Stuff You Should Know - How Foot Binding Worked

Episode Date: May 9, 2013

Once in a while, all the necessary factors converge to produce a peculiar nationalized sexual fetish. In China, that fetish was foot binding and over a millennia three billion Chinese women's feet were brutally disfigured for men's pleasure. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's time to reboot your credit card with Apple Card. Apple Card is designed to help you pay less interest. Unlike other cards, it estimates how much interest you'll owe and suggests moves to help you pay off your balance faster. Also, you can keep more of your money. Apply now in the wallet app on iPhone and start using it right away. Subject to credit approval.

Interest estimates on the payment wheel are illustrative only and may not fully reflect actual interest charges on your account. Estimates are based on your posted account balance at the time of the estimate and do not include pending transactions or any other purchases you make before the end of the billing period.

Hey, everybody, do you ever scream at your printer or hurl empty ink cartridges across the room? We all do, which means that you likely suffer from cartridge conniptions caused by irritating ink cartridges constantly running out of ink. It's the worst, everybody. We can all agree on that. But thankfully, the Epson EcoTank Printer is the perfect cure.

It's cartridge-free, conniption-free, and prescription-free. With big ink tanks and a ridiculous amount of ink, you can finally kiss expensive ink cartridges goodbye. Yeah, so check out the Epson EcoTank. Just fill and chill. Available at participating retailers and at epson.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. ["HowStuffWorks.com"]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. And it's time for Stuff You Should Know, everybody. So settle down. Buckle in. Get ready. Hey, congratulations to Kristen Bell.

Stuff You Should Know celebrity fan Kristen Bell. And her husband, Dak Shepherd, had their baby. Oh, hey, congratulations. It's a big congratulations to you. And I don't know if Mr. Shepherd listens. I thought you were going to congratulate her on a Kickstarter movie. Oh, in the Veronica Marsh movie?

Yeah. Well, congratulations on that. My wife is very much looking forward to that. Yes. And your wife is looking forward to meeting the baby. She's on her way right now. Kristen Bell's locking the doors. Oh, my god.

What started out is a small fascination with their show, ended in tragedy. Dangerous made for TV movie obsession. Anyway, just wanted to say congratulations. Yeah, that's nice of you, Chuck. Sure. I got no congratulations over here. Yeah, interesting that I tied that to this podcast

on female torture, essentially. Do you think there's something to that? No. OK. Well, we live in a world now where we don't have to worry about, although I think they had a son, where any little baby's feet being binded, I guess not babies, but four or five-year-olds, were bound.

Yeah. Yeah. Bound, binded. Bound. OK. Because the feet were bound. Yes. Yes.

Yeah. Do you think we should explain to everybody what we're talking about? Footbinding? Yeah. I'm glad you congratulated Kristen Bell, because I didn't really have much of an intro for this one. OK, good.

Because it's just so fascinating. I feel like we should just kind of dive right in. Yeah, fascinating and horrible and oddly impactful and areas I never would have considered. Yeah. So we should say that over the course of about 1,000 years, from roughly 970 till about the 1950s, almost on the dot 1,000 years, about 3 billion women in China

bound their feet to basically train them to become small and pointy in a really bizarre custom that just kind of came out of nowhere and stuck around, again, for about 1,000 years. Voluntarily deforming their feet. Well, at the very least, their mothers and grandmothers voluntarily deformed their feet for them. Yeah, it's a very good point, actually. But at some point, they had to take over.

And I guess then it became voluntary. Well, sure. Well, we'll get to all that. OK. Spoilers abound. So basically, this was purposeful deformation of the human foot, the human female foot, in order to attract men.

Yeah. There was a standard of beauty, a bound foot. And we'll describe it in a minute. But the idea, the whole thing kind of came from, they think about, like I said, 970 AD, in the court of an emperor named Li Yu. And Li Yu had a favorite girlfriend. Ballerina girl?

Yeah. And apparently, he saw her dancing once on a golden lotus pedestal, because everything was made of gold back then in China. Sure. And she had her feet kind of wrapped up, I guess, like a ballerina or something. Yeah.

