More and more laws are being passed restricting the rights of young people to legally obtain body modifications. Even in areas where it is legal, schoolboards enact secondary rules restricting access to the (mandatory) education system to those with body modifications in order to ensure that these young people are not able to express themselves freely, and the similarly corporate controlled workplace also does everything it can to prevent those with piercings and other body modifications from obtaining employment. The establishment presents a series of deceitful justifications for this in an attempt to mask their true purpose: social control. In this article I will show that these laws and regulations are nothing but system sustaining safeguards to ensure that the education process continues to do its government defined role — the production of a uniform social product — and that it is essential for young people to defy these laws en masse. Let me put it simply: laws restricting body modification have nothing to do with public safety. They exist exclusively to protect the interests of the corporate and political power structure and by tolerating them, we empower our oppressors. I should note that the history and political issues I raise here are predominantly American and Canadian, but, like it or not, the United States does tend to define where the rest of the world is going as it plows our path to the future. Think of it as the canary in the mineshaft.
Access to body modification tends to be restricted for young people, both in- and outside the school system, for a number of false stated reasons. I’ll mention a few here again, but it’s a subject I’ve written about previously (for example, in Joe Hatred Strikes Again!), so I’ll be brief. The point is that the listed reasons are lies (and obvious ones at that), and once we’ve revealed that, we need to start asking ourselves what the real reasons are. Body modification as an indicator of “risky behavior” It’s regularly written that there’s a link between body modification and activities such as drug use and adolescent sex. Ignoring the fact that the studies claiming this are wholly unscientific due to inadequate and non-representative sample groups, let’s assume for a moment that the statement is true. Now let’s examine two other examples of true statements:
In the first statement, there is a direct cause and effect — the first action (the gun firing) leads to the second (the violent death). In the second statement, which is also true, there is no cause and effect — freedom does not lead to crime, even though a free person is more likely to commit a crime. A person who is inclined to risky behavior is perhaps more likely to be attracted to body modification, but taking the body modification away from them has no effect on their interest in the risky behavior — one could argue it risks increasing it as the body modification acts as a channel for those drives (ie. a safe way to express them), but that’s a debate for another column. Body modification as disruptive to the education process Some people have claimed that body modification needs to be kept out of schools since it is unfair to other students who are not able to concentrate on their studies because of the distraction. As I’ve pointed out before, I find it difficult to believe that young people are this shallow, and in any case, this argument could equally be applied to expel ethnic minorities, the disabled (wheelchairs, crutches, braces, and disfigurements in general all have the potential to be just as distracting), or even exceptionally attractive or unattractive students. The real reason that this justification is clearly deceptive is because it’s too late. If this was the reason, it would have been implemented when body modification was rare. When I was in school over ten years ago, the schools gave me no grief for having a mohawk or stretched piercings. However, now that it’s becoming common — even normal — it’s perceived as a threat. Body modification as unhealthy Just like we do not allow young people to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, many have suggested that we need to stop them from engaging in the “dangerous” activity of body modification. The problem with this statement is that there is effectively zero evidence showing that responsible body modification is dangerous, and the little evidence that there is shows that any risks that do exist are a fraction of those that apply to activities that we embrace as a culture — from organized sports to driving, or even junk food (which I discussed in a previous column, Ban it all!). Others have made statements such as “piercings aren’t safe in a growing body” or “young people can’t take care of their piercings”, which are both patently false. There’s no evidence that body piercings shift badly due to growth when placed properly — the only “evidence” I’ve ever seen illustrating this theory is more likely piercings done poorly from day one (after all, the law is such that few talented piercers will take the business risk losing their shop for piercing a minor — leaving them to end up in the hands of what are all-too-often bottom-quality piercers). As far as the latter claim, it’s an offensive and ageist statement that I feel is barely even worth dignifying with a response any more than a claim such as “blacks and women shouldn’t vote”. But, since so many people believe that body modification requires more maturity to take care of than a fourteen year old can muster, let me point out this: taking care of a body piercing is no more difficult than cleaning oneself or taking care of a minor injury, something which we routinely expect adolescents to be capable of. Children are going through puberty these days as young as eight years old — surely those issues are far more difficult to cope with than a navel ring? And in any case, historically youths have had no difficulty dealing with the responsibilities of healing even large scalpelled piercings or scarifications — unless of course we are arguing that Western youths are somehow radically less competent than those in “simpler” cultures (and yes, given the statements about the education system I am about to make, I appreciate the irony in that suggestion!). “We know what’s best for you” Kids shouldn’t do this because it’s an expression of some sick kink or gateway into sadomasochism. Kids shouldn’t do this because no one will hire them looking like that. Kids shouldn’t do this because it’s just wallowing in mental illness. To that I simply respond, “faith based logic.” Ultimately these types of issues tend to be nothing more than one group trying to force its social ideals on another — often with almost pathological zeal and hatred. As one reader writes in response to tattoos being on the cover of the The Spectrum, a paper in Utah:
I won’t begin to comment on the level of psychosis and pure hatred that it takes to tear up a newspaper because the cover upsets you, but “God says it’s wrong” is a cop-out in that it offers no evidence for its spiteful claims, and creates a debate that “by divine proclamation” denies any right to respond. Let me let you in on a little secret — assuming God exists, God’s first interest is in the promotion of love and happiness. To suggest anything else for an omnipotent figure would paint Him as evil. Not only that, but nowhere in the Bible is there any dictate against body modification (the laws of Leviticus which briefly mention funerary cuttings are later overturned as “the old law” in Romans) — this is the word of man masquerading as the word of God.In any case, while wisdom may often come with age and experience, it’s not an automatic thing — man may be justified to God by acts of faith and not acts of law, but here on earth if a claim is made, it has to be backed up with facts. “Sick”, when it comes to personal expression, is simply a product of personal and cultural bias — for example, many would argue that to adhere to the mold is a betrayal of what it means to be human.
As far as issues such as the job market, factors are in such flux that it’s unreasonable to make such predictions. Body modification is mainstreaming at an incredible rate — studies show that 30% of Americans have a body piercing other than their earlobes, and according to Ohio University one in seven have a tattoo, with dramatically more in younger demographics (a 10:1 ratio according to some studies, which suggests we will see a generation where body modification is actually the norm). It’s very quickly becoming a modified world and given the permanence of these activities, there is no risk of “the trend disappearing”. The mental illness issues are deceptive as well. Body modification is a form of communication and expression; studies are very clear that restricting the ability to communicate or self-express is one of the most detrimental things you can do to a mentally ill individual — most treatment involves the encouragement and facilitation of communication. In the rare cases where the body modification actually is an expression of something wrong on the inside, the body modification is a healing factor or at worst a symptom, rather than a contributing part of the problem. It’s just a stupid trend that people are going to regret later In my previous column, The Benefits of Being Different, I discussed how while there is a move to shift body modification into a commodified trend and group fashion, body modification in the sense discussed on BME is ultimately self expression rather than herd expression. As far as “regretting it later”, even if it turns out to be a trend and all but disappears in ten years, because of its permanence and because such an incredibly high number of people have taken part it must lose its discriminatory value. I am reminded of a scene in the Star Trek episode, “Past Tense”, in which Dax, an alien with spots on her face and body very similar to those of Beki B (a model recently featured on the cover of In The Flesh, a book on the “cultural politics of body modification” by Victoria Pitts), travels back in time to to 2024, and meets an official named Chris who helps her obtain ID:
I’m sure that if this turns out to be a trend, there may be a “fear the mullet”-like backlash while the trend dies, but I find it highly dubious to suggest that any long term damage will be done socially to those with body modifications — there are simply too many of us.
The History of Modern Schooling
To understand why the school is a battleground on this subject, one must examine its history and modern role. In the mid 1800′s, young Americans were some of the best educated and most free individuals on the planet — and America had no formal education system (being largely derived from the guild — apprentice — system of learning that embraced “learning through doing”). Schools were locally organized and had no rigid structure such as state testing, national textbooks, or even a defined curriculum. Children learned to read young, and because the US had rejected European copyright law, academic books and literature were readily available and consumed by the lower classes. The end result was an exceptionally well educated population that truly embodied “the American dream”. The problem was that the liberty that these people embraced — and the spoils they demanded to earn (this was long before the concept of the welfare state) — ran contrary to the growing corporate power in the West, as well as the political corruption that sought to conglomerate control in increasingly expansive and wealthy federal hands. In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education wrote:
They realized that once the lower classes were educated, it became crystal clear to them that the system was not treating them fairly or equally, and that they would demand a fair share of the country’s opportunities. Over the next twenty years, the US radically overhauled its education system to combat a well informed populace, with an end goal of producing adult infants with little ability to think independently. They worked to eliminate the ability for people to learn on their own by dragging out the education process, replacing it with mind-numbing repetition and learning through memorization, rather than understanding. The goal also included coaching students into blind patriotism and consumerism. John Dewey, one of the fathers of modern education, wrote in 1897:
How often have you heard that a teacher’s role is to mold young impressionable minds, to prepare them for life (not life in the independent sense of the word, but life in the sense of their “duty to the machine”) — that is, to turn them into good little soldiers, happy to be ambitionless drones, working for the sole purpose of raising money to hand to their corporate slaveowners? William Torrey, the US Commissioner of Education at the turn of the 20th century wrote of his students:
John Taylor Gatto, who quit teaching in 1991 to become a school reform activist while still holding the New York City Teacher of the Year award he was just given, writes:
A truly terrifying and dystopian vision of the system that we are currently watching play out on a world stage, which Gatto has documented impeccably in his book The Underground History of American Education.Now that you understand why the state and the corporation instituted the modern education system — to produce compliant and patriotic consumer drones — let’s take a look at how body piercing and body modification fit into that equation.
Over the past month BME has been actively conducting the largest controlled study of people with body modifications ever done (click here to learn more about this survey and to browse its results). As of this writing approximately four thousand people have been interviewed, with just over two thousand of those being 21 years old or younger. Of those people, it is true that, as the mainstream claims, 80% have tried marijuana, and 84% have engaged in sexual intercourse (with about a third having done so before the age of sixteen), but let’s take a look at some of the other results that they don’t tell you about. In the absence of anything suggesting negative effects of body modification — mental or physical — I believe it is important to ask the question, “how do you feel?” In deciding whether something that doesn’t harm anyone else is valid or not, we ought to be investigating how it affects the way the bearer perceives their life. In the response sets below (limited to those 21 and under), I have marked the positive answers in green, and the negative answers in red, with the neutral answers marked in blue (and I’ve left out the people without piercings if you’re wondering why the numbers don’t fully add up):
As you can see, in a truly overwhelming majority, those with body modifications report back positive effects on their life, with virtually zero reporting back anything negative. You can browse the full survey data for yourself, but almost universally the only negative effects reported involve finding oneself the brunt of bigotry — and we can no more fault the modified with this damage than we can blame blacks for the actions of the Ku Klux Klan. Sure, “freaky kids with nose studs” made that decision for themselves, whereas people don’t choose the color of their skin, but that’s irrelevant — it’s simply a piece of misdirection intended to allow one to get away with blaming the victim, rather than the aggressor. It’s like saying, “but look how she dresses — she was just begging to be raped!” The fact is, people with body modifications become happier, more self-determined, and more willing to define their own lives on their own terms (hence the “risky behavior” I suppose) — exactly what the establishment and those who seek to sustain the status quo are afraid of. Now, maybe you’re saying “but healthy people shouldn’t need these crutches; harming yourself to achieve happiness is nonsensical.” There are many things that don’t add up on their own. To give an oft-cited example, the cost of policing a bank robbery is almost always higher than the amount of money stolen — that is, money would be saved by simply repaying the bank with taxpayer money, rather than going to the great expense of capturing and prosecuting the culprits. However, we understand that the larger effects (the damage to society) if we were not to use this “damaging crutch” would far outweigh any losses in the acceptance of the crutch. To give an example closer to home, recent studies by the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery showed lower levels of depression as well as “very significant improvement in quality of life” following cosmetic surgery — and such surgery is of course an order of magnitude more dangerous than body modification. The fact is that even while over-emphasizing the small amount of damage done by body modification, when it comes to improving the lives of those involved, it is a net gain scenario. To put it simply, all things considered, it improves lives and makes people happy. And those involved feel very strongly about this — not only do over 70% of these youths say they’d not take a better job in exchange for removing their modifications, but 61% go so far as to say they’d actually choose a worse job in exchange for being able to keep their body modifications. These are people who can’t be bought. To put it simply, they’re not slaves. So why are these rules really in place?
