Long Necks Vs Corsets

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The Long Neck women, also called the Giraffe women, originate from the Padaung tribe, also known as the Kayan Tribe, in a river village in the Northwest of Burma. Today, the tribe is numbered with less than 50 000 inhabitants out of which, only 500 women still devote themselves to the ancient practice of Long Necks (Kayan Lawhi, 2011). The Long Neck practice is about elongating the neck of a woman by using rings out of brass coils which can weigh up to 5kg (Anitei, 2006). Corsets may be considered very similar to the Long Necks because of the fact that it alters how the body grows. However they differ greatly. First of all, the purpose of the corset and the brass coils are different. While the brass coils are to elongate the neck, the corset is to reduce the size of the waist, compress the fat and push up the breast of a woman. Even though both start being worn at a very young age the brass coils are first applied to the child around 5 years old, and a corset is first pulled onto a girl’s developing upper body around the age of 14 (Patrisha Jo et al.). As the girls grow up, more coils are added around the neck where as when a girl wearing a corset grows up; the corset has to be modified to have the shape of the waist wanted but were yet pulled tighter every time. Also, both practices compress the ribcage but in different ways: the weight of coils deforms the clavicle by applying pressure on the rib cage. As for the corset, it squeezes the rib cage all around into an upside down cone. This did not cause so many problems to the women devoted to the coils, but did cause severe health problems to the corset wearers, the pressure on the rib cage was so great that it grew smaller and smaller at an unbelievable speed causing the internal organs to squash together, dislocating and bruising some of them, often some ribs snapped under the pressure as well. However,

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