Everything You Ever Wanted
To Know About Anal Piercing
But Were Afraid To Ask
“Some people never go crazy; what truly horrible lives they must live.”
– Charles Bukowski
Anal piercing is a bit like tongue splitting — we all thought it was impossible (or at least a very bad idea), but then one person showed one off, and all of a sudden everyone’s doing them [ok, I’m exaggerating a litte — so CNN, don’t come knocking asking about the latest trend unless you want me to go Jayson Blair on you]. But still, unlike tongue splitting, people don’t tend to show off their anal ring to anyone who’ll look, much less talk about it at length. BME finally had a chance to sit down — carefully — with a half dozen people who could talk first hand about their experiences with anal piercing.
Click the thumbnails in this article to zoom in.
Anterior anal piercing
Fresh and bloody
double anal piercing
Posterior anal piercing
First we’ll talk to Travis, a thirty year old white-collar business owner. He’s rather mainstream looking when you first see him, but he does have a few genital piercings, and rather by accident, found himself with an anal piercing as well. After a gland became infected, Travis developed an anal fistula, an infected tract inside the body with one end exiting inside the anal canal, and the other externally, near the anus. Fistulas of this type can be treated in a number of ways. They can be cut out (by inserting a rod into the fistula and literally excising along its length), they can be glued shut internally, hoping they’ll drain out and heal, or they can be tricked into “rejecting,” which is what happened in Travis’s case.
“A word to the wise ain’t necessary, it’s the stupid ones who need the advice.”
– Bill Cosby
In one of her most recent Dear Abby letters, Jeanne Philips (aka “Abby”) received a letter from a certified operating-room nurse regarding the risks of tongue piercing. Philips, adding a better safe than sorry response posted the letter to her column which ran with a large headline proclaiming “tongue rings can lead to heart surgery”.
Dear Abby is syndicated in over 1,200 papers and has a readership of approximately 95 million people, who all just got collectively stupider because of her largely unquestioning parroting of this misleading nurse’s claims.
According to the nurse, Karen Murphy from Morten Plant Hospital in Florida, “tongue studs can lead to endocarditis” in “otherwise healthy young people”. Saying that tongue piercing can lead to heart disease is like saying that having a dog can lead to fatal allergic response — yes, it’s true, but you have to have a pre-existing medical condition. In my example, you have to have a pet dander-type allergy, and in Murphy’s tongue piercing example, you have to have already have a valvular heart disease. It is extremely rare for endocarditis to affect someone who doesn’t already suffer from heart disease, and those that are tend to be older with already failing health.
Endocarditis is usually caused by a staph or strep infection, which admittedly are the types of bacteria common with body piercing infections. If an infection from a piercing has these bacteria enter the bloodstream (which is certainly possible from tongue piercing), those bacteria can lodge in the heart’s lining or valves. If the person has congenital heart defects, problems with the heart musculature such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, valve damage from diseases such as rhematic fever, or artificial heart valves, they are at risk of these infections. Anything that can cause oral injury — even teeth cleaning — requires the individual to first take a course of antibiotics to reduce their risk level. Other injuries (even papercuts) can lead to endocarditis in these individuals. Luckily, according to the American Heart Association (americanheart.org), endocarditis is extremely rare in people who do not suffer from the heart conditions I’ve just mentioned.
To be very clear, telling normal people that they shouldn’t get tongue piercings because of the risk of heart surgery is like telling them they should stop going to the dentist for the same reason! While it is important to point out that the Dear Abby column did disclaim in their response that they’d been informed by the AHA that only “certain individuals, people with a medical history of rheumatic fever or rheumatic valve disease — or any heart valve disease” are at risk, Jeanne still concluded that all her readers are “better to be safe than sorry”. Given the screaming headline and the page real-estate given to the misleading nurse, it is safe to assume that this will be yet another thing that will make educators, legislators, and parents behave even more ignorantly toward body piercing.
Estimating from body jewelry sales (straight ¾” and ½” barbells are almost all used for tongue piercing), there are millions of people with tongue piercings, and only a handful of those have had this complication, whereas the rate of infective endocarditis in the general public is between 1.7 and 4 per 100,000 — meaning there is no statistical evidence that tongue piercing leads to health complications in any meaningful numbers.
I have a letter I think I need to mail in.
Dear Abby,
Should I go outside? Every year, approximately one thousand people in the United States are struck by lightning, and about a hundred of them are actually killed! You recently said that “otherwise healthy” people might be “better safe than sorry” and should avoid tongue piercing because of the risk. Given that going outdoors — or using the telephone while it’s raining out — is far, far, far more dangerous, surely you must agree that it would be best if I didn’t go to work today.