And he apparently got very, very excited at this. Visibly excited. So much so that the other ladies of the court noticed this. Wait, did you say visibly excited? Visibly excited. OK. Yes, if you know what I mean. Really?

I would have mentioned. OK. Hey, this guy's been dead 1,000 years. Like all slander and defamation is like out the window. Sure. He's like it was a rock in time. It was a southern Tang dynasty. It was.

You never know what's going to happen. Yeah, it made Caligula look like watching it as an adult. Yeah, boring. Yeah. So really, Lee Yu was very much entranced by this enough that other women in the court noticed it. And they started wrapping their feet as well. Yeah.

And it just kind of took off from there. And it took a weird turn pretty early on. Well, what's the turn? Well, the turn is originally apparently the first, the woman who started this whole thing just kind of wrapped her feet in bandages. Yeah. To, I guess.

Oh, OK, I see what you mean. That turn. A literal turn. Yeah. Well, it became a status thing at first, because wealthy women did it. And then it sort of spread. And it also would end up preventing women

from doing manual labor. Well, not prevent, but it made it tougher. So it was sort of a status thing that meant if you had to bound feet, you're not out there working in the fields. I don't even have to throw a hoe. But then it spread throughout China. And only a few places. Actually, it was more than this article let on.

I did some more research on that. I saw like where 50% to 60% of the women ended up binding their feet in China. And this says like 100% except in these provinces. Well, I think they were saying about close to 100% of the higher classes. OK. But yeah, there is.

I guess that makes sense. So maybe about half of the Chinese population total. Yeah, that makes sense. OK. So the strange turn it took, though, was to go from simply wrapping their feet to actually the binding process, which is malforming your feet at a young age, like four to seven years old,

for life to where when your shoe is off, it looks like you're wearing it. Your foot looks like a high heel. You're disfigured. Yeah. You can't walk very well. You can't, again, you can't work in the fields. And your foot has been brought to a point, basically,

that's ideally three inches long. Three inches. Like that's it. And it's pointed. Yeah. And you do this by training your foot and your bones to deform. Yeah, and when I say it looks like a high heel,

your foot looks like a shoe. Like the heel is separate from the rest of the foot and a big block that looks like the heel of a shoe. And the foot is permanently arched and pointy and the toes are curled under. And it's just, if you look at pictures of this, it's horrific looking. Yeah.

And it was so entrenched in the Chinese culture that when it was outlawed for, I guess, the first time in 1912, it continued on. And it took the communists taking over to really get rid of it. And footbinding went the way of disco by just practical necessity. Women had to work in the field.

And if you had bound feet, well, you're in big trouble. Yeah. Well, the end of it, should we talk about the end now or should we do it later? Let's do it now. Let's just mess with the structure. The end of it, there were a lot of factors at play. One was Western missionaries came over there for the first time

and said, yeah, you know, this is really not what the rest of the world is doing. And it doesn't make you look good, by the way. Social Darwinists got on it. And we're like, yeah, you know what? We're not going to survive as a country because like half of our population is hobbled, essentially.

It's like, this is going to be really bad for business one day. And so they mounted like a real campaign, like an education campaign, which is really unusual back then. And they had three phases to it. One was that it made you look bad and look strange to the rest of the world. Two, that taught the advantages of having normal feet, like walking without pain.

And then they formed natural foot societies where people would pledge not to do this to their daughters or allow their daughter to marry a son, or allow their son to marry a girl who had bound feet. Because that was one of the big deals. If you didn't have bound feet, then guys would just pass you over. Right, so that's what it took to finally eradicate it.

When was that? That was... Was that after the 1912 outlaw or the communism? No, it was leading up to that. So 1912 was when it was formally outlawed. Oh, gotcha. They had government inspectors that would come around and make sure that you weren't binding feet any longer.

And they would hide girls that they still wanted to. So it was really oppressive and weird. Yeah, because that campaign that you just described is basically point for point trying to undo a thousand years of custom. Like if you had unbound feet, like natural feet, you were considered a freak, you were ugly, there was something wrong with you.

And even more to the point, no man would marry you. Because bound feet were so idolized in Chinese culture that if you were just totally plain or even horrendously ugly in every other way, but have really knocked out bound feet, like that was enough for you. You were a butterfly. You were gonna do pretty good.