As I mentioned earlier, high quality education was not perceived as a “threat” until it started to affect the ambitions of the lower classes. President Woodrow Wilson once said:
He said this while describing his goals for the future of business in America. The Rockefeller Education Board agreed, stating:
That is, education first and foremost must maintain the status quo; it must keep the class system stable, and it must keep ideas from flowing between demographic groups. The wealthy are able to maintain themselves due to the sheer bulk of their money — I hope it’s clear that the role of the schools in this caste system is primarily to repress, not to empower. Any ideas that break those molds, that run contrary to that conformity must be immediately destroyed lest they threaten the system. In the 1950s we watched rock music be attacked when it moved from black communities to white communities (where it was eventually commodified and lost its meaning), in the 1970s punk rock was attacked when it moved up from the lower classes (also diluted into commercialism), and most recently hip hop was attacked as it moved out of the ghetto into the suburbs. In White America, rapper Eminem says:
While there are forces working to commercialize the “rebellion” and individualism in body modification (as discussed in the previous columns on indigenous cultures and on class warfare), the current predominant drive is to try and squelch it at its root by blocking access to the next generation (who are recognizing its value in growing numbers).When social scientists claim that those who engage in body modification also engage in other “risky behavior”, what they’re really saying is that those with body modifications are less likely to accept the rules, and more likely to decide for themselves what is right and wrong in their lives… and this is exactly what the last hundred years of the education process have been fighting to stop. In some ways, body modification is the single largest threat the system is currently facing.
When it was just some S&M characters doing it in the closet, they didn’t care — it was going on behind closed doors, and only affecting adults who desperately wanted to keep their kinks a secret, so they still played the game. When it was just gays and lesbians doing it, they didn’t care — probably hoping that they’d marginalize it in the process with homosexuality being a relatively stable minority rather than a growing threat. When it was societal outcasts they didn’t care — it just made them easier to identify — but now that it’s affecting their kids, and affecting enough of them to radically change society, they know that they have to stop it before personal freedom and expression becomes normal and acceptable. And you can bet they’ll use every deceptive dirty trick they can think of. Who is “they” you ask? Is this kind of like “the man”? Who it is at this point is difficult to pinpoint, because no actual person or even group of people exist any more — in the past one could blame the aristocracy that initiated the process, but it is far more convoluted than that now. Ask yourself who owns a large corporation (since large governments at this point in Western nations are almost wholly corporate owned and controlled). Certainly there are people at the top of the corporate hierarchy that manage to skim off significant resources and are motivated to help sustain it out of greed, but they don’t actually own the corporation or society, and certainly have no power to universally control it. Others would say that it is the shareholders, or the voters, that own the corporation or government, but it’s obvious that while they do take part in the system, their value is largely symbolic and they carry little control as individuals. The fact is that at this point larger, older organizations own themselves — no one is in charge. They exist with one drive alone, as their free market model dictates: survival and market domination. In the case of governments and megacorporations which exist in a monopolistic state, they do this by sustaining the system. In the 1997 movie Cube, the characters find themselves trapped in a homicidal maze, symbolically representing the megacorporation. As the characters debate the question why, one of them explains that while it once had a function, no one remembers it any more:
As another character points out, there is no establishment conspiring against us — just guys at desks doing their jobs. The monster is headless and soulless; as they say, it’s not the individual player that causes our problems, but the game itself.What are we going to do about it?
Step one: Don’t let them kill body modification First we need to stop the efforts to kill or stem body modification by resisting these rules and regulations — and by responsibly and logically proposing alternatives that find a middle ground which protects both our safety and our liberty. That is, we should support laws that ensure safety standards and responsible practitioners, but we need to stand up against laws that actually restrict the artform — for example, laws in some states banning suspension, dermal punches, and even certain styles of piercing and jewelry (such as the laws in Florida banning the use of Tygon in piercing). Call their bluff when they’re overstepping their power. Many of the restrictive anti-modification laws are a violation of clearly defined civil rights. Not only that, especially in the case of school rules, the people making the rules may not even have the authority to do so — in many cases it has been as simple as pointing this out to make the issue disappear a la the young child shouting “the Emperor wears no clothes!” Use the media to your advantage. One of the reasons they think they can get away with these actions is because they do it in the shadows. Especially in the case of school suspensions over piercings, it’s not uncommon for the decision to be reversed with an apology as soon as the media becomes involved — since it can very quickly result in a hailstorm of negative national attention that risks the jobs of the people responsible. Body modification is still a hot topic for the media and they love doing stories like this, and are very often extremely sympathetic. In addition to direct involvement with the media, letters-to-the-editor are surprisingly effective and can reach a large audience. If your local area enacts restrictive laws, be sure to write letters to all the local papers and have your friends do the same in their own words. When you’re doing so, be concise and polite — read your letter over a few times and make sure that your argument is well constructed and will appeal to the common sense of readers… and have a sense of humor — while crazy kook letters are published, the ones that help the cause are ones that are well written and fun to read. Talk to your parents; try and make them understand you. If you’re a minor, your parents will have as much legal say over your life in these matters as you do. They can act as a powerful advocate for you, so if you can help them understand that body modification is something positive in your life, that’s not hurting you, they can speak on your behalf — and going back to the media, the media loves united families — having a parent say “I love my pierced daughter” not only speaks to the public in general and makes for good TV, but it inspires other parents to say, “hey, maybe my kid’s not so bad after all.” Remember, the government is in theory your representative. Your local town council, school board, state representatives, and so on, are all voted into power by you and your family. If you send them a strong enough message, and they feel that their constituents disagree with something that’s happening, it is their duty to act as your advocate and correct the wrongs (and they’ll do it out of self-preservation). Not only should you be writing letters to and calling your local government, but you could also collect polls and get general public support. And never forget — the squeaky wheel gets the grease. So called “special interest groups” have so much power not because they have the voting numbers, or because they are “right”, but simply because they are very vocal and good at lobbying politicians. When you’re writing your representative, be sure though to follow the same rules as writing the media — be polite and concise, and when possible, provide backup for your statements such as relevant studies. Be the best you can be. This may be the most important point in this section. I can not emphasize enough how important it is for you to get good grades and be a positive part of your community. If you’re a problem student that doesn’t play sports, doesn’t volunteer at the Red Cross, and is failing half their classes, you’ll just fall into the stereotype and it’ll be hard to argue your case. On the other hand, if you’re a B+ student that works hard, is friendly, worked on the school yearbook, and volunteers at the local animal shelter on the weekends, you can make a very strong case for yourself — they’ll be left having to explain why body modification somehow “voids” all your contributions to society. Consider civil disobedience. When all else has failed, you can of course practice the time-proven method of simply breaking the unjust laws, forcing them to either prosecute you or discard the law. There are several US states that still have restrictions against tattooing, and in them a small handful of brave artists have performed public tattooing for the specific purpose of being arrested to force the government to justify their anti-freedom actions in court. Many have spent significant time in prison for this, and some have even been successfully prosecuted. Most recently this happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as reported by KTUL:
Other artists, such as Diane Maiden of Manchester, New Hampshire, take a more active role, by suing their local governments over such restrictions, often with the help of groups such as the ACLU. Unfortunately these cases still often lose, with courts agreeing with the government that tattooing is not valid art or communication, and thus not protected under the First Ammendment. It’s still a long battle ahead, and those artists fighting it deserve our thanks.Don’t let them turn us against each other; don’t succumb to greed. When you’re running an above-board business, running it “criminally” is ultimately damaging to that business… As such, it’s not uncommon for some less scrupulous body modification business owners to, instead of fighting unjust laws, use them to attack their competition — I’ve even seen numerous cases where artists will attempt to manipulate local government into enacting laws that would in effect allow only them to stay in business. I am reminded of Afghanistan where rival warlords reported each other as al Qaeda operatives to the Allied forces who then ran bombing runs that served not the war against terrorism, but simply empowered one drug warlord over another.
