Attitudes to Piercing

Our attitudes to piercing, and indeed all other forms of permanent body art, are governed, to a vast extent, by the religious history of Western culture. Christianity was the established religion of the industrialised West, though this situation is and has been changing rapidly, this has had far reaching implications. The book of Leviticus outlaws tattooing and as good as outlaws piercing, branding and scarification as acts of deliberate bloodletting.

Leviticus 19:28: You shall not gash yourselves in mourning for the dead; you shall not tattoo yourselves. I am the Lord.

Also within the Bible the first outlaw, Cain, was marked, hence 'the mark of Cain', in order to warn others of his crime, and so exclude him from social and religious activities.*

Genesis 4:15: So the Lord put a mark on Cain, in order that anyone meeting him should not kill him.

This, of course, raises an interesting dichotomy between mutilation as means of exclusion from society, and particularly religion, as opposed to the sanctity given to the stigmata of Christ and of the saints (Gell 1993, Polhemus1978).

The ideas and values resulting from the dominant religion's attitude to body alterations has had repercussions in society which can be witnessed in the acceptance of the works of people such as Lombroso. Cesare Lombroso was a 'criminal anthropologist' living in 1896 who proposed the theory that criminal behaviour was a result of an ontogenetic deficit which stopped the development necessary for a civilised social life. He noted the features by which such a person could be recognised as a love of ornamentation and gaudy clothing, a passion for obscure demotic jargon, deficient normal sensitivities and the irresistible disposition to become tattooed. Here we see an attitude of distaste towards a practice, which cannot help but be partially due to indoctrination resulting from the religious attitudes of the time, taken a step further to the point where it is regarded as indicative of criminal behaviour. It says much about the public's views and attitudes towards taste and decency that Lombroso, and his work, is regarded as instrumental in the founding of modern criminology.

Attitudes towards the body, and what can be done to it, have also changed with the passage of time. Foucault in his work on criminality and punishment highlights changing attitudes towards the body. Where once we sought to punish the body of a person for their crimes we now shy away and disassociate ourselves from the physical. At the same time our attitudes towards other cultures and their interpretations of art have gained increasing acceptance within our own culture. This has lead to a mixed attitude towards body art. We can look at pictures of tattooed or pierced people and concede that there is some artistic merit, particularly if the person featured comes from a culture where the body art is a cultural norm, and yet when directly confronted with someone, particularly from our own culture, who bears the marks of such bodily manipulation some are repulsed by cultural memories of the supposed criminality of marking the body and social abhorrence of anything physical. This abhorrence of the physical is best exemplified by the Victorian period, one of strict morals and as near to total disassociation with the body as possible, and yet it produced hundreds of works on subjects such as 'male correction' and flagellation, most of which were destroyed because of their content. The most famous of these books, and indeed the ones which have had the greatest impact on modern society, are Venus in Furs by Sasher Masoch and the works of the Marquis de Sade, books which have resulted in the coining of the terms Sadism and Masochism.

Another example of society's attitudes to the body was noted by Bryan Turner. He explains how the restraint of passion, especially of a sexual nature, was viewed as working against society. In a culture which spawned the phrases 'time is money' and 'the devil makes work for idle hands ' sexuality was seen as pre-eminently wasteful unless for reproductive needs, and even then it should involve no pleasure.

This abhorrence of the body was, to a certain extent, quashed by the sixties 'hippy' movement and yet in the wake of 'yuppy' culture we saw it return. As this re- emergence of 'money is everything' attitude receded towards the late 1980s we see the beginnings of a return to acceptance of the physical, but now as the dominance of Christian ideology wanes aspects of the physical, until now repressed and viewed as perverse, emerge in the form of growth of the Sado-Masochistic subculture, of which piercing is often viewed as an integral part. This can be witnessed in the increased media cover of the subject and the release of books such as the photographic record of Torture Garden, one of Europe's largest fetish clubs.