That's hilarious. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to believe now, but when you see these photos and the X-rays and stuff, it's just total deformation. Yeah. So let's talk about this. There's an actual process, fairly straightforward, although extremely painful and dangerous.

If you, like I think you said, you grab like your four-year-old daughter, you say, prepare for a lifetime of pain and suffering. Starting now. And you take her feet and you soak them in hot water for a few hours. Yeah, and animal blood too. Oh yeah, what did that do?

Same thing, softened it, softened you up. Okay, so that was the whole purpose of the soaking was to soften the skin, make it more pliable. And I imagine the muscles too. Yeah. And then after the soaking, you would scrape away any dead skin. And then after that, their toenails were clipped.

You know? Super short. So there's still kids who are like, okay, I don't really like the toenail clipping part, but the foot soak more than makes up for it. Right. And boy, it turns out I like animal blood. Soak my feet in it.

And then either their mom or maybe a learned woman in the village would say, all right, now we're going to start bending your foot. Yeah, I imagine these ladies too, if they were the village lady that did it, they probably didn't take much guff. No, probably not. You know, they probably didn't mess around.

I imagine they came in there and just sort of took care of business. Like they've heard it all before. Right, but for as grizzly and grotesque a procedure, it's actually a delicate procedure too, because if you can wrap your mind around this, there's ways to do it wrong that can lead to problems.

That's a good point. There's actual risk factors. So the one other thing I left out was they sprinkled talc in there to keep it from perspiring because you want it to be dry. Right. And then they start bending things, right?

Yeah, well, then the cotton comes out. The bandage is about two inches wide, about 10 feet long. And they would soak those in the hot water and blood and herbs as well, because they want those to shrink up. It's all about shrinking. They want those to shrink up after they're applied to the feet.

Right. And then the old lady comes up and she folds the little foretoes that were just clipped, not the big toe, under as far as she can, and then starts to do little figure eights to keep them in place. You leave the big toe exposed.

You leave the heel exposed. So you just figure eights with the bandages. Yes, and you leave the big toe exposed and the heel exposed. Yeah. Just since those little front toes under, they break the toes. It breaks the foot bones.

Sounds horrific because it is. Right. And it brings the heel closer toward the ball of the foot. So the point of your feet is now your big toe. The slightly wider part behind it is the ball of your foot. And then behind that is your heel. And underneath it all are your four poor, poor little toes.

Yep, and the top of your foot is at this really unreasonable, odd-looking arch. Right. And it looks like you're in a high heel. Yeah, by making it arched, you're allowing that distance that was once between the ball of the foot and the heel to go up rather than between the two.

So you're bringing them together. And so all this has just been done to a four-year-old. Four-year-old's probably crying in pain. And after you've finished with the bandages, the old lady or the mom would probably sew them. Yeah. Because especially if you're dealing with a four-year-old, it's gonna try to get these things off.

And then they say, all right, start walking. Yeah, they put a little shoe on there. And the first steps with these things, and I imagine many steps after it, are excruciatingly painful. Yeah, you know. Well, yeah. The war on drugs impacts everyone,

whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is gonna show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without. Any drugs on the table, they can do that.

Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty, exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty.

The cops, are they just, like, looting? Are they just, like, pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like, what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil answer for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

How's that New Year's resolution coming along? You know, the one you made about paying off your pesky credit card debt and finally starting to save for retirement. Well, you're not alone if you haven't made progress yet. Roughly four in five New Year's resolutions fail within the first month or two. But that doesn't have to be the case for you

and your goals. Our podcast, How to Money, can help. That's right, we're two best buds who've been at it for more than five years now and we want to see you achieve your money goals. And it's our goal to provide the information and encouragement you need to do it. We keep the show fresh by answering list of questions,

interviewing experts, and focusing on the relevant financial news that you need to know about. Our show is chock-full of the personal finance knowledge that you need with guidance three times a week. And we talk about debt payoff. If, let's say you've had a particularly spend-thrift holiday season,

we also talk about building up your savings, intelligent investing, and growing your income. No matter where you are on your financial journey, How to Money's got your back. Millions of listeners have trusted us to help them achieve their financial goals. Ensure that your resolution turns into ongoing progress. Listen to How to Money on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's the craziest part if you ask me. You do this every day for years. Yeah, well, every couple of days. Okay, every day or every other day is what I got. I'm trying to diminish it, yeah. For a couple of years. It takes a couple to a few years

for these things to be fully deformed into what are called lotus petals. Yeah. Or new moons or whatever. Because it's a bandage, you unbind, and they actually would need the broken foot to keep it broken. Right.