To cite a recent example, at a private BME event being hosted in Chicago flesh pullings were being planned. The piercing would of course be performed by a local piercer — another local piercer heard about this and because there are regulations in the area making such rituals illegal, he spoke with the health board and supported them in threatening the organizers, allegedly in the interest of shutting down his competition — and as a result those aspects of the event had to be canceled. Some might argue that he was in the right; after all, he was operating legally, and those at the BME BBQ were about to break the law, and no one would claim that suspension is risk-free. I briefly interviewed the piercer responsible:
The problem is that when you support the law’s injustices, even passively, and instead of fighting for this community or for the rights of its members, decide to “play the game” and use it to your advantage (even if it means hurting others), you are holding up these injustices and empowering them. Having personally seen lives changed and even saved by body modification and body ritual, I could never bring myself to sink to such a level, but the sad truth is that I’ve had variations on this conversation — usually far worse — dozens of times with dozens of different piercers.To those body artists who fight against this community in exchange for a second studio and a few more dollars in the bank, I remind them that one day they will need to answer for their treachery and betrayal. As they say, karma’s a bitch…
Step two: Don’t let them commodify body modification When it’s clear to them that they’ve lost the battle to eliminate body modification, their “plan B” (as it was with rock, punk, and hip hop) will be to commodify and appropriate and turn it into a trend that they can use to serve their own goals. It is essential that we resist their efforts to keep us docile and subservient on both fronts. We’re seeing the same happing right now with the RIAA in the US toward music “sharing” technologies (such as Napster, KaZaA, and so on). First, when the technology was young, and the threats seemed fringe, they simply ignored the P2P community. Then, as the popularity increased, they fought to destroy it through increasingly aggressive lawsuits and attempts to legislate. We’re now seeing the final phase begin, and an increasing number of companies (Apple’s iTunes coupled with its iPod player for example) are learning how to use these technologies to both kill off the original threat and profit from it. At its simplest, always make sure your modification interests revolve around you and expressing yourself, rather than something you’ve been told to believe in — don’t go buying that Tickle Me Elmo Bellypiercing Kit that gets you a discount when you wear it at McDonald’s. Remember, when it comes to commodification, they can’t do it if you won’t buy it! Step three: Above all else, know yourself and be yourself If you want a piercing, get it. If you want your face tattooed, do it. Make sure everyone you know does the same if they want to. However… that doesn’t mean rush out and get that FTW on your forehead — rights do come with responsibilities as well. If you take body modification seriously (and odds are if you’ve read this far through this you do), then you know that it’s a powerful thing — use it right, and it’ll dramatically improve your life. Use it wrong, and it’ll do nothing to improve your life, and may even hurt you, especially if we’re talking about things like facial tattooing. If you’re honest with yourself, and care about yourself, then you’ll take the time to make good decisions when it comes to your body — or at least learn to judge which impulses you feel are “genuine” and which are passing fancy. Have fun and be happy, and remember, body modification is about you! And remember, the only reason that people don’t have rights is because they don’t stand up for them. I realize I’ve been brief in this section; in future columns I will talk about cases where resistance was successful, as well as illustrating those that failed. While there are parallels between what we’re facing and the civil rights movement in general, freedom of expression is much less agreed upon as a universal right, so it’s easier for them to strike at us with what would otherwise be instantly recognized as bigotry. This is a Slave Revolt Let’s be clear here — we’re talking about a slave revolt… and that means that if we lose, the lot of us will find ourselves crucified along the side of the road as an example to those who’d also seek to be individuals — some would argue that’s already happening. Some might even argue that there’s something to be said for the life of a slave; in theory, it’s easy — your needs are provided for, you know what you’re supposed to do and think, and as long as you do what they say, life’s worries are minimized. But at the same time, life’s borders become very narrow, and we’re reduced to cogs in a corporate machine. And, as I will illustrate in my next column, as cogs in the machine, we will be replaced. This is not only a fight worth fighting for philosophical reasons, but a fight for the survival of our species as we know it. Until then,
BMEzine.com PS. Enormous thanks is due to John Taylor Gatto for his incredible research on this subject which helped inspire this column. I whole-heartedly recommend his book on this subject (available at johntaylorgatto.com), and I would not have been able to compile this without his help. In addition, I think it’s also important to note that there are many fine teachers working to reform the system from within — they deserve great credit for doing so. |
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Young people unite: Body modification can FIGHT THE POWER [The Publisher’s Ring]
Written by
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Emulating and Idolizing Indigenous Cultures is Stupid and Dangerous [The Publisher’s Ring]
Written by
Emulating and Idolizing Indigenous Cultures
is Stupid and Dangerous
aka
Your only idol should be YOU
There ain’t no rules around here! We’re trying to accomplish something.
– Thomas EdisonSomething I’ve often heard said about India is that if people have done it, they’ve probably done it in India at some point in history. Every form of body modification, every ritual, every religion, and every philosophical theory has been explored in the incredibly broad intellectual and spiritual landscape that is India, and all my experiences with India have lead me to believe that on the whole it’s a land that encourages one to be oneself rather than feeling a need to conform to some role set forth by others1.
One of my favorite verses from the Bhagavad Gita reads,
It is better to do your own duty
badly than to perfectly do
another’s; when you do your duty
you are naturally free from sin.
– chapter 18, verse 47In introduction I’d also like to point out what brilliant graphic designers the Nazi party were, and how good they were at ritualizing their politics and social goals — the film Architecture of Doom even goes so far as to suggest that Nazism was first and formost an aesthetic movement (“the cult of the beautiful”). But just because they were good at these tasks doesn’t mean that their underlying philosophies were valid on other subjects.
Likewise, there were many brilliant scientists working for the Nazi regime; much of our modern medicine and a vast majority of our space technology is derivative of their work. However, that doesn’t mean that Nazism is valid either — it means that the science was valid. I think we’re prone to make this mistake quite commonly — because someone is good at one thing, we assume that their views on other subjects must be good as well.
I’d like to now move to discussing one of the most persistent and misleading myths of modern body modification culture; that of the Modern Primitive — a cult of idolization and emulation of various amalgams of indigenous cultures around the world. Self-identified modern primitives tend to embrace the aesthetic and often modernized ritual based on those of these tribal peoples, while holding them up as something to be admired, ignoring the fact that the vast majority were on many levels absolutely brutal and repressive cultures that would have been truly miserable to live under given our modern desires for self-determination and freedom.
That is, they make the mistake of saying “this modification is beautiful” and “this ritual is profound”, and then assuming associated philosophies and lifestyles are also beautiful and profound. As true as the first two statements may be, this line of thinking is no more valid than becoming a neo-Nazi because you appreciate the talented work of Albert Speer or Werner Von Braun — or enjoy Wagner.
The “noble savage” is of course, with few exceptions, a myth. You’re more likely to find this romantic vision in Northern Scotland than you are in the jungles of southeast Asia or the African plains; the “savage” life tended to be just that: savage. Life was rarely idyllic. One’s place in life, from slave to ruler, was dictated from birth and body modification and ritual were tools used to hold that fragile system together, and fearful spiritual codes did their best to explain and justify this world. Is the “noble savage” of modern primitivism something to aspire to, with its beautiful self-expression, empowering rituals, and peaceful Gaia-loving spirituality? Sure, but so is being a Jedi Knight and neither exists in real life.
In modern times many of us use body modification as a tool to become one with God; that is, to exercise control over our physical and metaphysical destinies… Modifying your body as an act of individualism echoes eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge — it’s an act of taking control. It’s an act of liberation.
Unfortunately, as I just mentioned, as beautiful as they were the modifications of most indigenous cultures were very much the opposite — they used body modification as cultural prisons, to ensure conformity and to protect social structure. Their stretched piercings were done at specific times of their life to mark their transition from one social role to another, and their scars were markers of group identification rather than individual. The modifications served a specific and pre-determined purpose — they were (as we accuse corporate-government actions these days), “system sustaining”. That is, their culture of body modification existed not to empower the individual, but to empower and sustain the group.
Certainly there was a great deal of validity in this — for them. As our societies become larger though, more resilient, and more autonomous, it’s essential that we shift our efforts from simply sustaining the society to sustaining and evolving the individual. We’ve finally reached a point in our cultural evolution where we’ve built a solid enough foundation to do so2.
On the other hand, we’ve also reached a point where we’ve given truly enormous levels of power to corporations who profit by mass-producing a cultural product (pop music being an obvious example thereof) which, while profitable, offers little toward the individual or spiritual growth of the people consuming it. Body modification has experienced explosive mainstream popularity over the past fifteen years and we face the risk that it will become commodified as well, which would deeply damage its ability to enlighten by wrapping it in the thick fog of fashion.
In indigenous cultures body modification was not apt to enlighten in and of itself — it was simply the uniform that one was expected to wear. It meant one belonged to a group. What we should be fighting to encourage is a cultural environment where a navel piercing or stretched ears or tattoo isn’t about being part of a group — it’s about being and defining yourself (regardless of who does or does not have that modification as well).
An email I received recently:
>At your websit i saw this
>beautifull Kanji tattoo!! I
>hope one of you know the
>menaing, because i really
>like it, and want to know it!
How can we do that?
I’d like to offer a few general tips to illustrate how we can move in this direction, beginning with never get flash and along the same lines, never get a tattoo you don’t understand. Certainly there’s space for a little empty decoration, but I hope you’ll consider the value in having genuine meaning on your body. After all, you are permanently etching this logo into yourself — Maori chiefs, who were one of the rare people in history who’s tattoos had deeply individualist meanings, would often use a drawing of their tattoo instead of their name when signing legal documents.
What is your name? Something handed to you by your parents? Some meaningless phonemes applied to you without your consent? Some shallow name shared by hundreds of thousands of people on the planet? A useful “tag” certainly, but not who you are… Your tattoos on the other hand have the potential to truly represent you — to mark you with identity in a way that you see fit, as you see yourself and as you’d like the world to see you.
By supporting small businesses, you make it harder for faceless corporations to seize the market and pervert the community to their needs.
I would hope it would be obvious what message is being sent when you decide that some anonymous done-a-thousand-times piece of flash off the wall, or a pretty symbol of dubious meaning from some language you’ve never spoken a word of can represent you better than something you actually worked on yourself. You can’t draw you say? Big deal! That’s why tattoo artists exist. They’re not just guys that are good at tracing — the majority are valid artists in every sense of the word… Artists that specialize in working with you to take your feelings and beliefs and making them a permanent part of you. Just make sure they’re yours3.
I’d also like to propose that you support local companies and support craftsmen over factories. I’ve spoken about this at greater length in previous columns, but we need to understand how to use the system to our benefit. Large companies are quickly dominating the jewelry market (ten years ago almost all jewelry was being made by small local craftsmen and a handful of small companies, whereas now we’re seeing international corporations using sweatshop labor to mass-produce low-quality “individualism”) — if we (the market) don’t aggressively resist this, small vendors will be all but extinct within the decade. As soon as that happens, you’ll see this community starting to be defined by corporations, not individuals.
“Killed a dude.”
Keep your sense of humor strong!I think it’s also a good idea to take yourself seriously, but not too seriously. What I mean by that is never forget the idiom “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Should you take your modifications seriously and use them to further personal growth? Absolutely! But you should also be willing to play with your body, and sometimes just be stupid for stupid’s sake. As you progress as an individual you’ll certainly face terrifying challenges, and without a sense of humor it will be hard to appreciate your failures as much as your victories.
When you’re defining yourself, avoid posturing. That is, don’t “act tough” and don’t try and get modifications specifically to affect your relationships and interactions with others. If you do that, you’re inversely falling into a conformist trap. While it’s true that your borders are in part defined by your relations with others, it’s important that the process of defining those borders is truly under your control, rather than simply in reaction to them. Or to put it another way, don’t avoid getting a [meaningful] navel piercing because you think it’s too common, and don’t get a [meaningless] uvula piercing4 just because you think it’s rare.
Along those lines, my final tip is trust yourself and who gives a damn what anyone else thinks! This is about you, isn’t it? Let’s assume for a moment that you’ve actually put some thought into what you’re doing (and if you’re not willing to do that, just stop reading now and switch to FOX News or something) and believe that you need to do a given mod in order to keep moving forward on a personal or spiritual level. If this is the case, anyone — be they parents, friends, partners, employers, whatever — that tries to stand in your way might as well be trying to kill you. In a world that understands that expression is a basic right — a core truth that makes an individual free — the act of restricting this right is one of the most grievous sins one can commit.
If it feels good, do it.
The saddest part is that most of us allow it to happen because we’re afraid… Afraid to hurt our parents’ feelings, afraid to lose our jobs, and afraid to get bad service at a restaurant. Well, guess what — the only reason that injustice exists is because so many of us allow it and prop it up. Ultimately slavery ends when people emancipate themselves; it doesn’t just happen on its own and no one can do it for you.
Actually, there is one last “rule” — probably the most important one: everything you just read here is a half-truth. Breaking the rules is essential to exploring the full landscape of life — you just have to understand the rules first to appreciate the value in breaking them5.
Really, the key I think is just to be yourself and define who you are solely by who you are. It’s not relevant who your friends are. It’s not relevant who lives in your community. It’s not relevant who you’re descended from. It’s not relevant that people with your color of skin were once slave owners of people with another color of skin or vice versa. All that’s relevant is who you are. Anything else is just a distraction.
