"A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind"

– Henry Ward Beecher

As you probably know, BME doesn’t generally cover piercing guns. It’s not because of safety issues (see BME/Risks) – BME discusses many activities that are equally or even more dangerous and ill-advised. It’s a cultural issue. Piercing gun “culture”, if you can call it that, is distinct from BME’s focus on atypical body modification and is not particularly relevant to our core mission. However, piercing gun manufacturers like Studex are slowly starting to create tools that are capable of untrained piercing of not just ears and noses, but many other body parts as well. When navel piercing guns start being used at mall kiosks, how will piercers in fully equipped studios be affected?

Earlier designs of piercing guns were simple spring-loaded devices into which an ear piercing stud and backing could be loaded, held around the ear lobe, and then fired through.

“Piercing as easy as 1-2-3” …or so the brochure claims.

Not only was the system physically inadequate for anything but basic ear piercing, but the plastic gun was effectively impossible to keep sterile or even clean properly, and the system was linked to the spread of hepatitis and other diseases, as well as damage to cartilage resulting in infection and collapse of the ear’s structure. While these apparently primitive and destructive systems are still a dominant force in the industry, recently a number of companies have released “cartridge based” piercing systems which attempt to address the majority of these problems.

Cartridge based systems improve on the spring-loaded guns in two main ways. First, they tend to use a “pusher” system which forces the piercing stud through the tissue by squeezing a handle which drives the stud, rather than aggressively firing it with spring action. In theory this causes less trauma to the tissue (no more shattered cartilage), as well as reducing the potential for blood spray which could contaminate the gun. Second, the cartridge which contains the stud as well as some of the gun’s mechanism is disposable, immensely reducing the potential for transfer of microbes from client to client even if the mechanism is exposed to the client’s fluids.

Rachel and I were able to meet with Ken Gardner, Studex’s Canadian distributor, who was kind enough to offer us their latest product for review – the “System 75(TM)”. While he did later characterize us as”tattooed from asshole to head” and with “ears big enough to put a tennis ball through”, he was likable and helpful, defended us against their main branch’s fears, and we walked away with a bag full of product for review as well as some literature on the devices.

A two gun System (TM) kit from Studex including a marking pen,
cleaning solution and wipes, two plastic guns, and a sample cartridge.

I was surprised Ken was so helpful – Studex’s reputation is far less friendly, largely due to lawyer Fred Safford’s notoriety for threatening anyone involved in body piercing who speaks out negatively against piercing guns. Even though medical journals have documented and published numerous articles showing everything from Hepatitis transferred by ear piercing studs, to physical damage to the ear, it can be very difficult to speak publicly about these surprisingly common problems – many professionals inside the industry urged me not to write this article for fear of BME being hit with a nuisance suit. In any case, Ken assured me that these problems had not only been addressed in the new System 75™ design, but that according to Fred, the doctors had universally recanted their claims about even the older style guns (which Studex continues to market today). Ken didn’t have the information on these studies, but Fred offered to send me information about these doctors’ retractions. Below is the entirety of the letter which I received from Fred:

This wasn’t particularly convincing (and implied the risk remained in the older style guns they continued to market alongside the System 75), so I did a few searches through MEDLINE and other services. Hundreds of articles discussing the risks of piercing guns and warnings to avoid them were returned, and I wasn’t able to find a single one describing either benefits over studio piercing or mentioning a retraction of previous claims. A great many focused on dermatitis and metal allergies due to the apparently low grade of materials used in some of the jewelry, but many others were directly related to complications due to the design of the gun or the stud itself.

Complications included marked increases of hepatitis infections among people with piercings done with a piercing gun, several with apparent direct links (where they were able to pinpoint the point of infection directly, rather than circumstantially), as well as problems such as embedded earrings, viremia and liver disease resulting from infections contracted from piercing guns, pseudomonas aeruginosa and other acute psudomonas chrondritis secondary to ear piercing, ear deformity, pseudolymphoma, sarcoidal tissue reactions, auricular chondritis, toxic shock syndrome, perichondrial abscesses, post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis, cytotoxicity due to corrosion of the jewelry, and a wide variety of other complications. I was able to find studies from the 1970′s up until today, and during most of that period, no significant changes were made by the ear piercing industry to correct the problem. However, now that piercing studios have significantly threatened their market dominance, they’ve finally been forced to respond – apparently not for ethical reasons or because of caring about their customers, but for survival. Thus the System 75™ from Studex and other analogous products from other companies such as Inverness have hit the market. However, even knowing these risks (and presumably acknowledging them by addressing them with the new designs), they have not taken earlier designs off the market.