And dry it all out real good because infection, like the toes would come into the foot if they weren't clipped properly, so infection and gangrene was too tight. All big threats to losing their feet. Right, because if you wrap them too tight, they can become gangrenous because you get gangrene, which is a massive loss of dead tissue

due to poor circulation. So the foot could just fall off. And like you were saying, if you don't clip the toenails, Chuck, you have to do that every day. Oh yeah. Or every time you unwrap and then wrap your feet. And then even worse than that,

if you didn't wrap them pretty quickly after you bathed them every day or other day, they could start to lose their shape. Which apparently was as painful as the initial foot binding procedure. Yeah, like once your foot has started to take shape, if you wanted to say, no, you know what, I don't want to do this anymore.

It was just as painful for the foot to undo itself. Because it's already like malformed. But there was, like you didn't think that. I think once this happened to you from your mom or whatever, and you grew a little older and you started to take over for yourself and you were bathing and wrapping

your own feet every other day. You understood why you were doing this. Because foot binding was so important that you could be just completely poverty stricken and some rich dudes would still be like, I like your feet a lot. It goes like two and a half inches. Yeah, I can't even breathe right now

because your feet are so deformed that I want to marry you. It's so weird. Yeah, so there's a- And beyond being wrong and gross and oppressive and all that stuff, it was just so odd to me that that was like a turn on. Yeah, and man, it was a turn on.

Like foot binding was highly, highly erotic. You guys like nice feet, trust me, I get that. But these deformed, I just don't get it. But this is pretty much a national foot fetish. Yeah. And it was nationalized, it was cultural, and it was extraordinarily widespread. Like we said, about three billion women

over the course of a thousand years bound their feet. Yeah, and it had a lot of odd effects, side effects that went along with it. Yeah. When three billion people do something that hobbles them, there are gonna be some weird repercussions. Yeah, but you don't think about. One thing it definitely did was it fostered dominance

over women because of the simple fact that if a woman's being beaten, she can't run away. A woman can't travel very far period, so they're gonna hang around their village and their house. And so it just, it's like hobbling somebody. All of a sudden, they can't get around as well, so they're just dependent on you. Right, and they really aren't traveling much.

Not a lot of traveling going on when your feet are bound. And then also the fact that they have women with bound feet had trouble walking meant that the architecture of China kind of was created to help this out. Like they had to lean on windows or walls, I mean. So buildings were built close together so that average woman could lean on a wall

while she was walking. Yeah, and there weren't a lot of six-story walk-ups in ancient China. Man, that would have been cruel. Everything was one story as a result. So it, yeah, had a weird impact on the architecture. And what else, colonization? Yeah, that was a really big one.

They were surprising. Yeah, you know, most people realize that China didn't do a lot of exploring while the rest of the world was. It just kind of isolated itself and shut itself off. And one of the reasons given for that was that the women were foot bound. And they couldn't travel like women in other countries

who could walk normally did. So with the Chinese women unable to travel and, I guess, see the sites, their men didn't want to leave them, so they stayed at home. Yeah. And actually, the areas that didn't practice foot binding are the ones that actually did go out and colonize other places like the Philippines.

Right. They were Southern China. Yeah, or the Old West. Like every great Old West show has like the one Chinese immigrant family. With the pony tails. Yeah. The article points out like we're being hard on it

because it's easy to look today at some antiquated practice is really cruel and unusual and weird. But at the time, the women wanted their feet bound. There were great bonds between the generations because it was such a cultural thing between the women. Oh yeah. They would sew their shoes together. I listened to this one, NPR Fresh Air,

that interviewed some of these old Chinese ladies that still are some of the last surviving ones. Yeah. And a couple of them said, you know, I really regret it now. It's been a lifetime of pain. But most of them said, no, we wanted to do it. And this was, I'm very proud of the fact that we did this.