And when you figure out who you are, and protect and ennoble that person, and fight for them and allow them to express themselves, you will be free and you will be well on your way to becoming a God.
Getting back to my original slander, I certainly encourage people to draw inspiration from all sources. But don’t think that we should aspire to actually be those sources — they had the exact same problems we’re trying to overcome (often worse), and on the whole, they never overcame theirs either. Even the most idyllic of these cultures existed in a condition of stasis with no ability to grow or evolve or move forward. All the inspiration you need is already inside of you — everything on the outside is simply helping show you how broad the palette is.
Enjoy life as yourself,
Shannon LarrattBME.com
1 Not that India doesn’t have any number of problems as well – cough! caste system! cough!
2 Please note that I’m not proposing a total rejection of cultural bonds; as much as we’re individuals we’re also players in a larger game. My belief is that we simply need to make sure we keep the focus always centered on the individual — and there are powerful forces fighting to keep that from happening.
3 That said, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t go out and get that Star Wars Rebel Alliance logo tattooed on your ass — all I’m saying is that if you do, I hope you’re doing it because it has meaning to you, not just because you think Star Wars is cool…
4 I’m not suggesting people get uvula piercings for shallow reasons. While Jon Cobb jokingly referred to his as a “stupid human trick”, he also speaks with profundity of how significant it was on a spiritual level to pierce that internal nexus.
5 As a general footnote, let me say that body modification and body play is a means, not an end. It’s a tool. You can use it to empower yourself, or you can watch as others — be they other individuals, or be they some faceless mob or soulless corporation — use it to empower themselves at your expense. Like all tools, it can be used for your benefit or your downfall… One of the general goals of BME is to encourage people to use body modification as a tool for themselves.
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Ban it all! [The Publisher’s Ring]
Written by
Ban it all!
“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or to impede their efforts to obtain it.”
– John Stuart MillOver the past few months there’s been an upsurge in ludicrous “studies” — shallow covers for dubious statistics and ill-informed “medical” statements from doctors less concerned with truth and more concerned with using the letters after their name to put forward their personal prejudices — which decry various forms of body modification as dangerous and a threat to public welfare. As a result, legislators are being called upon to ban or restrict these activities in a misguided attempt to “protect” the public from itself.
First, let me just say this: FUCK OFF AND KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF MY BODY.
Second, let me apologize for the profanity and follow up by saying this: You’re a bunch of hypocrites and bigots that are using shoddy science in an attempt to force your sociopolitical views on others and you should be ashamed of yourselves.
A recent study released by the European Union, and now being cited by media and lawmakers all over the world, makes perverse claims such as tattoo ink being made of car paint, states that up to fifty percent of piercings become seriously infected, and links a multitude of serious diseases and even several deaths to body modification.
As far as their claim of “tattoo ink being car paint”, it is true that many of the same dyes are used in tattoo ink as are used in car paint… but those same FDA approved dyes are used in food products, medical products, and so on — guess what — some cars have components made of stainless steel and titanium. Does that mean we should ban body piercing because “piercing jewelry is made of car parts?” The human body contains a significant amount of fecal matter at most times; because of that, I’d like to urge that Philippe Busquin, the EU commissioner responsible for this deceptive report, be flushed down the toilet for being a big walking turd.
The statement that “up to fifty percent of body piercings lead to acute infections which require medical treatment” is frankly preposterous and is, to put it politely, a lie. Millions of piercings are done every year. Millions. If Busquin’s claim was true, body piercing would be one of the largest medical emergencies humanity has ever faced. The truth of the matter is that body piercings rarely become acutely infected and medical treatment being required is extremely uncommon.
As far as linking diseases, primarily due to largely false stereotypical claims of unhygienic environments in tattoo and piercing studios, this is yet another fraudulent claim. The number of documented cases are rare, tend to be limited to unlicensed studios, and are becoming less and less common. I think it’s important to note that it was tattoo and piercing studios that, due to their strict adherence to contamination control, eventually forced dentists and estheticians to clean up their own acts. The Red Cross had major problems with their blood supplies due to irresponsible contamination control and as a result infected far more people with deadly diseases than the body modification industry ever has.
The claims of deaths are also deceitful — yes, there are a small number of deaths that are linked to body piercing, but what’s left out is that the piercing is rarely responsible for the death; it simply complicates existing medical sitations such as mitral valve relapse (and in all cases that I am aware of, these conditions were hidden from the piercer). I can think of only one or two cases where the piercings could be directly linked and in these cases the victim had behaved in a deeply irrational and irresponsible fashion (a la Lesley Hovvells) — after all, you can kill yourself with a hammer if you hit yourself over the head enough times… but that’s not how a hammer ought to be used.
I think maybe we need to do some comparison now. They tell us that of millions of people who get body modifications, vast numbers experience serious problems or even death — although given that the actual documented number of these “millions” is a handful at best, I’d love to know where they’re getting their information. In any case, let’s look at a few things that we know cause deaths:
Automobiles
Car crashes kill and maim an enormous number of people yearly, to say nothing of the environmental damage they are responsible for. At least 90% of all personal transportation (which accounts for almost all road fatalities) could be replaced by mass transit infrastructures which would be safer and cleaner than personal vehicles — tens of thousands of lives would be saved yearly, if not more. If the risks of body piercing are significant enough to justify new regulations and restrictions, then surely we should ban private ownership of automobiles.Junk Food
Perhaps the leading cause of premature death in the West, the culture of obesity and sloth that our megacorporations have embraced is rarely questioned, even though it not only strains our healthcare systems, but the planet itself. In 2001 the Surgeon General announced that every year 300,000 people in the US die from obesity-related causes — and 60% or more of Americans are currently obese. The American Cancer Society cites similar statistics, saying that over half of cancer is obesity related…If we can propose banning or restricting body modification for a few infections and some dubiously linked deaths, how can we stand by and allow (and encourage) young people to overindulge in a lethal drug that’s killing a million people every three years — to put this into perspective, obesity kills six times as many Americans every year as died in the entire Vietnam war. Ban junk food if you want to save lives.
Conversation
How many people have died because of the argument they got into with their neighbor? Or on a larger level, how many people have died because their country’s leader got in a meaningless argument with the leader of some other country? If we feel that the freedom of expression embodied in body modification is dangerous enough to restrict it, then it should be obvious that the far more dangerous freedom of speech should definitely be banned as well. Since the law is blind, we must ban free discourse of all kinds in order to protect the citizenry.Marriage
How many people kill their spouses every year? How many cuckolds kill their spouse’s lover? How many kill themselves from the stress of a relationship? How many of their children do? Going by the cold numbers — especially now that we know that more than 50% of marriages end in divorce — it’s clear that marriage is a threat to society and human life that far outweighs the risks of body modification. If we are to act objectively, marriage and dating should be banned.Religion
How many millions of people have been murdered in the name of one god or another? How many billions more have been repressed or abused for the same reason? Objectively, if body modification needs to be banned for being a danger, we’d best eliminate religion altogether. God may not be as dead as Nietzsche claimed, but in our objective legal society we surely must legislate his death.
Yeah, that’s right. The above is stupid and flawed thinking that any intelligent person should be appalled to stand behind… so we have to ask ourselves why intelligent people are doing this exact thing to a dramatically more ridiculous level when it comes to body modification?
They are doing it for one simple reason: bigotry.
They are launching preemptive strikes in a culture war.
The arguments that they present to defend their cases are deceptive and flimsy and never hold up under the light of any logical examinations. It’s very sad that we can proudly trumpet what free societies we all live in, yet when anyone steps outside the narrow definition of normal (as defined by “the man”), we twist words to try and justify denying them those freedoms. Freedom is a universal and borderless concept — we can’t stop someone from expressing themselves just because we think it’s “gross” (that’s really what this boils down to).
Papers are reprinting these claims constantly — please, if you see such an article in your local paper, don’t be afraid to write in and punch holes in their lies… It’s only because too few people are afraid to stand up for themselves that this is allowed to continue.
Good luck,
Shannon LarrattBME.com
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Your Body as Temple?
Written by
“I hated every minute of training, but I said, don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life a champion.”
– Muhammad AliOne of the oldest and most commonly used justifications for body modification is the ‘temple’ metaphor — “Your body is a temple. Have you ever seen an unadorned temple?”
If the body truly is a temple, then why are so many people abusing it and letting it fall apart? I am not referring to the act of piercing or tattooing or to any other skin-deep modification. I am talking about how most of us abuse our bodies through inactivity, improper nutrition, lack of rest, and elevated levels of stress. If it’s true that we’ve become the fattest generation of people the world has ever seen, then it also holds true that we in fact have very little control over our bodies, something that each and every one of us claims to have gained through our body modification endeavours. If we care so much about our personal temples, exactly how do we let ourselves become twenty pounds overweight? Fifty? One hundred?
David Patchell-Evans, champion rower and the successful entrepreneur of The Good Life Fitness Clubs, brings physical fitness into the ‘temple’ equation:"Imagine yourself as a house. Your fit body is your foundation. An unfit body is an unstable foundation. If your intellect and emotions are the walls, and your foundation is fit, those walls stay up straight and help you hold your treasures inside. If the walls are vulnerable because your foundation is shaky, the house could fall apart. Think of your soul as the roof. To be truly self-actualized, everything below the roof needs to be in good working order. Everything works together to make the dwelling place that is you."
Over the past three years working in the body modification industry, I have noticed two things. The first is that as a portion of the general population, we’re some of the kindest, most generous people out there. We’ve all had to deal with the insults and snickers behind our backs, and for many of us these acts of prejudice have made us mentally tougher. My second observation is that many of us are out of shape, and even obese. While I’m sure that this reflects the physical status of the general population, it strikes me as peculiar that the very people who choose to adorn themselves with jewelry and markings on their skin manage to neglect the fitness of their body as a whole.
I say this not to be mean or cruel, but because I’m right there with you. After four years of intense schooling and working simultaneously in this industry, my fitness level has decreased significantly, while my waistline has grown to reflect this. (I’ve even heard reference to something called a “tattooist’s gut.”) While I’ve never been thin, and perhaps never will be, I was in great shape as a teenager. I played baseball internationally, was the captain of my high school football team, and played competitive hockey, to name a few activities that were an integral part of my adolescence. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way I decided to prioritize school and money over my physical fitness, and now I find myself desperately trying to get back into shape and lose the weight I’ve put on over the past four years.
The concept of this series of articles is to chronicle my physical transformation from David into Goliath. Well, maybe a five foot six inch Goliath, but you get the point. Over the next several months I will be documenting my physical (fitness) transformation via photos, statistics and stories. I have joined a reputable fitness club and hired their best personal trainer to push me harder than I can on my own — with your body, there are no quick fixes or short cuts. I am motivated and ready to see the changes I will be making to my body in the weeks and months to come. While I have not yet set out goals on paper, my plan is to change not only my overall fitness level, but the entire shape of my body. I do not wish to become the next Arnold or Incredible Hulk, but any gain in lean muscle at this point is a step forward in matching my imagined self with my real self. Maybe once I am happy with the shape and fitness of my body, I can once again concentrate on adorning it through traditional body modification methods.
