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Sometime people suffering from anxiety eat things they really shouldn't, including hair. When these foreign objects are found in the stomach they are called bezoars. Hair bezoars can get very large and project beyond the stomach and into the intestines. This is called Rapunzel Syndrome and it is most common in prepubertal girls.
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In Rapunzel Syndrome the girl doesn't through her resources/hair out into the world to achieve adulthood, she draw it into herself to cause illness and even death. I suppose I could consider the naming deeply ironic riff on a mythic trope, but it seems more likely that it is simply glib. That someone took hair + girl and came up with = Rapunzel, without doing a lot of research.
Hence my irritation because I think, deeply and fundamentally, that girls should act boldly upon the world, that myths and fables should be respected, and that scientists should do their research. And if they did and the destructive force of female 'failure to launch' is the very point of the name... I stand corrected.
2 comments:
It seems that Disney is 'revamping' Rapunzel to make it a more masculine story.
http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2010/03/10/disneys-rapunzel-gets-a-makeover/
I wish they'd make the Snow Queen instead....
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