We Can Rebuild Him
From the fun-time world of the sexually dysmorphic:
This sounds like something worth talking to a therapist about, since that’ll be much less traumatic and most likely cheaper.
Wise words, as Transgender Reddit goes, from the replies to this:
Please let me know what height reduction surgeries are out there, and the cost. It’s been really difficult to find out. I’m 18 years old, on hormones since I turned 18. I’m 169 cm or just a little bit under 5’7″ and I’d like to go down as much as possible. Please let me know on both legs and spine. Also I’m a size nine-and-a-half women’s shoes, if that is important.
According to our height-conscious chappie, it’s all about “just being myself.” And his self is apparently a shorter person:
I only need to go down about two inches to be happy. I would be happy at 5’5″.
And hey, who wouldn’t want a “controlled breaking” of their legs? A procedure that entails an exciting range of possible complications, including limited mobility, nerve damage, chronic pain, and deformity, and for which the success rate is, intriguingly, “not known,” according to the people offering the service.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
There’s a rabbit hole I don’t want to fall down
It’s not for the faint of heart.
But the fixation with surgery, often to a fetishistic degree, as if it could somehow deliver every heart’s desire, is a little odd.
Laughed, not sorry.
Big feet, or imagined big feet, are a recurring issue.
At which point, some musical accompaniment comes to mind.
Thing is, chappie above, the one who wants his legs broken in order to become more ladylike, is already pretty much average height for a woman, hardly conspicuous. And I doubt that the extra inch or so is what will draw attention.
Don’t they do foot binding on the NHS?
By the way, last night, in the mood for a horror movie, I watched The Last Voyage of the Demeter. It’s not very good. Oddly lifeless and at no point compelling.
You’d think that, as a premise, TRAPPED ON A BOAT WITH DRACULA might have some potential, sort of ALIEN: 1897, but little of it is realised. It’s not offensively bad, just predictable and dull. The film doesn’t even present the Count as a character, or a speaking part – he whispers half a dozen words in total – which seems a bit of an oversight.
If someone is expecting to pay for a trip to Turkey and to hand over $16,500 to have their legs smashed up, and to subsequently, in addition, pay for months of “intensive physical therapy,” and months of disability, probably unable to work, then buying custom shoes and a more flattering wardrobe sounds like a bargain in comparison. Or indeed therapy of some kind.
Again, trying to fix a software problem by smashing up the hardware.
I remember an episode of M*A*S*H (first run, I’m old) where the new surgeon, who you knew was a one-shot character, got in big trouble for removing a soldier’s appendix while doing whatever else was needed to patch him up. They went up one side of him and down the other about the moral bankruptcy of removing a healthy and functioning organ for no reason and without the patient’s consent.
Ah, the golden age of the war-torn 1950s through the lens of a 1970s sitcom.
And today we have doctors performing what can only, if you’re being honest, be called mutilations and the majority of the profession politely glances away ignoring it like passengers trying to ignore the lunatic in the subway carriage. I know there are some brave doctors standing up and they deserve acknowledgement and support, but they are too few to make a difference sadly.
The trailer looked okay but Universal Horror don’t have a great track record.
But… but… it’s affirming.
There are some mildly amusing details early on. The discovery of the Count’s ‘packed lunch’ – a strangely anaemic woman boxed in soil – but any hope of suspense and good writing soon evaporates. As the protagonist is black, there’s the inevitable dialogue about prejudice, which is tiresome and dramatically irrelevant, and we get a couple of brief scenes of girl-bossing, because, obviously, the anaemic woman has to be more competent with guns than the sailors.
There’s also the reliance on characters doing inexplicably dumb things. Having fathomed that whatever is picking them off one by one is doing so at night, and is dormant during the day, the remaining crew belatedly consider investigating the mysterious, man-size wooden crates that they’re transporting. Which they don’t do immediately, during daylight, when they can see what they’re doing, but instead do at night. Needless to say, it does not go well.
But I think much of the problem is in reducing the antagonist – the main attraction – to a silent, generic vampire, whose motives are only guessed at, in fairly uninspired dialogue, by fairly uninspired characters. A main attraction who only utters maybe half a dozen words – two very short lines, one of which is a wince-inducing cliché.
So, no, not a triumph.
I sometimes speculate about the cultural impact of all those science fiction stories with transhumanist themes in which characters get their bodies dramatically and drastically altered in various ways. Did some naive readers come to think that such things were feasible today, rather than being mere speculation about the cultural consequences of things which may be impossible?
I’m just going to leave this here, for no reason whatsoever.
Remember Sheldon Cooper’s “upper flermin”?
When thinking of a title for the post, I remembered how the Six Million Dollar Man TV series and its spin-offs differ from the Martin Caidin novel, Cyborg, on which they’re based. If memory serves, the novel is rather more grim, with the prosthetics much less impressive, and with plenty of amputee angst.
Still, our hero does have a dart gun built into his metal bludgeon arm.
I think I read the novel when I was about 12 years old, but don’t remember it at all.
How about the casual outpatient sex-change and limb-change surgery in John Varley’s stories? Or consciousness-in-a-computer stories? I seem to recall Vonda McIntyre wrote a lot of stories steeped in New Age feminist fantasies about radically
“progressive” transformations of biology and consciousness, but don’t recall with any clarity.