Hoax Museum Blog: Body Manipulation

Breast Ironing — When I posted last week about the surgical procedure of hymen repair (and how it's used to fake the appearance of virginity) some people commented that the practice was so widely known that it scarcely warranted inclusion on the site. These same people will doubtless also be familiar with the Cameroon practice of 'breast ironing', but it's new to me, so I'm guessing it'll be new to some other people as well.

According to the BBC, breast ironing: It sounds extremely unpleasant, but the BBC notes that there hasn't been any medical research into the medical effects of it (though doctors warn that it could cause serious damage), so I wonder if it actually prevents tissue growth. And if so, is it only a temporary effect or permanent? I suppose that if you damage the tissue enough it will stunt growth, but I would think that heavy exercise would have a greater effect and be a lot healthier (thin, athletic girls such as ballet dancers and competitive swimmers are known to start puberty later).

Hymen Repair and Fake Virginity Certificates — In Hippo Eats Dwarf I define 'Secondary Virginity' as: "Virginity regained by abstaining from sex for a time." But apparently many Muslim women in Europe are using other means of regaining their virginity. The Associated Press reports: Hymen repair struck me as a rather peculiar operation, and I wondered if it was real or just some kind of medical scam. But some quick research reveals that it is a real procedure, according to Hanne Blank, author of Virgin: The Untouched History: However, as the Wikipedia entry about Hymens points out, the condition of a hymen is a very poor indicator of a woman's sexual history:

Criss Angel Pulls Woman In Half — On YouTube there's a video of magician Criss Angel taking the old "sawing a woman in half" trick a step further. He actually pulls a woman in half, whereupon her upper half crawls away in horror while her legs remain behind wriggling. I, like many other people, have been trying to figure out how he does this trick. All I can conclude is that it's achieved by clever editing of the camera footage. (Which, if true, would make it less a magic trick than a special effect, but entertaining nonetheless.) My reasoning is that the (half of a) woman who crawls away at the end is probably not fake. She's likely a woman who, in real life, has no legs. But this cannot be the same woman who initially walks to the table and lies down on it. (No, I don't think she was using robotic legs, or anything like that.) They are two different women. Which means that at some point the camera must have been turned off, and the one woman replaced the other on the table. This also suggests that everyone in the crowd were actors. That's my theory. But I'm actually hoping it's wrong, because it would be cool if he could have done this without turning the camera off at some point. (Thanks to Captain DaFt for the link.) (And I could have sworn I once posted about another Criss Angel trick in which he crawled through a glass window pane, but for the life of me I can't find the post about this.)

Update: Archibold pointed out that Snopes has a page about this video in which they point out that Ricky Jay has written about a similar early version of this trick in Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women. Sure enough, he has. Participating in this early version of the trick was Johnny Eck, a legless & thighless man who starred in the movie Freaks. So I was right about the woman at the end of the video actually being a legless woman. But this leaves the question: was the woman standing in the crowd also the same legless woman? If so, that's amazing. If not, then I still have no idea how a switch could have been made without the camera being shut off. But I've now got to assume that it's a real trick and no camera tricks were employed.

Air Stockings: Spray-on Pantyhose — This product came out in Japan in 2003, and in America in 2004. The idea behind it is simple. It's a "unique blend of hydrolyzed silk proteins and specially formulated foundation" that you spray on your legs to "recreate the even look of silk hose, without all the hassle. Never worry about runs or tears again!" In other words, it's pseudo-pantyhose. In a July 2004 article in the Houston Chronicle, Liz Embry wrote: My first thought was what it would look like on other parts of the body. Could bank robbers conceal their identity by spraying it on their face? Would it hide a five o'clock shadow? Or could you use it as temporary wall paint? It sounds like the kind of stuff that hobbyists must have found other uses for. It's available for purchase here or here or here. (Thanks to Kathy for the link.)

The Mustache Tattoo — When I first heard about this, I thought it meant that people were tattooing mustaches on their upper lip. Not quite. The mustache is tattooed on your finger, allowing you instantly to don your mustache disguise whenever and wherever necessary. Watch the video and you'll understand. Both men and women are getting these things. Fox News has dubbed it the newest trend in tattoos.