Yeah, and these are women who are confronted with the outside world. And they still feel pride about their bound feet. You can imagine how much pride a woman had in her bound feet while it was the norm. You know, because it was basically the norm in China and these women weren't going out anywhere else. So if you had really nice bound feet,

that was a huge point of pride for you. So one of the other weird things we need to talk about is sexy time. Yeah. Because we talked about foot fetishes and things, but it really like something happened in the water at this time where Chinese men really, really got into it. And they would take the shoe off in these odd deformed feet

and they would do weird things like drink the water that they bathe their feet in or put nuts between the toes and eat the nuts from their toes. And just really odd things. I also read that it became another orifice, I guess, if you can imagine. Oh, really? Yeah.

And even outside of that, I guess one of the more normal things to do is to bury your face in the center of the bottom of the foot and really get a good whiff of a motor boat. Yeah. No motor boat. No to smell it, gotcha. And then Chuck, we should point out that if you're doing that,

if you're burying your face in the deformed foot of a foot bound woman, one of the things that happens pretty commonly when your feet are bound is that they develop pustules that break and stink. And so there is a, I read one guy, a contemporary report from several centuries ago saying like, there is no other smell like it in the world. Nothing as sexy as a deformed foot

with leaking stinky pustules. Exactly. Yeah, so yeah, there was a definite fetish that grew up around it. There was at least one sex manual released with, I think, 48 different things to do with a bound foot, yeah. And the shoes, we didn't talk about the shoes.

They play a role in that eroticism as well. About the strengthening of the muscles, is that what you're talking about? Yeah, that's a big part, yeah. Yeah, apparently there was a theory at least that because they had to walk so funny and oddly that their vaginal muscles were extra strong and thus more pleasurable to the man. Right.

And then so the average woman with foot bound shoe, or with bound feet, I'm sorry, everybody, she had at least four pairs of shoes. You had two, or else there was no point in having bound feet. You had to have one for each season. Ideally, you had at least four pair per season, so 16. Some women had hundreds of these. Oh, I'm sure.

And they were designed to really show off, like, hey, look at my bound feet, buddy. That's what they were there for. But there was one specific one that were always red. They were your wedding shoes. That's right. And inside, there was erotic embroidery, which the husband, the new husband, and the new wife

would look at and try out together. It's kind of an instruction manual for the bride, by her mother, or the women of the town. Like, just do this. Here's a picture of what you're supposed to do tonight. Yeah, and slippers, period, I think, were just, was almost like the lingerie of the time. Yeah.

Because they would, the bedroom slippers were more embroidered more sexily as well than just your average, like, I've got to go to the shop and pick up some rice shoes. So the Chinese communists came along Mao and his comrades and said, you know what, you're a woman. We don't care. Get to work digging ditches.

And oh, your bound feet hurt you. Well, I guess you're going to starve, because we give food based on how much work you did. If you don't do the work, you're going to starve to death. That led to the real conclusion of footbinding. And apparently today, they say with great authority that no one does it any longer. Yeah, that's good to know.

Yeah. I'm surprised that it completely died out, because do you think there'd be like a few families here there, but yeah, I mean, it's possible. Well, welcome to the modern age, is what I say. Isn't that just a bizarre, strange chapter, 1,000 year chapter in one of the most populous nations on the planet's history?

Totes. And very few people know about it. Well, now a lot more people do. That's right. You got anything else? No, you can't like, there's no place we can direct people to voice their outrage, because it doesn't happen anymore.

No, but I'm sure we're going to get a lot of suggestions for female genital mutilation, and we should probably do that one, female circumcision. We haven't done that? No, we did male circumcision. I don't think we talked about female. I think we, like mentioned, said we'll do that later. Oh, well, there you have it.

We'll do it again. So if you want to learn more about footbinding and see some pictures of some unshod bound feet, you can type footbinding in the search bar at HouseToForks.com, and it'll bring up this article. And I said search bar, which means it's time for a message break. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not

you take drugs. America's public enemy, number one, is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that.