I realize that this is just the beginning; that I have very much to learn and even more to look forward to. And while I haven’t hashed out exactly the subjects of each column, there are several areas which I will bring to you in hopes that you too will be inspired by my transformation to become more physically active. As you’ll see, it is a long road ahead, but I am intent on reclaiming control over my body, just as many of you claim to do when getting pierced or tattooed. Perhaps when I have control again, I can use the ‘temple’ metaphor to refer to something more than just skin deep.
Until next time,
Dustin Sharrow
Next week’s column will offer a perspective on why having a healthy body is important to each and every one of us. I will also offer up my before personal statistics and photos, as well as my thoughts about having completed my first week of training after three years of inactivity!
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The Benefits of Being Trendy – Through the Modified Looking Glass
Written by
The Benefits of Being Trendy
Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
– Jean CocteauThey say, “You have to take the bad with the good.” Now, we all know that they say a lot of things – and a lot of what they say is inane crap. I bring up this particular adage though, because when it comes to the popularity or so-called “trendiness” of body modification all I tend to hear are negatives. It comes from both sides – those who are aghast that people do these sorts of things fear a new wave of modified people, and the already modified are mortified that their cool, unique status is about to be threatened, or that their deeply personal journey that the “mod” represents will simply be mistaken as joining in with the latest fad.
Part of the problem, as usual, comes from the media that applies the label of trend or fad. Their doing so is usually a calculated move to create or increase the impact of a story – just look at the recent coverage of tongue splitting. Tongue splitting is not even remotely a fad or a trend in the world, in the west, or even among people who go so far as to get tattoos and piercings. At best, you might say that tongue splitting is approaching the level of a trend among those people who have a disposition towards “heavy mods”. But what makes a better sounding story? A couple random people doing what they want to make themselves happier or a rush of people mindlessly running to get their tongues cleaved? The latter makes a story, which combined with a good image or two, that is sure to draw attention and that is what it is all about: ratings.
Commercial media is based upon how many people they can get to look at their product and subsequently the ads within, which pays for the whole enterprise. But there is an upside. It is possible, I’d even say likely, that out of all the people who saw the coverage of tongue splitting that there were at least one or two who saw something that they could identify with, perhaps had even been dreaming of, and now know that they can achieve. If just one person benefits in this manner then I, for one, would be willing to go through the all the hassle and headaches over and over again tenfold.
By way of extension, we can apply such a loose model of exposure to most “mods”. Think about how you first came to know of tattooing, body piercing, or whatever else might be your fancy. If you have come into any of these “scenes”, especially in the last decade or so, then it is very likely that your initial exposure was due in some part to the increasing popularity of them. Moreover, the primary reason you currently have such a large selection of quality manufacturers of jewelry and equipment, qualified artists, and other resources is because of this popularity (i.e. trendiness)*.
* I know, it also spawns the glut of anything for a buck shops, but — “You have to take the bad with the good.” Heh….It was not long ago that finding jewelry, good or no, larger than 14 gauge was an incredibly frustrating search and the idea of something like pocketing was nowhere to be found. The necessary fuel for the creative fire of the people who pioneer new designs and procedures to offer us is an industry capable of supporting them. Before you bemoan the “belly pierced and quarter sized butterfly tattoo on her butt” chick imitating her favorite pop star remember that she is one of legions and it is their dollars that help make this industry. Shops cannot survive off only the heavy and unique procedures and practitioners cannot simply jump in at an advanced level – good piercers get good by doing lots of piercings, and good tattoo artists get their basics down churning out flash. Every little flash piece from butterfly to Taz and every blinking light navel barbell are dollars in the coffers and experience at work that go towards potentially improving and evolving the industry and community. Without recent trends your current piercing would probably have been much more expensive, done by a less experienced piercer, and used lower quality jewelry. When the trends and fads are too thin to produce new customers the businesses fall off and it is usually the better shops that take the first hits because of their unwillingness to cut costs on the quality they provide to you in terms of staff and product.
Instead of laughing at “trendy chick” or whoever else – thank them and kindly suggest that they think about adding to their collection. And who knows, perhaps in going through the process of getting that fashion driven “mod” the person may well learn something unexpected or find a deeper meaning and motivation. That butterfly could grow into a bodysuit (we all start somewhere), but that first step might not have happened if not for the pop-star tattoo trend.
So what do you do when everybody else starts getting the up-till-now rare “mod” that you chose because it’s the latest trend? My advice: Get over it. If you only got something done to be different from those who didn’t have it then you are just as shallow, if not worse, than those who run and get the latest thing their idol had done. Odds are you weren’t the first and only person to have it anyway – so why is it ok for you to be one among tens or hundreds, but not one among thousands? We are all already unique individuals by nature without making any effort whatsoever. Doing something just to try and be different is rather silly and redundant to the facts. Ask yourself, “If everybody else had it, would I still want it and why?” Here’s another one of those things they say, “Just because everyone is doing it, doesn’t mean you have to too.” To this I say, “Just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.”
Are you afraid of being one of the crowd or being perceived as one of the crowd? The “crowd” is an illusion – everybody doing it has their own personal feelings and motivations for what they are doing – the differences may not be great but they are there. So, really, you can’t be one of the crowd but you can be seen as such. And this seems to be the most common complaint among the “anti-trendy modified”. These are the people who are upset that their personally significant “mods” will be viewed as just pop trends. Again: Get over it. People who look at you and think you got your piercing or whatever because the flavor of the moment rock star has it done weren’t ever going to recognize the deeply personal or spiritual event or outlook it represents to you anyway. In fact, it is rather hard to do this in any situation unless you explicitly tell the person what it means to you. It may be annoying that they make an assumption that you find distasteful but that’s life and it is going to happen a lot – people make assumptions, trend or no trend. How am I supposed to guess that your butterfly is symbolic of a reclamation and rebirth after abuse and addiction instead of something you and your sorority sisters did on a dare just by looking at it?!
I know and know of a few people who have removed or reversed things because they became popular. I sit here typing this and laughing at such people. To me, your “mods” could not have meant as much to you as you claimed if they can be given up simply because others had their own as well. Beyond which, I choose to laugh because the alternative is to cry at your lack of understanding. Your ideas about modification may be deeply spiritual or have a greater context but that doesn’t have to be so for everyone. You can stretch your lobes for enlightenment but let others stretch them for looks or just for fun. Why should it matter if they aren’t approaching modification with your particular frame of reverence? Feel free to be annoyed if you want but if you actually feel that way about it I would think that you would keep yours and educate others rather than giving up completely. I don’t see the devotee among Jews giving up circumcision and the bris, Hindus no longer wearing nostril piercings, or any other number of peoples stopping their modification practices just because other people in the world may start doing them for other reasons than their religiously or spiritually motivated ones.
Finally, perhaps the greatest benefit of body modification (atypical, of course – per my earlier columns) being trendy is simply a greater level of acceptance. If enough people are doing something that it can be rightfully called a fad or a trend then that means a lot of people are doing it. The more people doing it, the more likely it is to gain acceptance. Look at men piercing their ears over the last couple decades. People like myself with so called extreme and heavy mods are not the ones who can or will make body modification accepted at large. We can do our part as ambassadors of a sort, but ultimately it is the trend followers that will bring body modification home to their families and fight on the front lines for its acceptance. Mom and Dad can sit home and watch me on TV, perhaps even enjoying it, without ever being threatened or changing their dislike for modification but when their son or daughter comes home with their new “mod” then the real process begins. They face possibly an even greater struggle than those who might shun them for their fad – which would you think is easier to fall back upon for support in such times: A vision or belief based on body modification or just wanting to be allowed to look a certain way?
Erik Sprague
because the world NEEDS freaks…
Former doctoral candidate and philosophy degree holder Erik Sprague, the Lizardman (iam), is known around the world for his amazing transformation from man to lizard as well as his modern sideshow performance art. Need I say more?
Copyright © 2003 BMEzine.com LLC. Requests to republish must be confirmed in writing. For bibliographical purposes this article was first published July 8th, 2003 by BMEzine.com LLC in Tweed, Ontario, Canada.
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The Benefits of Being Different [The Publisher’s Ring]
Written by
The Benefits of Being Different
Well, if you want to sing out, sing out
And if you want to be free, be free
‘Cause there’s a million things to be
You know that there are– Cat StevensIn his latest colum Erik, The Lizardman, suggested that it was laughable to seek out body modifications solely because they are rare or unusual, and even more foolhardy to get rid of a body modification when it becomes popular for fear of being perceived as part of the crowd. While I believe his core premise is accurate on a business level*, I’m not entirely sure that I agree with his decrying of difference for the sake of difference.
* It is the “trend followers” who ultimately pay the bills of the body modification industry and thus keep it alive. Therefore it is wrong to downplay their value, since without them, we’d face significant hardships.
On an animal level, body modification serves to further two goals: first, strengthening the herd through a shared “belonger” visual language (African tribal scars, the Jewish bris, stretched lobes in the piercing scene, and so on), and second, as self-differentiating mating behavior (usually within certain boundaries, although we’re seeing those grow all the time). Until quite recently, all atypical modifications have been an individual expression — that’s where my interest lies, it’s what this article will focus on, and it’s what I believe we should protect and encourage.
To attract a mate of a specific type, animals differentiate themselves. Since females “choose” their mate in most species, males have evolved garish ways of drawing attention to themselves — look at birds and one of the first things you’ll notice is that the males are brightly colored and perform bizarre and dangerous rituals to attract attention, while the females have muted colors and tend not to put themselves at such risk. The basic idea though, universal across almost all animals, is that the unique and exceptional individual gets the best mates.
Humans of course are more complex animals, so our appearance and behavior is more than just mating behavior; it’s a broader form of communication. But it still boils down to the notion that the unique individuals define and rule the herd and the plain ones simply are going with the flow and get second pick. I should note that the definition of “plain” changes from year to year — at times it was normal to be corsetted, and nowadays it’s not abnormal to have a small number of tasteful body piercings.
Even a cursory overview of “successful people” (ie. business leaders, self-made millionaires, authors, celebrities, etc.) makes it clear that they’re not normal people. They tend to be tall. They tend to be beautiful. They tend to be eccentric. Of course there are exceptions, and it is true that the majority are excelling in socially acceptable ways, but the fact remains that the world and its destiny belongs to unique and exceptional individuals. That said, the brightly colored bird is more likely to be killed by a predator, and the same goes for humans. If your goal is survival rather than success, maybe you’d be better off flying under the radar and stick with the crowd.
The future is defined by change. When things stay the same they stagnate — and the sad truth is that most people prefer to avoid change out of fear. The person who embraces mods that are already “normal” is not taking humanity forward. They’re certainly helping by not holding it back, and, as Erik stated, they are helping build a foundation for further change, but they are not involved in defining the future. Maybe not everyone wants to do that (and some would argue that not everyone is qualified to do that), but anyone with decent self-esteem should want to be involved in this process. After all, if you believe you are a good person with valid ideas, should you not be taking part in deciding humanity’s future? We’ve seen that when the future becomes defined by the herd that it tends to fail until a small group of individuals stands up, tears it down, and rebuilds it with forward vision.