Fake Bellies — This could be useful at baseball games. It's the Beerbelly, "a removable spare tire that serves a stealth beverage." Basically it's a bladder that you fill with your drink of choice and strap around your belly, thereby (when worn beneath a shirt) camouflaging it as a beer gut. (Thanks to Emily for the link)

The beer bladder would definitely be more fun to wear than the empathy belly, which is a "a multi-component, weighted 'garment' that will -- through medically accurate simulation -- enable men, women, teenage girls and boys to experience over 20 symptoms and effects of pregnancy." (I thought I had linked to the empathy belly before, but it didn't come up on a search of the site.)

And while you're at it, you might as well strap on a whizzinator prosthetic penis as well. To complete the theme, I would post a link to an artificial lactating breast, like the one featured in Meet The Fockers, but I don't think any company actually makes such a thing.

Plastic Assets Follow-Up — A month ago I posted about Plastic Assets, a faux credit card company offering free breast implants as a sign-up bonus. I noted that the site was an entrant in the Contagious Festival, a contest to create a high-traffic parody site. Now Plastic Assets has officially won the contest, receiving five times more visitors than its closest competitor. And the media, typically late to the party, are announcing that the site has just been revealed to be a hoax. (Even though I know I wasn't the only site to point out that this was a hoax last month.)

According to the CanWest News Service article, Plastic Assets was designed by Shari Graydon, author of In Your Face: The Culture of Beauty and You, and the site "attracted hundreds of female applicants and more than 130,000 visitors." Graydon concludes from this that "The degree to which our site was believed to be credible despite how over the top it was underlines the fact that people aren't bringing critical thinking skills to what they read on the Internet."

I agree that many people are too gullible about claims they encounter on the internet, but in this instance I'm skeptical about how many people really were fooled. I don't think there's any correlation between the number of visitors the site had, or even the number of applicants it received, and the amount of people who believed it to be real. I figure that most of its visitors recognized it as a joke, and probably filled out the application as a joke also.

The Fat Tax — An article in the current issue of Esquire describes the tax-reform campaign of a sixty-six-year-old recluse named Irwin Leba. His idea is to enact a fat tax. The idea is pretty simple. Charge overweight people higher taxes. That way you raise more tax revenue and encourage people to be healthier, at the same time. Here's exactly how it would work:

sometime between January 1 and April 15, every American will have to visit a government-sponsored weigh station and step on a scale. You'll leave with a notarized certificate attesting to your body-mass index (BMI). If that number is 25.5 or higher—24.9 is officially the upper limit of normal—you'll have to pay Uncle Sam a little something extra, corresponding to how overweight you are and scaled to your income.

You can also check out Leba's website, FatTaxFacts.org, which operates under the umbrella of an organization calling itself the Institute for a Healthy America. No, none of this is real. It's an early April Fool's day joke. Irwin Leba is none other than Alan Abel, who you can see posing in the thumbnail as Leba. Leba is Abel spelled backwards. The hoax was revealed yesterday in the Washington Post.

Skinny Model — A lot of people still stumble upon the "Too Skinny" pictures that I have posted on the site. (Warning: one of the pictures may not be safe for work.) Andrea was one such person, and decided to send in a picture of a real-life skinny model that she once worked with to serve as a comparison. She writes:

I worked for 3 seasons at dolce&gabbanna in milan, italy and all the girl models were very skinny but we had 2 anorexic/bulimic ones, one (the one in the pic) more than the other. The thing that really got to me while working there is that the girl with the best body (thin but curvy, great breasts, ass and legs) was the one that fit into less clothes, no jeans would close or even go all the way up! but even worse than that, there was this new collection of leather/plastic skirts and trousers that we could only fit on the model whose pic i'm sending, two of the trousers we'd even have to close them between 2 people because they were so small... and whenever she had to model those ones she would stop eating for a day or two. To each their own ideas, but i saw her wasting away, partly fault of the fashion industry and i don't think that is right.

I agree that the girl in the picture is very skinny, but thankfully she's nowhere near as skinny as the models in the Too-Skinny pictures (which are all fake, by the way).