And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty, exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just, like, looting?

Are they just, like, pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like, what we would call a jackmove, or being robbed. They'd call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. How's that New Year's resolution coming along?

You know, the one you made about paying off your pesky credit card debt and finally starting to save for retirement? Well, you're not alone if you haven't made progress yet. Roughly four in five New Year's resolutions fail within the first month or two. But that doesn't have to be the case for you and your goals. Our podcast, How to Money, can help. That's right, we're two best buds who've been at it

for more than five years now. And we want to see you achieve your money goals. And it's our goal to provide the information and encouragement you need to do it. We keep the show fresh by answering listener questions, interviewing experts, and focusing on the relevant financial news that you need to know about.

Our show is chock full of the personal finance knowledge that you need with guidance three times a week. And we talk about debt payoff. If, let's say you've had a particularly spend-thrift holiday season, we also talk about building up your savings, intelligent investing, and growing your income. No matter where you are on your financial journey, How to Money's got your back.

Millions of listeners have trusted us to help them achieve their financial goals. Ensure that your resolution turns into ongoing progress. Listen to How to Money on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Right now, listener mail, right? That's right. I'm going to call this, we're plugging something.

And when we ask to plug things, we get a lot of people right in for good charities. And we can only do a certain amount of them. Otherwise, we'd be reading charity plugs all the time. So apologies to those who don't get theirs read. But this is from Kate Havinicht. She said, don't worry about saying my last name wrong. No one does.

If you just did, you get a fruit basket. I demand one. Havinicht, it's got to be German. That's good stuff. She lives in Bozeman, Montana. She says it's the most beautiful place on earth. And she's just been listening for a few months. Because her brother, Jack, is awesome and turned her onto it.

Way to go, Jack. So during listener mail, guys, you supported some really awesome charities and groups that try to make the world a better place. A friend of mine works for such a place. It's a coffee brewing company called Brownwater Coffee, which got started here in Bozeman a few years ago and is now based in Denver.

The great thing about these guys is that 15% of their profits go directly to getting clean water to those who need it, hence the great double meeting of the name Brownwater. They're also a small company with only a handful of employees. But so far, I've done an amazing job. Not only is it great cause, but their package design is awesome. And I can say that because I'm a recent grad of graphic design from Montana State University.

Go Bobcats. The coffee's fantastic. Actually, it's really some of the best I've ever had. So she highly recommends it. They sell it in shops mostly in the Northwest at the moment. So unfortunately, you won't be able to get your hands on it. But if you send me an address, I'll be more than happy to send some along.

Do they sell it online? You would think so. Sell it online. She said, check them out on Facebook. Soon they will have their website back up and running after a quick redesign. So I figured that's the deal. I'd be ecstatic if you mentioned them on the show.

Shout out to Ricky, owner and founder, and Katie, graphic designer, and Stevie, who is the master brewer at Brown Water Coffee. So hopefully by the time this comes out, they'll have their website up and running. So I imagine if you search for Brown Water Coffee, it would come up, right? I would think in this day and age,

you've got to be able to find something online. I would think so. By the time this comes out. So get with it, Brown Water Coffee, if you haven't already. Thank you, Kate. Yeah, thanks for writing in, Kate. It's pretty awesome of you. I feel like they owe you some coffee or something for that.

Sure. If you have a awesome nonprofit organization, Charity, that we can help out by giving a plug, you can send stuff to our Twitter handle, the at symbol, s-y-s-k-podcast, all one word. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com and check out our website.

It's got some good stuff on it. It's called stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Hey, Netflix streams, TV shows, and movies directly to your TV, computer, wireless device, or game console. You can get a 30-day free trial membership. Go to www.netflix.com slash stuff and sign up now.

The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. Cops, are they just, like, looting? Are they just, like, pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like, what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it.

Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, qué tal, mi gente. It's Chiquis from Chiquis and Chill Podcast. Welcome to this show. I talk about anything and everything. I did have a miscarriage when I was 19 years old.

And that's why I'm a firm believer and an advocate of therapy and counseling. The person that you saw on stage, the person that you saw in interviews, that was my mother offstage. Acompañame every Monday on my podcast, Chiquis and Chill, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.