One of the points that Erik made — and a very valid one — was that no matter what, we are all individuals, and are all different. No matter what. Sure, that’s true, but on an objective level it’s not really so true after all. It’s kind of like the person who watches contests on TV and swears up and down that they’re smarter and could win the million dollars… that’s all good, and maybe it’s even true, but what does it matter if you’re not going out there and winning? We’re social animals — few of us, short of sociopathic serial killers, operate solely as individuals. As such, while it’s definitely good to perceive of yourself as an individual, you’d better be able to prove it if you want anyone to take the claim seriously.
Being different with the same form of expression is not really being different objectively; only subjectively. For example, if a person who’s lead a vanilla life gets a navel piercing, it can be a profound and positive statement on a personal level — one that I’d encourage (and I hope this isn’t coming across as negating that value) — but it is only a private statement. However, when you pursue modifications that are unique or relatively unique, you make a larger statement, and if you have some basic comprehension of esthetics, you can get “heavy mods” that are still attractive (read: successful) on a mainstream level and can even help you succeed in that mainstream — not because the mod “makes you better”, but because it’s an effective way to advertise and promote yourself. As I’ve mentioned before, it makes you memorable (unusual modifications do — a navel piercing did ten years ago, but that is no longer the case).
The term is thrown around a lot, but I believe that we’re sitting at the cusp of a major paradigm shift that will define human culture over the next millenia. We’re currently deciding whether we want to move toward a society that embraces the unique individual, or a conformist culture that insists on uniformity. Powerful forces and trends are fighting for each option, and as society stratifies the coming culture war becomes more apparent.
We have to ask ourselves which kind of culture we’d rather live in: are you defined as a member of a group (black, American, Russian, white, Christian, whatever) or are you defined as an individual, with your group allegiances being secondary? That is, are you defined by your similarities with your compatriots, or your differences? Logically, I fail to see how an individual can be defined by anything but the differences.
One of my favorite movies, Harold and Maude, contains a scene where they are walking through a flower greenhouse near a giant field of white daisies. Maude, an eccentric and full of life old woman says to her much younger boyfriend Harold, “I like to watch things grow. They grow, and bloom, and fade, and die, and change into something else! Ah, life!” She then tells Harold how she would like to be a sunflower, on account of them being “so tall and simple”, and then asks him what sort of flower he’d like to be.
Harold (an oddball who longs to be “normal”) gestures at the wide field of daisies, which from a distance look uniform in nature, and says to her, “I don’t know… one of these maybe. They’re all alike.”
Maude replies, “Oh, but they’re not! Look, see, some are smaller, some are fatter, some grow to the left, some grow to the right, some have even lost some petals… all kinds of observable differences! You see Harold; I feel that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people that are this, yet allow themselves to be treated as that,” pointing from the single flower to the giant field of daisies which then transitions into a field of thousands of white gravestones.
In conclusion, be yourself and don’t be afraid to tell people that as loudly as you want. Be proud of your differences; fight not just to protect them, but to amplify them! I named BME not just as an acronym for Body Modification Ezine, but as a symbolic statement of “BE ME“. IAM is of course the same. I aggressively encourage you to be yourself and back up that action with evidence of your uniqueness.
See the future. Be the future!
Shannon LarrattBME.com
PS. Let me be very clear though: if you want your navel pierced, that’s awesome and I think that on a personal level you can get a lot out of it and it’s absolutely worth doing and I encourage it as well. This column is not meant to spit on the mainstream; I’m simply trying to illustrate that the other side of the coin (“difference for difference’s sake”) has value as well. I also am not so blind as to believe that atypical body modification is the only way to achieve the goals I’ve discussed here — it’s simply the path I’ve chosen for myself (and I think it’s a good one; or at least the right one for me).
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Body Play: State of Grace or Sickness? (Part I) – Fakir Rants & Raves
Written by
Body Play: State of Grace or Sickness?Part I: A New Culture is Born
In body modification, the spirit and body
dance together in a rhythmic balance.
What is the prevailing view of the “body” in 2003 when ever increasing numbers of people are using their body to express and explore “life in a body”? What is really going on in the minds and psyches of those who pierce, tattoo, cut, brand, sculpt and other wise use their body as a plaything? Is this use of the body something beautiful and enriching? Or is this perversion? If we take a broad multicultural view of this behavior, which some in our culture like to call “mutilation”, a better understanding may very well snap into focus. And to truly understand body modification may also require an adjustment in our mindset — and might involve a calculated and deliberate attempt to rise above cultural biases by which we have been observing and describing such behavior for several thousand years.
Left: Pierced septum (1948), Right: Nineteen inch waist (1959)
In my personal experimentation and work with body modifiers over the past fifty years, I have been brought very close to the subject. So close in fact, I have sometimes been called “the father of the modern primitive movement”. I was bitten by the urge to modify my own body at a very early age and I found non-destructive ways to satisfy that urge. I practiced them in secret for thirty years. Unfortunately, I was also driven into deep isolation and shame, as are so many others, for lack of any social sanction. I was a bright boy, so I knew that if I let it be known what I felt and was doing to myself I would probably been institutionalized and the key thrown away!For years I haunted libraries, searched archives, and listened intently to the tales of Native American elders were I grew up in South Dakota. I was looking for any trace of sanction for what I felt and practiced in secret. In other cultures I did find acceptance, reasons, and traditions honoring this urge to modify the body. In fact, the mental and emotional states associated with the act (ecstasy, trance, disconnection and disassociation) were frequently considered “States of Grace”, not perversion or sickness.
I ended my isolation when a wise and understanding mentor encouraged me to “go public” with what I had been doing in secret for so many years. He arranged a showing at the only place where I might find a receptive audience: the first International Tattoo Convention held in Reno, Nevada in 1977. There I “came out of the closet” and showed it all: body piercings, contortions, large blackwork tattoos (novel in 1977), disconnection from body sensation while on beds of blades and spikes. The highly tattooed and pierced audience ate it up. They understood and honored in me what had also moved them to mark and pierce their own bodies. From that moment on, I felt we started making our own new culture and social sanctions.
After this warm welcome, I openly searched for others who viewed “life in a body” very differently from the majority of our society. I found them by the hundreds and eventually thousands. We had all heard the sound of a “different drummer” and responded to the beat. But the beat was not the beat of the prevailing anti-body Western Judeo-Christian culture in which we were living.Whether we were Native Americans returning to traditional ways, or urban aboriginals responding to some inner universal archetype, one thing was clear — we had all rejected the Western cultural biases about ownership and use of the body. To us, our bodies belonged to us! We had rejected the strong Judeo-Christian programming and emotional conditioning we had all been subjected to. Our bodies did not belong to some distant God sitting on a throne; or to that God’s priest or spokesperson; or to a father, mother or spouse; or to the state or its monarch, ruler or dictator; or to social institutions of the military, educational, correctional or medical establishment. And the kind of language used to describe our behavior (“self-mutilation”) was in itself a negative and prejudicial form of control and domination.
At first, these newer views about the body and what it could be used for were only expressed or practiced in the budding subcultures of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s — in hippie, punk, radical sex, gay, sadomasochistic, tattooing and pierced body circles. My own connection with these subcultures began as far back as 1955 when I started to share body piercing and other body rites with other individuals and various cultural sub-groups. I needed a meaningful name to call our now socialized (versus isolated) practices. To me it had always been “play”, so I coined the term “Body Play”. To me, Body Play is the deliberate and ritualized modification of the body whether permanent or temporary. I felt it as a deep-rooted, universal urge that transcends time and cultural boundaries. As a behavior, Body Play is either accepted, condoned and made a part of the culture — or it is seen as a threat to established social order and institutions and forbidden or made unlawful.
UPDATE ON APP 2003 AND OTHER RECENT EVENTS
In early June, I had a heart-warming experience at the 2003 APP Conference in Las Vegas. I was honored to give the opening day program called “Anthropology”. This two-hour presentation covered the origins of body piercing both as enhancement and ritual. It concluded with a brief history of contemporary body piercing — its beginnings and pioneers. We were totally amazed at the number of APP attendees who wanted to hear me. About 250 waited in the hall and eventually another large room had to be opened to accommodate the crowd. I showed slides and videos and got a five-minute standing ovation when I finished the presentation. I covered a lot of information I’ve included in this “Rants & Raves” column. So if you missed APP, you can get much of what I presented right here and in my next two columns. Thank you APP and Bethra for inviting me to Las Vegas! To see a few snapshots of my visit to APP, click here.
On the same subject, another significant event at this year’s APP was the introduction of Blake Perlingieri’s handsome new book “A Brief History of the Evolution of Body Adornment in Western Culture: Ancient Origins and Today”. Don’t let the long title scare you. This book is a “must have” for all serious modifiers, tattoo and piercing shops: about 150 oversize pages (many in full color) on heavy glossy paper, hundreds of rare photos never before published. It includes sections on the earliest known modifiers in Western society, like Ethel Granger and the Great Omi from the 1920s and 1930s. And (blush, blush) a long section on me and my recollections of the history of contemporary body piercing. The book is published by Nomad and can be purchased directly from Nomad by check or money order. The book is available at bodyplay.com along with my own “Spirit + Flesh” with your PayPal account. You can also get Blake’s book at the Nomad Museum.The last June event I want to mention in this column is the week-long shamanic and healing body rituals our Northern California group just experienced in the beautiful hills north of San Francisco. Over 30 enthusiastic devotees were pierced with hooks, some both in front and back, for a five-hour ecstatic energy dance in the bright afternoon sun. It meant so much to the participants to be able let go totally, to find the inner fire and peace we all long to reach, that I have decided to open up and facilitate this unique experience to more participants next year. Check my next columns in BME for more details on energy-pull and suspension events. If you or a group in your area are already doing this kind of ritual I would like to hear from you. Write me an email and tell me what you are doing. For a preview of what we are doing here in Northern California, click here for photos.
More of Fakir’s Early ExperimentsLeft: Wearing lead (1962), Right: O-Kee-Pa (1963)
Body Play is a process and kind of “magic” that courts unusual feelings and states of awareness, which in the end result in elevated consciousness. That is, we know something we didn’t know before our “Body Play”. In practice, Body Play is aimed at increasing “body awareness” and making clear the boundaries between “body” and “spirit”. It makes one acutely aware of one or more body parts. For example, if you pierce an ear (or whatever) you are more aware that it (or the whatever) exists. When you compress the torso with a tight corset, you are constantly aware you have a waist. When that body state feels normal, the bodymod is repeated until you are again aware of that body part (the ear piercing is made larger or the corset is made tighter). Finally, no matter how extreme you apply the “change of body state”, that change soon feels natural and you are empowered through the process of taking control and making the change. In body modification, the Spirit and Body dance together in a rhythmic balance.In the 1970s, an eccentric millionaire in Los Angeles brought a number of “body players” together. His name was Doug Malloy and I first met him in 1972 after he had seen some photos of my early experiments dating back to 1944. We used to meet monthly in the back of Los Angeles restaurants for what we called “T&P (tattoo & piercing) Parties”. The numbers were small, never more than ten to fourteen persons, all we could gather in those days. We shared experiences, did “show-and-tell” and often arranged to meet again later in the day to help each other implement various piercings and bodymods. Over a course of several years, we developed and defined what would eventually become the lexicon of contemporary body piercings: types of piercings, techniques to make them and tools. At one meeting in 1975 I recall we tried to list everyone we knew in Western society who had pierced nipples. There were only seven, all males, except one woman who had been pierced in 1965. None of us in that group could conceive that we would, within a few years, have pierced hundreds of nipples, and that many of those we pierced would later also pierce hundreds more. By the late l980s the sight of pierced nipples — thousands of them — would be commonplace at all large subculture gatherings like Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco.