In all fairness, it must be noted that a great deal of care has gone into the design of the System 75™, which really does represent an enormous leap over the older guns (which the above mentioned studies primarily refer to) which were easier to link to serious health problems.

The “pusher” system is the only part of the System 75(TM) which is used more than once; all other components are disposable. In theory none of this plastic body ever comes in contact with the customer.

The cartridges come in sealed sterile packaging, which can presumably be handled freely without putting the contents at risk.

Opening the package does not involve touching the cartridge or jewelry, which is at the opposite end of the package from the part that is peeled off.

The cartridge is then picked up using the gun. The part that is exposed when the packaging is peeled open is the part that interfaces with the gun, so the easiest way to use the unit is also the safest.

The packaging is then discarded, leaving the jewelry exposed. Unlike some of the other systems on the market, it is very easy to see where the jewelry point is and the system is simple to co-ordinate and line up with one’s marks.

The trigger is depressed, pushing the jewelry through the tissue and latching the stud into its backing. The gun’s design does not allow crushing the tissue, and different length studs are available for different sized lobes. When the trigger is released, the part of the cartridge that held the stud opens like a flower and releases the jewelry.

After piercing, every part of the gun that came in contact with the client – the cartridge – is discarded. Unlike a spring loaded system which is almost entirely reused between clients, the perfect-world potential for contamination using the System 75(TM) as directed is extremely minimal. Even if the pusher unit itself became contaminated – which to me seems inevitable – the odds of transferring that contamination between clients seems very, very low. A large number of designs of jewelry are available in these sterile packs, so there should be no need to switch the jewelry after piercing as was sometimes done in the past.

Above right you can see the child-sized “practice ear” with recommended placements. In the past, upper ear placements were strongly frowned upon due to the damage that could be done to cartilage by forcibly firing a dull stud through it, but the slow-push method in the new systems is thought to address this. In order to try it out we had a little “piercing gun party” and added studs to myself and a number of friends. Ear placements were simple and largely uneventful.

The only problem we had is that the cartridge’s release system (the part that’s supposed to open up and let go of the jewelry after the piercing) failed on a few of our test piercings, resulting in us needing to use our hands to physically force it open to release – which of course instantly eliminated most of the benefits of the new system and put both the operator and the client at unnecessary risk. A number of the cartridges actually fell apart entirely as we were using them. Because of this it seems important that anyone using this gun wear gloves in case they need to handle the jewelry or tissue directly.

The interesting thing about the System 75(TM) though, and the real reason I’m reviewing it, is that it’s designed to bridge gun technology into much more than just ear or nose piercing – it’s designed to be able to pierce nipples, navels, eyebrows, and more. When I talked to Studex, this was not yet approved in the US or in most of Canada, but Ken told me that in Quebec, parts of Europe, and most of all Japan, the gun was being used for full-on body piercing. Even the US-distributed catalog, which is primarily ear oriented, shows jewelry that while labeled as being for “ear piercing” appears to be more appropriate for body piercing due to its length and gauge (although some of it is tagged as being “Europe only”).

Ken was able to provide us with a number of the Japanese developed body piercing cartridges. They appeared to be 14 gauge, and came as both straight and curved barbells. The basic idea was the same as the ear piercing studs, although much more physical contact was needed to use them. The cartridge sits on its side in the packaging, requiring one to take it out by hand, rather than handling it exclusively with the pusher. In addition, after forcing the stud through the tissue being pierced, the bead has to be screwed on. Many of the benefits of the System 75(TM) were lost.

This is one of the body piercing gun barbells.

As you can see, it is not very sharp, and contains a very steep bevel, making piercing both painful and difficult. This is additionally complicated by external threading which tears up the piercing as it passes through the freshly made hole.

Still, we attempted several piercings using this system. The first and somewhat bizarre problem we discovered, on our navel piercing attempt, was that the curved barbell was facing out in a concave fashion. This meant that it was being held in the exact opposite way required to do this or any other piercing, and was extremely difficult to coordinate – but BME photographer and guinea pig Phil Barbosa bravely allowed us to attempt it anyway. Using all of her strength, Rachel forced the stud into his belly as he grimaced in pain. The dull point managed to penetrate the first layer of skin, and then eventually ground to a halt as the external threading tore up Phil’s navel and wouldn’t allow us to get it all the way through no matter how hard any of us squeezed the unit’s handle, which eventually fell apart in protest. Extracting the stud wasn’t very fun either, as we had to pull the threading back through the fresh injury.