Goldfish in Fake Breasts — I seem to have been posting a lot about goldfish, with recent posts having included items about blind goldfish, trained goldfish, forgetful goldfish, and swallowed goldfish. So when I came across this story about goldfish used as fake breasts, I knew I had to post it:

FISH have feelings, too, according to the folks at PETA, who are taking aim at writer Josh Kilmer-Purcell. The author, whose best-selling memoir, "I Am Not Myself These Days," chronicles his double life as an ad exec-cum-drag performer, was put on notice last week by the animal-rights group's "Fish Empathy Project" for alleged cruelty to goldfish. As his whip-cracking alter-ego, Aquadisiac, Kilmer-Purcell donned a pair of clear plastic breasts filled with live goldfish. Says PETA: "It would be, for you, like living in a covered bathtub that's constantly moving, tossing you around as you defecate in it. It's filthy, painful and terrifying for these animals."

When PETA puts it that way, it kind of reminds me of how I felt once back in college when I had a particularly bad hangover (minus the defecating part). But seriously, it does seem unnecessary for Kilmer-Purcell to use real goldfish in his fake breasts. He could substitute plastic fish for the real ones, and most people would probably never know the difference. (Here's an article about Kilmer-Purcell in the Fairfield County Weekly, where I found the picture of him as Aquadisiac.)

School For Ambidexterity — According to an article in NewKerala.com, the Veena Vadini school in Singrauli, India teaches its students to write with both hands, at the same time. And that's not all:

All these students are able to write simultaneously with both their hands. Trained from the early days at their school, these 72 young students are today at comfort with this rare art. They are also fluent in a number of languages.
Virangat Sharma, the principal of the school said that all his students are proficient in this art, which was started as an experiment. “The children are taught six languages Hindi, Urdu, English, Roman, Sanskrit and Arabic,” says Sharma. “I read somewhere that India's first President Dr. Rajendra Prasad used to write in two languages I also preferred to experiment developing such a skill among my students. All the children here can do this and also know the world's capital cities and their tables up to hundred. They can write on two different subjects and in two different languages at the same time,” says Sharma. Not just that these children can write with both their hands but they can also write in two different languages on two different subjects at the same time, tells Sharma.

Wow. And I thought my ability to write backwards in ancient Greek while doing a one-arm handstand and juggling two balls with my feet was impressive. Needless to say, I'm highly suspicious of the principal's claims. (Assuming that he exists and wasn't misquoted by a reporter.) The same story is also reported by ananova, adding to its credibility (note: sarcasm). I did a search for "Veena Vadini School" to see if they have a website, but only found links to this article about their instruction in ambidexterity. (Thanks to Kathy for sending me the clipping.)

Update:
SicTim (posting in the comments) remembered that Ripleys had once featured some cases of amazing ambidexterity. Checking the Best of Ripleys volume on my bookshelf, I found these examples. On the left, Lena Deeter of Conway, Arkansas, who "could write with both hands simultaneously — backwards, forwards, upside-down, even upside-down backwards! She could write in a different direction with each hand simultanously." (She appeared in a Ripleys cartoon on April 1, 1942... I assume she wasn't an April Fool's joke.) On the right is "a 1936 Dallas Odditorium performer [who] could draw three different cartoons simultaneously — with both hands and a foot!"

These cases indicate that it might be possible for someone to write in two different languages at the same time, but I'm still doubtful that an entire school could be trained to do it.

 

Free Breast Implants With Credit Card — The Plastic Assets credit card company is making an attractive offer: free breast implants if you sign up for their card. They promise that "With a low APR and bigger breasts, you will be ready for anything!" And you also get free lip injections for every friend you refer.

The site is well designed — well enough designed to plausibly pass for an actual credit card company site. But it's a hoax. The site is part of the Huffington Post Contagious Festival (as you can find out if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of it), which is a contest to create a high-traffic site. There have been contests like this before. Remember the Contagious Media Festival, which produced Forget-Me-Not Panties (panties with a built-in GPS device so that jealous lovers could track the whereabouts of their wearer)? (Thanks to David for the link.)