Frank O’Derby
PS. I’m a little concerned that three hundred people have died from bee stings over the past couple decades. Do you think it would be a good idea to ask my Senator to ban honey?
There’s one thing the world desperately needs more of, and that’s common sense. It’s one thing to expect without fulfillment that Ms. Dear Abby had the “uncommon common sense and youthful perspective” she claims to have, but entirely another thing to wish that the OR nurses had it as well. If they can’t think clearly about tongue piercing, can we really trust nurses like Karen Murphy to think clearly about our emergency health care?
Note to self: don’t get hurt in Clearwater, Florida.
Fighting For Freedom In Iraq
One Screaming Eagle At A Time
“The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”
– John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty” (1859)
I have hope for any culture that allows a tattoo studio to exist. Any culture that permits its people to choose their own tattoos has made a very important statement that is all too rare in this world: the citizens, not the government, own their bodies and have full sovereignty to decide what will become of them. This is the most base and important right that a person could have — and one that people in the US state of Oklahoma still don’t enjoy… unlike Iraqis.
It is true that tribal tattooing has been popular in Iraq for thousands of years — even Saddam Hussein had protective glyphs tattooed on him, and in her book NPR correspondent Anne Garrels describes seeing heavily tattooed Shiite mothers in the overflowing hospitals created by the wars. In addition, after the first Gulf War left so many Iraqis without hands, arms, feet, and legs, Sharia courts which often amputate these parts as punishment started to add tattoos to the foreheads of criminals so that war amputees wouldn’t face the stigma of people assuming they were criminals. But all of this tattooing is very different than what happens in a Western-style tattoo studio. Until recently, all tattooing in Iraq was legally limited to permanent marking designed to uphold social order — that is, the tattoos were for communities, not for individuals. Similarly, Oklahoma permits cosmetic tattooing — that is, tattooing which allies an individual to the group aesthetic.
Reuters is currently reporting on Sarmad Shamael, a quiet 29-year old who has a small basement tattoo studio in one of Baghdad’s many rough neighborhoods. Instead of using breast milk and ashes to scratch traditional designs, he uses architect’s ink and a homemade tattoo machine to render the same sorts of images you might see anywhere in America — “Celtic crosses, screaming eagles, and death’s heads” as well as plenty of dragons from a beat-up book of tattoo flash he managed to import.
Sarmad Shamael at work in his tattoo studio
Photo: REUTERS/Ceerwan Aziz
The new Iraqi government is certainly no more liberal than Saddam was, but thanks to an almost total collapse of government since the occupation started, Iraqis are operating in a lawless environment — it’s not so much that tattooing has been made legal, it’s more that there’s no one enforcing the laws. As Sarmad puts it, “now people have a choice about what they do, there are no laws to restrict them.”
This is true across Iraq as formerly banned industries and subcultures ranging from pornography to heavy metal to pharmacological vices flourish. The mainstream of Iraq — like the mainstream in the West — likes to call them “the bad side of freedom” and debate whether it’s an American conspiracy to corrupt their culture. At first after Saddam’s fall, Iraqi police continued to enact the vice laws, but American MPs, seeing overflowing prisons, forced the Iraqis to release people who committed these crimes and the official raids stopped.
The main risk comes from religious vigilantes who have been bombing businesses that they don’t agree with. Al Khayam theatre, near Sarmad’s tattoo studio, has recently began showing adult movies — “In Saddam’s time I had one old night watchman. Now I have three young people armed with Kalashnikovs,” said the manager. Sarmad’s customers as well face resistance to their tattoos, with one 19 year old — tattooed with a scorpion and an American Indian head — describing his father trying to burn his tattoos off with acid. Luckily his mother convinced his father that “the damage was already done,” and now young Mohammed Jasim, presumably having saved up another $15, is back in the rusty metal tattoo chair.
Photo: REUTERS/Ceerwan Aziz
Business is still slow, with Sarmad doing a tattoo only every few days since he opened last April, but he’s improving, and doing his best to control contamination inside his studio. He doesn’t advertise, promoting himself only by word of mouth and the large lion and dragon he’s tattooed on his own forearm underneath the text, in English, “I want to kiss you.”
Salman Rushdie recently argued that the level of freedom in a culture can be gauged by its willingness to accept pornography. “Pornography exists everywhere,” he wrote. “But when it comes into societies in which it’s difficult for young men and women to get together and do what young men and women often like doing, it satisfies a more general need. While doing so, it sometimes becomes a kind of standard-bearer for freedom, even civilization.”