Every cartridge we used for body piercing disintegrated during use, and while the rate of failure was much lower when we used the smaller gauge ear studs, it was still unacceptably high. Also in this photo are one of the standard ear piercing studs with a butterfly backing, as well as a barbell bead, and a nostril piercing stud (about 14ga, but flaring out to 12ga to hold it in place).

We did a second test piercing on Badur through his hand web. It took an incredible amount of force to drive the stud through – probably about the same as it would take to drive a nail into soft wood using only your hand, was excessively painful, and the unit failed to release the stud, causing it to be partially pulled back into the wound and forcing us to dismantle the unit by hand to abort the piercing. People stopped volunteering so we tried piercing pieces of cloth, which also broke the cartridges. Finally we tried simply piercing the air, and continued to have the same failures. While it might be possible to modify it, I do not believe that this element of the System 75(TM) is a mature product yet, and I am somewhat disturbed that there are people using it on unsuspecting clients.

Even if the issue of the cartridges falling apart can be addressed or somehow explained away as a freak batch, I’m not convinced that performing commercial body piercings (rather than small gauge ear piercings) is a viable option with this design. It might be possible to build a unit that used a cutting bevel to place the jewelry, but even with that fix, it would be difficult to address the contamination issues in a way that made them sufficiently “idiot-proof” to be used by largely untrained staff. In addition, once the design reaches this level of complexity, it seems to me that it would be less complicated – and far less expensive – to simply use a traditional piercing studio.

In terms of ear piercing, if the System 75(TM) had not fallen apart so consistently in my testing I’d actually be giving it a thumbs up – in theory it is a well designed unit that really does address nearly every one of the physical problems that existed with earlier spring-loaded ear piercing systems. However, at least the units that I was given to test were not reliable and forced us to use our hands directly in enough cases to offset these corrections. If Studex is able to fix the release system then this is a safe unit for small gauge ear piercing, including cartilage piercing, in my opinion, although one must consider that the people using the guns are relatively untrained, have minimal access to contamination control devices and chemicals, and the possibility for misuse resulting in injury is very real. Studex also sells a smaller system of a similar design for single-use home piercing – the Medisept(TM) – and of the guns they make I’d select that one over the others.

In conclusion, Studex’s System 75(TM) does make significant improvements over traditional piercing gun systems, although I find it distasteful that these systems do not appear to have been developed until recently (and still have not been made exclusive), given that the problems have been documented and understood since at least the seventies. Additionally, given the failure rates we experienced, I can not in good conscience recommend them, especially since piercing studios equipped with contamination control knowledge and supplies – and autoclaves – offer ear piercing services within a few dollars of the same price. That said, if you’re going to get pierced with a gun and you don’t want to do it yourself, this is the right system to choose and offers immense advantages over a primitive spring loaded non-cartridge system. Finally, piercers have nothing to worry about in terms of the navel or nipple market being captured by this device or a similar one, as it is neither safe nor functional for general body piercing at this point, at least in our testing.

Shannon Larratt
BME.com

System 75, Medisept, and Studex are trademarks of STUDEX, Inc.
Thank you to Bagatelle Marketing for providing product samples and information.

“People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.”

– R. Buckminster Fuller

“Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.”

– I COR 13:7-8

Ten years have passed since BME was first uploaded. In that time it has gone from being one of the first websites on the Internet to being one of the oldest and most successful, not only in body modification, but of all subjects. I have a pretty bad memory, so it’s possible that some of these things are out of order, but let me try and tell you how BME came to be what it is now.

	Following are some of the looks that BME has had over the years; unfortunately no archive that I know of exists for versions of BME prior to 1997. If anyone reading this has earlier versions, please send them my way!

In the summer of 1994 I was at a turning point in my life. On one hand I was building the world’s first Internet casino, was about to be featured in WIRED magazine for it, and had a flagship telephony product that was being hailed as revolutionary. On the other hand, I was fresh out of psychiatric prison, at odds with my family (it was my mother who had me drugged and locked up after I grew up to be “too weird” for her sensibilities), and had just moved back to Toronto. I was living with a stewardess at the time, which gave me a lot of unattended time to myself as I enjoyed her fancy apartment.

