Sheyla Hershey

The Guinness Book of Records Is a Catalyst For Self-Destructive Conduct, Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I guess it’s that time on a sweltering Friday afternoon that I am not quite up to finishing any of the more substantive posts on the runway, and only feel like tackling the stupid stuff. (These are the posts long-time critic/commenter Neil Dorr prefers. This one’s for you, Neil!)

Tara Berry just set the Guinness Book of Records record for “‘most tattoos of the same musician on the body.” She has 18. ( The former record-holder has 15 portraits of Eminem tattooed on her body.) A big Madonna fan from the beginning of The Material Girls’ pop-culture ascent in 1983 ,Tara only started her Madonna tattoo collection in 2016 when she was looking for fans who had Madonna’s image tattooed on their bodies to feature in a video. I guess she’s suggestive (or <cough> or something): she had an overwhelming urge to get her own Madonna tattoo. Once she started, she couldn’t stop.

Well, bless her heart. It’s her skin and her body: this is one example of “choice” that doesn’t hurt anybody except the chooser. Hey, if she wants to go for 20, or 50, I won’t criticize.

I do hear a bit of a ping one of my smaller ethics alarms about the Guinness Book of Records. Why does it even have a record in this category? I’ve touched on the issue in the past: the GBOR seeds the needs of narcissists and sad, insecure people searching for some level of fame or notoriety with records that can only be set or sought with some danger to the aspiring record-setter. There were “the Biking Vogels,” the various children endangered by their parents to have them be the “youngest” to achieve some pointless and dangerous goal, and my personal favorite, Sheyla Hershey, who ended up with size M breasts to set the Guinness record for “largest breast implants.” I concluded that 2010 post by stating that it was unethical for Guinness to publish “records” that can only be achieved by risking long-term harm.

And yet…blaming Guinness for Tara Barry mutilating her body is like blaming hip-hop records and violent TV shows or movies for people doing in reality what is only sung about or shown on a screen. It was her choice, albeit a crazy one. Tara is supposedly an “artist,” so maybe being festooned with pictures of a washed-up and aging pop-star won’t harm her at all, as long as she doesn’t seek employment at a school or a bank. Or with me.

As I said, that ethics alarm isn’t pinging very loudly. The GBOR doesn’t make anyone do anything. But the alarm has been pinging, however faintly, for 13 years.

Jessica Rabbit Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

From Left: Jessica, Pixie Before, Pixie After

                          From Left: Jessica, Pixie Before, Pixie After

Who could have predicted, when “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” opened in theaters, that one of its greatest legacies would be a continuing obsession of young women to emulate her exaggerated, uh, features? Yet here is another example—and there have been quite a few—of a woman mutilating herself in pursuit of looking like the sexy Toon.  Model Pixee Fox—I’m sure that’s her real name—wore a waist-training corset for 24 hours a day and spent $120,000 on various cosmetic procedures including a recent operation to have six of her ribs removed in order to achieve Jessica’s apparent 48-14-40 figure.

“I’ve always been inspired by cartoons and Disney movies, all the curves and tiny waists,” Fox told reporters. “People often, they come up to me and say, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like a cartoon.’ For me that’s a compliment. My inspiration started with Tinkerbell, but with my transformation, I’ve been starting to look like Jessica Rabbit.”

If you say so, Pixee!  Pixee is ill, it’s fair to say, so the ethical issues fall on the shoulders of  Dr. Barry Eppley, the Indiana surgeon who admits handling Fox’s surgery and also defends it.

I covered this the last time Ethics Alarms covered a wannabe Mrs. Rabbit (Jessica is a human Toon married to a member Leporidae Family). In that case, the happy aspiring Toon looked like this when all was done…

Lips Continue reading →

Sheyla Hershey’s Mega-Breasts and the Ethics of Assisted Self-Destruction

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The current bicycle ordeal commenced by the Vogel family was sold to the family’s twin boys as a chance to get into the Guinness Book of Records. That publications has been used to justify more self-destructive conduct than the complete works of Ernest Hemingway, and here’s another example: Sheyla Hershey, owner of the world’s largest breast implants (size M, supposedly) according to Guinness, just had to have them removed because of serious infections. They were also “uncomfortable,” she has told reporters.

Gee, who could have seen that coming? Continue reading →