While I certainly agree with Rushdie, I think at an even more base level, it is tattooing of the individual that is the best indicator of how free a culture is. A culture that tolerates people tattooing themselves as they see fit — not as the law, the tribe (or even the family), or their social stature dictates — is a culture that tolerates the idea that people own themselves. The belief in self ownership, rather than ownership by the tribe, is the first and most important step toward true personal liberty and all that comes with it. Pornography is the second stage of freedom, as it enacts the right to use one’s body as a form of communication with others in any way one sees fit. But both of these freedoms boil down to the same thing — being allowed to do whatever you want, no matter how odd it may seem to others, as long as you’re not hurting anyone else.
“A lot of people ask me, why are you so strange,” says Sarmad Shamael, sitting in his little tattoo studio in Baghdad. “I tell them: because I like it.”
Stelarc Video Interview
TRANSVISION 2004 COVERAGE: PART TWO
“We mostly operate as Absent Bodies. That’s because a body is designed to interface with its environment — its sensors are open-to-the-world (compared to its inadequate internal surveillance system). The body’s mobility and navigation in the world require this outward orientation. Its absence is augmented by the fact that the body functions habitually and automatically. Awareness is often that which occurs when the body malfunctions.”
– Stelarc
Australian performance artist Stelarc has been doing public suspensions since the 1970s. He is literally the first face many people who are now “elders” in the suspension movement came in contact with, although his use of suspension is very different than the standard we seem to have settled on more recently.
In 1987, two years before RE/search released Modern Primitives, Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture hit the shelves. My father bought me a copy, highlighted the opening quote — “There is nothing more terrifying than stupidity – Werner Herzog” — and that now beat up copy still rests on my bookshelf. Amid articles on eugenics, nuclear war, modern fascist movments, schizophrenia, and child molestation, was an interview with Fakir Musafar somewhat derisively discussing Stelarc.
While they’d later find a common ground for discussion, at the time Fakir was none-too-kind, writing,
“He has a tremendous amount of guts, but I think his civilization varnish has not been scrubbed enough. He is capable of enduring things longer than he does. If he hung for a longer length of time, he’d have a mystical experience. I can’t help to think that he may have had one or been on the border and it scared the hell out of him. So he limits the length and calls it art. What he’s dabbling in is magic technology.”
But it was enough to get a generation desperate to find literature on something that was calling to them seeking out Stelarc. A few years earlier (1984) Stelarc had released Obsolete Body: Suspensions, a book of writing and photos on flesh hook suspension, using the body as a sculptural installation in various art spaces (and public spaces as well). As much as Fakir expressed dismay at Stelarc’s refusal to embrace the spiritual application of suspension, Stelarc had become — without even knowing it at the time — one of the modern suspension movement’s godfathers. Back then, only he and Fakir were out there doing it publicly and sharing their experiences.
TOKYO – 11 MAY 1980. PHOTO: KENJI NOZAWA
“The insertions were done with the body laying on the floor, below a halo of rocks which had been suspended from eye-bolts in the ceiling with slip-knots. When everything was connected the cords were tugged, releasing the rocks. As the rocks came down, the body went up. The body started to gently sway from side to side, triggering random oscillations of the ring of rocks. Everything was in motion, balanced and buoyant. Everything was connected and and contained. Thoughts of obsolescence flickering in and out of the silence. The telephone rings. Murmurs. Distractions. Sitting, suspended and anxious.”
MUNICH – 8 AUGUST 1977
PHOTO: HAROLD RUMPF
TOKYO – 12 MARCH 1978
PHOTO: TONY FIGALLO
TOKYO – 2 MARCH 1980
PHOTO: NINA KUO
MIURA – 30 MAY 1981
PHOTO: ICHIRO YAMANA
YOKOHAMA – 29 MAY 1988
PHOTO: SIMON HUNTER STELARC’S FINAL SUSPENSION
I finally had a chance to meet with Stelarc in person at TransVision 2004 in Toronto (click here for part one of our TransVision coverage) where he was giving a presentation on his work. Stelarc is friendly and approachable, and most of all down to earth with an easy boisterous laugh. At his talk he covered everything from his early suspension work (which ended in 1988, a decade before the suspension mainstream would boom) and “third hand” experiments (a fully functional third hand, controlled by nerves in other parts of his body).