I’d always been “online”, but only via the BBSs I accessed using my text-only DOS-based computer. One of the systems I used had a primitive USENET gateway (newsgroups; now Google Groups) which allowed access to rec.arts.bodyart, a discussion group for all things body modification. The BBS I was using only allowed reading, not posting, so after a week or so of monitoring it in silence I set myself up with a full Internet account and “delurked”. One short week after that — August 15^th, 1994 — I made the following post:

Is anyone out there interested in starting an e-zine dedicated to piercing and bodyart? It’s a project I would like to get started... I have access to a 1200dpi scanner, and lots of equipment, and have various piercings of my own I could use, but obiously [sic] I need help... If anyone is interested please email me. For a first issue I would like to make a sort-of-FAQ with photos (among other stuff) — something that newbies could ftp and would answer a lot of question — but I don’t want to use magazine pictures so I would need people to mail me pictures or email me scans of stuff... not just finished piercings but procedural photos if you have an unusual piece of pierce. (I will probably use photos of having an 8mm dermal punch put through my conch.)

Response was not very strong, although I did get a few photos, but I think it was luck that made the biggest difference. My ears were stretched to over an inch using homemade jewelry, but I wanted something better. In my search I happened to walk into Stainless Studios where I met Tom Brazda. He’d just hired Ryan Worden (who now runs BMEshop) to run the counter, and in September 1994 hired me to make jewelry, even though I’d never done it before, let alone even operated a lathe. Also working at Stainless Studios was Ryan O’Brien who would later run BMEbooks. In any case, with the help of their customers and portfolio (and my friend Saira’s computer, which was much better than my own), on the evening of December 7^th, 1994 I was able to announce BME’s creation.

Newsgroups: rec.arts.bodyart
Date: Tues, Dec 6 1994 10:02 pm EST
Subject: Body Art Magazine / WWW Site

Ok, well the magazine is much more on its way! The initial pictures from the first issue are available on my WWW site.

http://www.io.org/~glider

There are a bunch of pictures: hand web, large piercings, stretching, implant surgery, eyebrow... they are 1200dpi colour 24bit scans, all 640x480 in .jpg format — check it out. Text will be there soon too...

shannon larratt
[email protected]

It was amazing how quickly the site grew. As soon as it was up, word started to spread and people started sending in their pictures and stories as well. At this point it was nothing but a few text-only menus with links to images which could be downloaded and viewed later, but bandwidth began to spike — by December 15^th it was already clear that female genital piercings drew a server-crushing amount of bandwidth!

Within a few months BME was ranked as the 25^th most popular site on the fledgling Internet — of all subjects. As the Internet grew, BME normalized to about 850^th of the four billion or so sites now online, but bandwidth continued to grow, cracking a million hits in the first month, and then quickly moving up to a million daily and later twenty million daily! Hosting wasn’t cheap back then, but in another “just got lucky” moment that seems to define BME, one of Internex Online’s employees turned out to be a fan of the site and helped convince her bosses that BME deserved free hosting, which they continued to provide until they were bought out by a larger telecom corporation.

That company wasn’t willing to provide me with free hosting, but they understood the business potential of the volume of readership BME was drawing. We had a series of increasingly unpleasant meetings discussing advertising, memberships, and so on. As luck would have it again, an employee of another small hosting company — Quintessential Communications (now Sound Concept) — offered me hosting under their “FreeQ” banner and with their help was able to stall becoming commercial for a few more years.

Eventually bandwidth bills caught up to Gypsy and Brian at Quintessential, and BME did take advertising, getting early support from companies like Anatometal and Unimax which was essential in keeping BME afloat. At about this time we started adding paid membership options as well, which also started to allow me to dedicate more and more time to maintaining the site and building software tools to improve it. Now that we were paying for our bandwidth usage (which was cripplingly expensive back then, and we often ran at a dramatic loss), BME bounced between ISPs a little to keep costs low, including a few more years with a new company owned by Paul Chvostek, the founder of the company who’d offered us hosting back in 1994!