By the late 1980s, other forms of body modification and socialized body rituals were also emerging from the shadows of American subculture: tribal tattoos, cutting, branding, trance dancing, suspensions and body sculpting. In many ways, I felt responsible for encouraging some of it. In a quiet way in l983 I proposed production of a book on body modification and extreme body rites to ReSearch Publications of San Francisco. They began by taking twenty-seven hours of interviews with me. Along with this edited text, I provided about seventy photos of myself; self-portraits I had taken during my thirty years of secret experimentation. To round out the book, the publishers added other individuals who were also pioneers in modern body liberation. I suggested the title: “Modern Primitives” (a term I had coined in 1978 for an article in PFIQ magazine to describe myself and a handful of other “atavists” I knew). The net result was a book of unprecedented popularity and influence in the subcultures. Since its release in 1989, this book has gone through many reprints and sold tens of thousands of copies. After fourteen years in print, it is still being sold. As a result of this one book, thousands of people, mostly young, were prompted to question established notions of what they could do with their body — what was ritual not sickness, what was physical enhancement not mutilation. The Modern Primitives Movement was born!
Yours for safe inner journeying,
Fakir Musafar
fakir at bodyplay dot com
Fakir Musafar is the undisputed father of the Modern Primitives movement and through his work over the past 50 years with PFIQ, Gauntlet, Body Play, and more, he has been one of the key figures in bringing body modification out of the closet in an enlightened and aware fashion.For much more information on Fakir and the subjects discussed in this column, be sure to check out his website at www.bodyplay.com. While you’re there you should consider whipping out your PayPal account and getting yourself a signed copy of his amazing book, SPIRIT AND FLESH (now).
Copyright © 2003 BMEzine.com LLC Requests to republish must be confirmed in writing. For bibliographical purposes this article was first published July 4th, 2003 by BMEzine.com LLC in Tweed, Ontario, Canada.
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What is ‘Body Modification’? Part Two – Through the Modified Looking Glass
Written by
What is ‘body modification’?
… and what does it matter?
Hold on to something, this one is going to jump around a bit…
A lot of the feedback on my last offering (‘Body Modification’?) gave me a sense of preaching to the converted. That is, of those who commented, the majority thought the points I was looking at were ones they agreed with and found to be rather obvious. While it is nice to know that others share something of my view, I can’t help but be dogged by a certain uneasiness. If it is true that many modified people will agree that body modification is something everyone does and includes things like haircuts and possibly even clothing then why isn’t that reflected in their words and behavior?
It reminds of the problem with evolutionary theory. Many people will accept and recite back evolution when questioned as to the nature of the human animal but they do not reflect this position in how they actually behave. It is simply a ‘fact’ that they have learned to give in response to certain promptings but it is certainly not what they base their actual decisions upon. People who purportedly believe in evolution hardly ever react to and judge human behavior on the grounds that human beings are a domesticated primate group. If they did so, then much of our moral and social quibbling would be absolutely absurd. There is a clear gap between what many people say they think and how they actually behave on this issue and it shows up in much the same way for modified people talking about modification.
“The difference between people without tattoos and people with tattoos is that people with tattoos don’t mind if you have tattoos or not.”I have seen variations of the above in many a shop, on t-shirts, and quoted by people complaining about the fact that the ‘un-modified’ often discriminate against or look down upon them. However, I often see behavior which goes directly against it — people with tattoos or other mods being very judgmental and pejoratively discriminating against those without. This is not only the case for people without what is popularly referred to as body modification but also for those with ‘taboo’ mods like facial tattooing or amputations. While I find it unfortunate and potentially damaging that people who choose certain methods of body modification (like tattoos or piercings) would further divide themselves from people do not, rather than try and show those others that what they do in getting tattooed or pierced is simply another means in a process we all engage in, it seems even worse to me that they should want to divide amongst themselves those with acceptable and unacceptable tattoos, and so on. For anyone doing so and then claiming to understand body modification as a more general term I would like to hold up the mirror of logic so that they can clearly see it shatter with their reflection.
This does lead to another interesting trail of thought, and one that Shannon suggested investigating as part of following up the piece: the differences between atypical and mainstream modification and how the line is drawn. Quite clearly this is a question of relative cultural and social values as it can be seen that what is the norm in one part of the world and a given subset of a population can vary widely and be plainly contradictory with another. For example, in many African cultures scarification would not be atypical while in the US it is still anything but mainstream and while tattooing might still be considered atypical in the US for the culture as a whole, in many subsets (like the often cited bikers and rock musicians) it is very much part of their mainstream, if not obligatory. To push it back to a broader context, we could ask why is it that I am allowed, and often expected, to cut and style my hair but I am frowned upon for doing so in certain ways (such as a Mohawk)?
As a side note, if you want to really see how something like hair style can affect your life try wearing a moustache in the style that was chosen by Hitler (and was very common in its day). I wore such a moustache for a few months years ago and was almost universally reviled for it, receiving harsh and negative reactions the likes of which my facial tattooing has never even approached. All for a small patch of hair that was representative of nothing symbolic but just a silly experimentation to see how it looked. (When people would call me nasty names I would rebuke them for not appreciating my homage to Charlie Chaplin‘s genius — this generally just confused and further incited them).
To really address why some modifications are accepted and others are less accepted or even taboo would require an indepth examination of the relevant culture or society. I am certainly not going to attempt a full deconstruction of Western civilization and its views on the body here — others have attempted and I think pointed to a great many salient points and influences. I do think though that what you see in terms of a given group’s attitudes towards hair, dress, tattoos, elective surgery, and so on is something of an admission that body modification is a universal and as such rather than be denied, it can hopefully be directed for the good and interests of the group. We then see the typical problem arising on the macro scale that the group is simply too large and diverse in many cases to reach fundamental decisions (for example, an ear piercing on a man in an urban area of the US will have little effect but I still know and see many regions in which it draws negative attention).
Another jump: mainstream versus atypical puts me in mind of another term: extreme. What is extreme body modification? Most of the treatments I have seen before propose that there are two grounds on which a modification can be extreme: technical difficulty and social reaction. Personally, I think the former can be almost completely discounted. The technical difficulty of a modification (now speaking in the popular sense) is negilible and for the most part only exists because of how the industry is structured. I do not mean to deflate anyone but the most complicated procedures being performed by modification artists (such as implants, genital splitting, urethral relocations, and minor amputations) are incredibly basic compared to what is done on a routine daily basis by the medical community. It is the social component that makes something truly extreme in my opinion primarily because it is a social stigma held by those most qualified (doctors and surgeons) which prevents us from attaining the true outer limits of what is possible in terms of modifying our bodies.
Given the possibility that what is extreme is socially derived it will then be quite relative. As has been pointed out before, for a given pair of individuals it may well be a more extreme act for one to simply dye their hair than it would be for the other to tattoo their face. I had a friend from a very traditional Japanese family in college who was nearly disowned for coloring her hair red whereas I received a primarily positive response from my family when I tattooed my face. And what about facial tattooing?
Recently on IAM, Shannon predicted and described facial tattooing as the next “trend”. I have to agree that I have seen and been approached by people considering it a lot more in the past couple years but I would emphasize the caveat that it’s going to be a certain type that really becomes predominant (remember what I said above about groups attempting to direct modification for their own good and interests).
I think you will see people who have always been a bit further along (full body suits, heavy facial piercing, etc) realizing that in today’s world they aren’t really taking that much of a risk by moving into facial tattooing — If you already have large stretched or many multiple facial piercings the general public’s reaction if you add a facial tattoo probably won’t change that much. The ones that I think are interesting from the standpoint of cultural change are those that are less heavy (full black or green, heh) designs — ones that work up the neck or along the hairline and are more decorative than transformative of a person’s appearance. All that said though, a couple things about facial tattooing (inspired in part by Cora’s column on things to consider for those considering the incredible transformation she is undergoing):
- It will change your life. The degree will vary but it will change and you will not be able to predict a lot of it.
- Make sure your life is at a relatively stable point. Getting your face tattooed is not an answer or a fix to anything. It is going to make your life less certain (see above) and that’s not something you need to introduce if things are already at all shaky.
- Make sure you want it and get what you want. Seems obvious I know, but it is amazing what people overlook or skimp on.
- Tell people you care about beforehand and examine their response. They will be your support and can help you a lot. Sometimes people are amazed that I have such a good relationship with my family but as I often say (and mean it every time) I couldn’t do what I have done without them.
- Try it out first. Use makeup or whatever to simulate it — not just for a minute but for days or longer. Put the design up and look at it everyday because once it’s there you will have to see it everyday.
In a perfect world, I would suggest these (and more) before any mod but I’m not silly enough to think that’s going to happen…
Erik Sprague
because the world NEEDS freaks…
Former doctoral candidate and philosophy degree holder Erik Sprague, the Lizardman (iam), is known around the world for his amazing transformation from man to lizard as well as his modern sideshow performance art. Need I say more?
Copyright © 2003 BMEzine.com LLC. Requests to republish must be confirmed in writing. For bibliographical purposes this article was first published June 26th, 2003 by BMEzine.com LLC in Tweed, Ontario, Canada.
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Regulation: Attacks from Within? [The Publisher’s Ring]
Written by
Regulation: Attacks from Within?
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley,
An’ Lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain / For promis’d joy.”– Robert BurnsOver the past six months I’ve been contacted by an increasing number of piercers and amateur activists complaining of perceived problems in the piercing industry, and seeking my help in pushing through regulations of various kinds to combat them. Most of these piercers are talented and experienced and often some of the best in the industry. While being very clear that I’m not attacking them, but simply their methods, what I’d like to show in this column is that while their actions are well-meaning, they are ultimately misguided and perhaps even destructive to the body modification community.
The first thing that should be addressed is that the piercing industry is only a very small part of the (atypical) body modification community. The piercing industry represents the commercial application of a very small subset of this community’s interests and because of it being a mass-market commercial application, there are certain incompatibilities, since one is built around the individual, and the other around larger issues such as public safety, contract law, and business ethics… all concepts which often run contrary to the extremist individual freedoms embraced by those drawn to atypical body modification, as well as the ever broadening freedoms being demanded by modern societies.
The big first question from my point of view is “why now?”
Why wasn’t the piercing community aggressively pushing for regulation five or ten years ago? At its simplest, the golden age of piercing is over. Five years ago shops regularly had “thousand dollar days” and there was more than enough business to go around. In 2003, competition is heavy, the market is saturated, and profit margins are lower and lower. Aging piercers are realizing that they’ve been putting long hours into what may be a dead-end job, and are asking themselves what the future holds — and how they can secure that future.