Related Posts:
May 5, 2004: Invest In My Breast

The Case of the Microwaved Penis — The following incident caught my attention because it occurred in McKeesport, which is right outside of Pittsburgh. This is where my mother grew up. My grandfather used to be mayor of a small suburb of McKeesport called Liberty Borough. I visited it often growing up. McKeesport is also where Andy Warhol grew up. Sadly, the city has gone way, way downhill ever since the steel mills closed, as evidenced by this incident:

Police in McKeesport said a woman who needed to pass a work-related drug test was the reason behind a fake penis being microwaved at a convenience store. A clerk at the Giant Eagle Get-Go store along Lyle Boulevard told police that a man brought what appeared to be a severed penis into the store and asked her to microwave it Thursday night. But police said the item was actually a fake, hollow penis that a woman planned to use to pass a drug test. McKeesport Police Chief Joseph Pero said the woman's male companion had filled the device with his urine, which the woman somehow planned to pass off as hers for a drug test. The couple stopped at the convenience store to have the device microwaved because the woman wanted the device to be warmed up to something approaching body temperature -- as part of the drug-testing ruse. Police said they plan to charge the man and woman criminally, although the exact charges haven't been determined.

My main question is this: Why did the woman need a fake penis in order to pass a drug test? Does that make any sense at all?

Update: It's been pointed out to me that the news report misspelled the name of the road. It's Lysle Boulevard, not 'Lyle' Boulevard.

Skinbags (bags made from human skin) — The front page of the skinbags site advertises that skinbags are "Organic objects, in synthetic human skin." That description isn't as clear as it could be, and could easily be misread to suggest that skinbags are actually made from human skin. Much of the rest of the site plays up this ambiguity. You come across passages such as this:

What is it? Could it be human skin? One asks oneself, reaching out a hand in an attempt to touch it : a reflexive gesture. This is what is fascinating – like a game made to scare oneself.

But don't worry. It's not really human skin. Skinbags (as you learn if you search around the site a bit) are latex designed to look and feel like skin. They're made by Olivier Goulet. The skinbag line includes purses, handbags, jackets, overalls, and laptop carriers. It looks like they all have to be special ordered. You won't find skinbags down at The Gap. (Thanks to Timothy Hunter for the link)

Stevie Starr, Professional Regurgitator — Stevie Starr calls himself a professional regurgitator. He's been doing his act for a long time, and is quite famous. (He's appeared on shows such as Jay Leno and Ripley's Believe it or Not.) But I just became aware of him through a video of one of his performances on Google Video, and I'm at a complete loss to explain how he does what he does.

His performance includes some of the following tricks: He swallows sugar, followed by a glass of water, and then regurgitates the sugar, completely dry. He swallows a live goldfish and regurgitates that a minute later, still living. (As he does this, he mentions the urban legend about goldfish having 5-second memories.) Reportedly he's also able to swallow a (miniature) rubik's cube and bring it back up — solved. (Though the Rubik's cube trick isn't shown in the google video.)

I can't find anyone on the web who has a decent explanation for how Starr is able to do all this. Obviously he has a genuine talent with his stomach. An article about him in the Amherst Student reports that:

he was born in a children’s home in Scotland, where he lived for the first 19 years of his life. When little Stevie was four years old, he discovered this unique talent by swallowing his lunch money and realizing he could bring it right back up. Thus, a freak of nature was born.

But this doesn't explain how he can swallow sugar, followed by water, and bring the sugar up dry. Or the trick with the rubik's cube. Does he have a second stomach, or something like that? To do the rubik's cube trick I assume he must have swallowed a solved rubik's cube before the show. But like I said, I'm pretty much baffled.

Incidentally, history is full of famous vomiters, so Stevie Starr evidently isn't the only one who has ever had this talent. In 1621 there was the case of the nail-vomiting Boy of Bilston (who had been trained by a priest to simulate the symptoms of being bewitched). This was followed in 1642 by Catharina Geisslerin, "the toad-vomiting woman of Germany," who, as you might guess, had a talent for vomiting up toads. In 1694 there was Theodorus Döderlein, who vomited up twenty-one newts and four frogs. (I'm getting this info from Clifford Pickover's The Girl Who Gave Birth to Rabbits.) Pickover also reports that there have been cases of compulsive swallowers who don't later regurgitate what they swallow, including one guy in 1985 who had "53 toothbrushes, 2 razors, 2 telescopic aerials, and 150 handles of disposable razors" removed from his stomach.