TOKYO – 8 MAY 1981
PHOTO: JUN MORIOKA
TOKYO – 22 MAY 1982
PHOTO: AKIRO OKADA
“Whilst the body activates its extra manipulator, the real left arm is remote-controlled and jerked into action by two muscle stimulators. Electrodes positioned on the flexor muscles and biceps curl the fingers inwards, bend the wrist and thrust the arm upwards. The triggerings of the arm motions pace the performance and the stimulator signals are used as sound sources, as is the motor sound of the Third Hand mechanism itself.”
Stelarc also discussed his exoskeletons and robot appendages, and his work with electric muscle stimulation, including pulling “volunteers” out of the audience, wiring them to his control box, and forcing them to dance — any attempt to resist his commands were met with pain, increased voltage, and eventually failure as they involuntarily moved exactly as he choreographed. In previous performances Stelarc has wired himself with these devices and been controlled by both audiences and other factors like Internet ping times.
“During the Ping Body performances, what is being considered is a body moving not to the promptings of another body in another place, but rather to Internet activity itself — the body’s proprioception and musculature stimulated not by its internal nervous system but by the external ebb and flow of data. Ping values from 0-2000 milliseconds (indicative of both distance and density levels of Internet activity) are used to activate a multiple muscle stimulator directing 0-60 volts to the body. Thus ping values that indicate spatial and time parameters of the Internet choreograph and compose the performances. A graphical interface of limb motions simulates and initiates the physical body’s movements. This, in turn, generates sounds mapped to proximity, positioning and bending of the arms and legs.”
Stelarc also showed some of the work he’s been doing on his “third ear” project, in which a replica of his own ear will be implanted into another part of his body — instead of listening though, this ear may talk instead. Helped by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of Tissue Culture & Art, Stelarc has been “growing” these replica ears inside biotumblers as his own cells permeate a polymer latice. Finally, Stelarc also showed his avatar projects (an Alice-based communication system coupled with a very creepy animation of his head), allowing computers to speak on his behalf as him.
After TransVision, Stelarc and I were able to sit down for an interview to talk both about his suspension work and his other art. I’d like to present that video now. It’s 45 minutes long so the file sizes are quite large. Please save it to your computer, rather than trying to view it in your browser!
That’s actually the first real video I’ve edited using Avid, so I apologize for any errors. While you’re waiting for it to download, I’d like to strongly urge you to go and browse Stelarc’s website at www.stelarc.va.com.au, as the interview assumes a basic knowledge of his work. Not only is Stelarc one of the seeds of the suspension movement, but he’s also an important seed in cyborg culture, distributed intelligence, technoethics, and other fields he likely never knew he was even performing for.
Edit/Update (October 2012) – I’ve posted this to YouTube here:
Thanks to Stelarc of course, and to Philip Barbosa for videotaping the interview and presentation, and thanks to Bo De Duyen for allowing us to film there. Thank you as well to everyone from BetterHumans and the WTA for inviting us in the first place.
There’s something undeniably powerful about watching someone working through the stages of suspension. We all build up ideas about ourselves—what we’re allowed to feel, how much we’re allowed to express, when it’s okay to break. For some, suspension is not about pushing physical limits its… Read more: Suspended, Not Silenced
Some stories take their time, unfolding over decades, through life’s long detours and diversions. But dreams never rest until they’re fully realized. Even after 15 years, Robb knew there was still a suspension experience waiting for him. Something left unfinished, something essential. At the Ontario… Read more: A Nightbird’s Passage
First suspensions are rarely just about the body—they’re a meeting point between the physical and the deeply personal. Stepping into this experience isn’t simply about trying something new, but about stepping outside yourself to a version you had always sensed was waiting. I’ve had a… Read more: What Lifts the Body, Shifts the Soul
One of the most powerful things about being at a convention like OSC is the sheer concentration of experience, creativity, and capability in one place. When you’re surrounded by people who not only understand the technical complexities of suspension but are excited by the challenge… Read more: Skin and Strings: The Art of Human Puppetry
There’s a particular kind of magic that happens at your first big suspension gathering when you arrive with nerves, an open heart, and the quiet hope of flight. Guided by the encouragement of mentor Lynn Loheide and driven by the quiet confidence of belonging, Alex… Read more: Twelve Points to the Sky
In March 2025, BME attended the Ontario Suspension Convention in Hamilton, hosted by the Kevin Donaghy and the Ontario Suspension Collective. We had the pleasure to take part and help document the event, but also run a booth to sell a bunch of old (but… Read more: Ontario SusCon 2025