It’s expensive to run a good shop. Customers are rarely willing to pay more for high quality jewelry, and far too few are even willing to discriminate by the safety practices of the studio. As such, with pricing being equal, the better a studio is, the less money its owners and staff take home with them. It’s very easy for unscrupulous studios to legally undercut prices by reducing quality and seize a significant market share in exchange for cutting corners and providing substandard service — but let’s face it — that’s true in every industry, and it’s what makes capitalism work!
In response, a number of well-meaning good piercers are trying to push through regulation that would force every studio to conform to their tightly bordered and high-end standards. Much of the time this is accomplished by pointing out the many problems that arise from not maintaining those standards — slightly elevated (but still very manageable) rates of infection and complication, more young people with piercings (as if that’s a bad thing), and so on. This is further sought by publishing “scare articles”, citing their qualifications as required knowlege (nursing skills, CPR courses, and so on; all excellent knowledge to have as a piercer, but whether it’s required is very much up for debate), and generally using an approach of attacking others (often validly) to make themselves look better.
In light of recent attention by the mainstream media on procedures such as tongue splitting, others will make extremely negative statements about heavy mods and the artists that embrace them in an attempt to make themselves appear more responsible. I suppose they feel that painting others in the most dangerous, frightening, and irresponsible manner will make them appear more responsible to the mainstream in juxtaposition.
Problem is, that doesn’t work.
First of all, we need to realize that the majority of politicians (and media) are not involved in the body modification community and often don’t like piercing and see it with a preexisting set of prejudices. As such, they won’t see any juxtaposition of “high quality” versus problem studios — they will simply see the problems and, like all bigots, stereotype our entire community by the acts of the worst of the bunch.
Second of all, we need to acknowledge that there is no central professional organization of piercers for regulators to work with in drafting balanced legislation. While groups such as the APP have made excellent progress over the last decade, they still represent only a very tiny percentage of piercers. Almost all attempts to form such organizations have eventually degraded to infighting and apathy.
Because of those two factors, much of the political action on piercing is either pushed through by a individual piercers who don’t represent the industry on the whole, or, worse yet, by politicians working with doctors who don’t have any comprehension of or sympathy for atypical body modification. When this occurs we tend to see things much like gay sex laws — heterosexual sex is typically legal at 16, with homosexual sex not becoming legal until 18, and we see piercing being restricted to 18 even though cosmetic surgery is permitted at 16. In addition, we tend to end up with tightly defined rules which restrict jewelry use, procedures, and even aftercare to only one possibility. Since piercing is still very much evolving and improving, locking its growth like this is a potentially harmful act, and tends to restrict valid and sometimes even superior methods — as illustrated by some areas’ bans on dermal punches, scalpels, and other needle alternatives.
We also need to recognize that what an industry perceives as being right for it is not always right for the surrounding community (or from the industry’s point of view, the customer). The actions of groups like the RIAA are good examples of that of course, where we are watching a power shift from the music listener and the musician to the corporate distribution channels.
So what should we do? How can we ensure a high quality piercing industry that encourages the growth of the body modification community, gives consumers a range of options, while still ensuring basic safety?
Now, I’m not about to propose that this should be an absolutely unregulated industry; simply that we need to balance individual freedoms and public safety. Clearly we need to ensure minimum standards as far as sterility goes and making certain that regulation controlling contamination are adhered to — no studio has a right to willfully and negligently endanger its clients. I’m happy to say that a growing majority of jurisdictions have already enacted such laws covering piercing studios, nail salons, dentists offices, and so on. I am fully in support of such laws. They restrict no one’s freedoms and simply increase the safety level.
My focus with BME will continue to be education over regulation. This is why I dedicate resources to developing FAQ documents, BME/Risks, and work to get qualified authors writing columns. An educated consumer base will make the decisions that it sees fit for itself — and we do have the right to purchase low quality product should we choose to. After all, assuming base standards are in place, the worst that can occur from a lower-end studio under normal circumstances is a small scar. Given that we allow — and even encourage — the consumption of junk food and candy by even young children, thereby damning them to live in the most obese and unhealthy culture in human history (in effect allowing corporations to market a product that shaves 15 years or more off a person’s life), it seems somewhat hypocritical to suggest that we should restrict piercing to only the most conservative, limited, and safe options?
As far as age standards go — and we do need to strike a balance between the rights of parents, the rights of youths, protecting against predatory piercers, while making sure not to fall prey to ageism — we must create them in context with other age restrictions. It’s too easy to allow politicans to force into place high age restrictions as a shallow cover for an attempt to ban and keep piercings out of schools and so on. We allow youths to sign for surgery and drive at 16. We allow youths to sign for abortions without parental consent at as young as 14. We allow marriage and sex at 16 in most areas, and we even allow firearms to be owned by teens… If we are then to restrict piercing to 18, we need to justify how piercing is more dangerous than these acts and why comprehending them is out of the range of a young person’s ability. From my point of view piercing is a safe and excellent way for young people to practice independence and responsibility, and I worry that when we spend so much effort telling young people that they are immature that they will be utterly unprepared for the world when they reach adulthood.
I mentioned earlier that I believe informed consumers can make a good decision. Because of that, one type of regulation that I would like to see in place is disclosure laws. We require food manufacturers to place ingredients and nutritional information on the packaging in order to allow consumers to make an informed decision. We require auto manufacturers to disclose pollution and mileage data. Why should piercing studios not be required to state what material their jewelry is manufactured from? Without this information, the average consumer can’t tell if they are being sold a $1 mass-manufactured barbell made of cheap low-grade steel, or whether it’s a $20 piece of “implant grade” jewelery — while the vast majority of people can heal a piercing just fine with the cheap stuff, it will take a bit longer, the complication rate will be a fraction higher, and some people will have reactions. Certainly someone should have a right to choose that path, but I do not believe that a studio has the right to surreptitiously impose that path on unwitting customers.
Ultimately though there is only one way to guarantee a high quality industry: Consumers must, on their own, decide to support high quality studios. Poor quality studios don’t thrive in a vacuum — they thrive because of their large customer base. If you’re reading this, you probably have the knowledge required to judge which studios in your area are the good ones. Tell your friends. Write experiences about them. Tell the piercers why you go to their studio and not another, and tip them appropriately. People have a choice in life — all of our laws make it clear that we believe as a culture that people have a right to make bad decisions and purchase an ill-advised product should they choose to. Why should piercing be different? Are we really comfortable with ours being the one industry that’s tightly restricted and dictated by the whims of politicians?
To the piercers who are pushing for these laws, while I applaud what you are attempting to achieve (a high quality industry), I hope you consider that your actions may not achieve your goals, and could in fact have the opposite effect. There are better ways. Make sure that when you push for regulation and make public comment, you push for minimum standards and disclosure laws, and not for self-serving regulation that may come back to haunt us all, and that you respect the right of others to make their own informed decisions, even if you disagree.
Thank you,
Shannon LarrattBME.com
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What is ‘Body Modification’? Part One – Through the Modified Looking Glass
Written by
‘Body Modification’?
Interviewer: So why do people get tattoos?
Me: There are probably at least as many reasons as thereare tattoos.
Interviewer: Yes, but generally why?
Me: Because people modify their bodies.
Interviewer: Some people.
Me: All people.Interviewer: Not everyone gets pierced or tattooed.
Me: They all do something; haircuts, make up… even clothing
changes the way in which your body looks and moves
Interviewer: But those things aren’t permanent.
Me: So temporary body modification isn’t body modification?That doesn’t make much sense…
The above is paraphrased but pretty accurate and has actually occurred more than a few times. It is probably a good example of me trying to be a smart-ass; it is also what brings me to this:
The term ‘body modification’ has popularly come to refer to a loosely grouped set of practices — tattooing, piercing, branding, scarification — and it is usually with this pop meaning in mind that the common question “Why do people modify their bodies?” is asked. The problem here is that the question being asked is significantly different than the question that is very likely intended: “Why do people modify their bodies with tattoos, piercings, and so on?”
The former is a general question about the human experience and motivation while the latter is one that develops out of the first and looks only to particular methodologies. By analogy, to ask the former is as if to ask, “Why do people compete?”, and the latter, “Why do people race cars?” Part of the reason I think that people are often mystified by why someone would modify their body is because they have gotten tied up in the idea that this one particular usage is the pure definition of what is body modification. So then, what is body modification if not just these or similar procedures?
Most of the discussions I have encountered concerning what does and does not count as body modification have born a great resemblance to the debates which occupied a large portion of my academic career over whether or not something was art. In the case of debates over art, it can often be shown that what is actually being argued is not whether or not something is art but rather whether or not something is good or bad art. Obviously, according to most theories of art, whether or not a piece is possessed of any great talent or merit is not what determines if it is art. That is to say, even though it may suck, even though you hate it — it is still art.
In the case of body modification I have found that what is often at stake is not really whether or not something is or isn’t body modification but rather whether or not it is the sort of body modification that is of concern to the parties engaged in the debate. For instance, is hair dyeing body modification? In that it is an alteration of the body it would seem that hair dyeing is body modification on its face. However, since it is not permanent and because it falls (depending on the color) well within acceptable practices many people will claim that it is not body modification. Much of these debates focused upon what other terms would be assumed to be built into or implied in their use of the term body modification. On a practical level this is often expected and quite essential. It is common to use a specified definition for purposes of certain discussions (BME is a fine example of this in its motivation and choice of what it considers body modification for content inclusion) but that definition should not be mistaken for or masqueraded as exclusive or complete.
Body modification as it is commonly used today is a fairly recent introduction to our language and seems to have emerged mainly from the communities that practice it as described. And it is within these communities that I have been able to find the most common adoption of the term and debate over its definition. The other place in which I was most readily able to find the term applied was in anthropology — where it is often used in a very broad fashion.
Anthropologically speaking, the term is taken at nearly face value. It is applied in most any case where the body of a person is in some way altered — from hair styles and body painting to skull shaping. The interesting (and important) thing about this is that taken in this way there is no record of any human culture or society without practice(s) of body modification. And it is for precisely this reason that I support some of the broadest possible interpretations of what is body modification.
I do this because it helps to break down the artificial barrier between the modified and the un-modified. I am fond of pointing out that we are all individuals whether we like it or not. By our very nature we are different from one another but there are also many shared qualities. In embracing our own unique stature I think that it is important that we do not needlessly create the perception of even more difference. If body modification is something we all engage in, in one form or another, then there are no un-modified people.
From this point, we may find a better way for those who do not choose certain forms of modification to understand the motivations of those who do. If the person who shaves, manicures, and is possibly considering a nose-job learns to see tattooing or tongue splitting as simply an alternative example of the same general behavior (modifying the body) that they themselves engage in, it may become less mystifying to them. In fact, body modification taken as part of the overall effort to intentionally create the image that others perceive when they apprehend you — especially in an effort to better express one’s self — is something that I think most people would readily accept as the sanest and most rationale thing in which a person can engage.
Erik Sprague
because the world NEEDS freaks…
Former doctoral candidate and philosophy degree holder Erik Sprague, the Lizardman (iam), is known around the world for his amazing transformation from man to lizard as well as his modern sideshow performance art. Need I say more?
Copyright © 2003 BMEzine.com LLC. Requests to republish must be confirmed in writing. For bibliographical purposes this article was first published June 10th, 2003 by BMEzine.com LLC in Tweed, Ontario, Canada.