Shot Glass Through Ear — I'm assuming this photo of a guy with a shot glass through his ear is real because it was taken by a Reuters photographer (Jorge Silva) outside the World Social Forum in Caracas on January 25, 2006. The guy with the crazy ear piercing is "Venezuelan tattoo maker Constantino." So when he doesn't have a shot glass in his ear, his earlobes must hang down like big fleshy loops. That's got to be attractive. (And is that a spike through his nose?)

Glasgow High School Offers Fake Tanning Lessons — Deprived of natural sunlight by geography, students in Glasgow high schools have taken to popping down to the tanning salon between classes. This has become such a problem (with school officials worrying about students damaging their skin) that some high schools have begun offering lessons on how to get a fake tan:

In the first of a series of such sessions, Lisa Fulton, a training expert with Fake Bake, will give pupils tips on how to apply fake tan next week. Ms Fulton also plans to tell the pupils about her celebrity clientele, in the hope that stars will have influence where health experts do not.

The reaction of the students to this seems mixed. The Daily Record reports:

MORE controversy at the Glasgow school that's called in a fake tan firm to stop pupils going for sunbeds. A fourth-year girl has been suspended for disrupting the home economics class by stripping down to her underwear and lying under the grill.

What kind of grill are they talking about? A sunbed grill? (Which means they have a sunbed in the school itself?) Or was this some kind of protest on her part? We never had anything as exciting as a girl stripping down to her underwear during class at my high school, if only because it was an all-male school.

Digital Plastic Surgery — For those who still don't realize that all those beautiful models you see in magazines have benefitted from the aid of photoshop, the Swedish Ministry of Health and Social Affairs has created an online tutorial to demonstrate exactly how photo editors manipulate appearances. They write:

The media world is becoming increasingly fixated on appearances. And the number of tricks used to achieve the increasingly exaggerated ideals is growing. Many models have plastic surgery and even more are retouched so they appear to have bigger breasts, smaller stomachs or fuller lips. We wanted to show how easy it is to change someone’s appearance in this campaign.

Now they should do a companion tutorial to show what real plastic surgery can do.

Penile Weight Lifting (A Follow-Up) — I feel compelled to post something about this simply because I've posted about the sport of penile weight lifting before, expressing a few doubts about its reality. (I also had a few questions about the actual mechanics of the process). Inside Bay Area has this report of a recent demonstration of penile weight lifting in action:

Grandmaster Tu Jin-Sheng, best known for his Iron Crotch, attached himself not once, but twice, to a rental moving truck and pulled it several yards across a parking lot in Fremont. In lace-up leather boots and a black tank top, the 50-year-old tied a strip of blue fabric around the base of his penis and testicles and tugged to make sure it was on tight. An assistant kicked him hard between the legs before he lashed himself to the vehicle.

Here's the best part of the article:

Jin-Shengs performance drew a hearty applause (and only a few gasps) from the sparse crowd. He wrapped a piece of fabric around his waist to conceal his genitals from the crowd, but in the heat of the second truck pull, when he tied the cloth around his testicles only, it was pushed aside to reveal a ball of flesh that looked ready to burst.

Lovely. So apparently this sport doesn't involve muscle training, per se. It's more like hoping your skin and connective tissue don't rip apart as you lift (or pull) the weight. The description of the event sounds credible enough for me to categorize it as real.

Fake Body Parts — An Alex from Colombia sent me these pictures and the following note:

I came across these images and sincerely speaking I have no idea what they are. Is there any logical explanation for such thing? I suppose that they are either stage props or someone with a very disturbed mind and undoubtedly very good skills in clay or meat modeling made them, staged them and took the pictures.

Unfortunately I can't identify what's going on in these pictures any better than Alex from Colombia can. It looks to me like body parts being produced in a Hollywood special effects shop. But that's just a guess. At least they're obviously not real body parts.