kind of like knitting needles through the length of the leg bone, and pull the two pieces of the saw-through bone apart….this causes the bone to eventually regrow in the space in between, leaving the patient anywhere from one to four inches taller.
Before they emerge as taller versions of themselves, I should also mention the “knitting needle” steel pins are connected by eight screws punched horizontally through the ankle and calf to a steel cage surrounding each leg.
Yeah….OUCH.
Once the bone starts to heal, each day over the next few months (up to one year in some cases) patients need to turn the screws a teeny fraction and stretch their limbs.
Pretty gross, right? I thought so.
However, if my entire future was dependent on whether I was 5′ 1” or 5′ 4”, you can better believe I’d plunk myself down on that operating table and turn those nasty Tower of London-ish screws until I was able to get a job, college diploma and a dude.
Besides, when you think about it, is doing this that much different than what people put themselves through in the States?
Cutting our facial muscles and skin to yank it back tighter than a drum, jamming bags of poisonous silicone under our chest muscles, putting Botulism into our face or cutting into our bodies and sucking out fat with a Dyson-like apparatus….
When you look at it like that, those all sound pretty gross on paper, too. And as someone who got breast implants seven years ago (only to have them removed three years later), I can also tell you they hurt like a sonofabitch.
What are your thoughts on the leg-lengthening procedure? Would you do it? What if you lived in China?
Holy shit. I’ve heard of that surgery, but it sounds as though it hurts like HELL.
But you make a good point — is it really *that* much different than the surgeries we put ourselves through?
there is still a lot of preferential treatment based on height in the U.S. too; it’s been proven that tall males wind up in higher on the company ladder irregardless of their intelligence (which is why I breathe a sigh of relief that my son is tall).
I’ve never heard of that procedure but it sounds like a dark ages torture technique.
I know this sounds terribly cavalier, but it’s the truth: if I lived in China, and my success depended on my height, I would move. That procedure sounds like the worst thing I can imagine.
Other than the fact that it makes it a little harder for me to control my weight, I actually rather like being petite. It’s a shame that every culture seems to have its own way of making people feel inadequate.
Now that’s interesting…I’m pretty happy with my height. I can’t walk in heels, not sure I could handle longer legs.
Susan – It DOES sound pretty painful!
Carma – I agree…it does help in the US to be a bit taller for sure.
Joy – The pictures make it look like a Spanish Inquisition torture method!
Bachelor Girl – It does sound infinitely worse than a facelift…and worth moving for!
Lee – If you don’t walk well in heels, I strongly suggest waiting on the leg-lengthening procedure
I can’t even imagine that hellish surgery, OMG!!!!! If i were too short to do anything I think i’d try to flee the country and go to a short person colony where I could drive and be appreciated. but seriously, that is just crazy. the surgery here in the us is also crazy to me though!
I would LOVE to be 3 inches taller…that would make me abt 5’9.
But screw my legs? Ew. I pass.
So, you go through the surgery get married, then give your children growth hormones to beat their own genetics. They won’t need the surgery, and the next thing you know, we’re fighting a billion Ivan Dragos.
We have been reading about this for years, and it never stops sounding horrifying.
This is basically extreme cosmetic surgery – it sounds more barbaric than a nose job, but only because bone work requires tougher measures than cartilage and muscle.
But if you have ever seen how a liposuction is performed, with them making holes and then plunging the huge hollow needle repeatedly though the fatty tissue to break it up…. that stuff is nasty, and no less barbaric. Yuck to it all.
I’d never have that surgery even it it was for free. I’d like to be taller, especially if I could keep the same weight, it would make my belly and butt look thinner, no so bad!
Secretia
I guess I’m glad I’m 6’3″