BME also expanded into BME/extreme with the help of Shawn Porter who I met after the death of body modification pioneer Jack Yount — we officially launched BME/extreme on the first anniversary of Jack’s death. A little later BME/HARD was launched using all the images I’d been getting from people for the first few years that I deemed “too dirty” to use in the main sections. I’d resisted adding them because I didn’t want erotic aspects to dominate the site, but the fact is that erotic application of body modification and play is a significant sociocultural demographic, and it would be contrary to BME’s mandate of accurately representing this community to exclude it any longer. With that decision, BME had matured as a commercial entity and began to be able to stand on its own two feet.

However, BME’s financial growth brought its own problems. The first time we offered online memberships we had virtually no fraud control in place (no one did; it was too early). We were later horrified to discover that we had a fraud rate of about 75%, which instantly destroyed that billing system. I later moved on to Online Financial Systems, an early third-party adult processing competitor to companies like Ccbill (no mainstream billing service would take BME, so we had to work with people processing for pornographic sites). As much as the credit card companies “tolerate” adult sites (because they are profitable), they make life hell for them — increased rates, draconian charge-back policies, aggressive security hold-backs, and so on, and that’s if you can even find a bank willing to take on an adult customer. Most will not. Because of this BME found itself processing out of the Bahamas. The site was making enough money to pay its bills, but then the bank started getting slow on their transfers to us… and slower… “sorry, there’s a technical problem down here… you’ll get the money next month, we’re very sorry…”

After months of charges (as well as a security deposit and a rolling hold-back) had been sequestered in their tropical holding cells, it became clear they’d defrauded us and we had little to no recourse to reclaim it.

It took a few months of negotiations with new banks but eventually BME was back taking memberships — although this cycle of economic abuse would happen several more times, and I expect it to happen several more times in the future. Sometimes all it takes is the wrong person at corporate headquarters to clue in to what BME represents and we find ourselves on the street. That said, every time this has happened, BME has stayed online and continued to run, almost entirely due to generous support from those who create BME through their images and stories. It’s very important to understand that the reason that BME has worked (or at least why I think it’s worked) is because of those people. BME isn’t a magazine with a mandate of its own to push — it seeks not only to be representative of the voice of the community, but to actually be created cooperatively by the community itself.

As much as BME had tools for this community beforehand — a simple forum system, personal ads, and later even online “beauty pageants” — it’s really October 15^th, 2000 that needs to be mentioned. The Net was already way into the blogging phenomenon, and I decided I’d like to have an online diary of my own. I put together a simple system for journals, and since it wasn’t really going to be much more work to do so, made it available for others to play with, posting the following message:

October 15, 2000:  I am so tired! I probably shouldn’t tell you about it yet, but if you want to see what I’ve been working on, go to http://bme.com/iam/ -- Feel free to play with it if you want to, but do realize that we’re talking pre-Alpha stuff here and I’ve only completed about 25% of the programming. If you do play with it, and you experience “odd” behavior, please do tell me though.

As had happened six years before with the main BME site, IAM quickly snowballed and a vibrant community was there within the week! I added features as quickly as I could and started tying parts of the IAM site and BME together. IAM went through a set of growing pains similar to BME and now continues as (I believe) the defining online body modification community (and a pretty nice piece of software as well).

IAM has been able to provide a backbone of communication and introduction for people, and has helped catalyze tens of thousands of intense friendships, dozens of marriages (and some divorces) and now babies as well (including my own I suppose). In-person meets (echoing back to the rab munches of USENET) are common and from them suspension groups, bands, and more have sprouted. BME has grown from my little one-page website idea to a distributed empire given life by the ideas of hundreds of thousands of creators.

Maybe I’m kidding myself and the reason for BME’s success is simply pictures of female genital piercing as I opined in December 1994, but speaking without misery it’s my opinion that the reason this growth happened is because BME was always run first as a devout offering to something we all believe in, and second as a business. BME’s stated goals are as follow:

While I’ve left a lot out in this brief history — the creation of BMEshop, Uvatiarru (our movie), all the BMEbooks productions, legal fights, HUSTLER offering to buy BME, constant content theft, threats, ModCon, the Church of Body Modification, BME/Japan and much more — but that brings us basically up to date.

Reflecting on Ten Years

So… ten years of my life have been used on this project. I estimate I’ve spent at least 30,000 hours of time building and maintaining the site (and that’s my “lower limit” estimate). Was it worth it? Absolutely. As time has gone by I have become convinced of one thing:

That is, the way that we live is the right way for us to be living (I make no claim that there aren’t other paths up the mountain, but for me, and many people reading this, this is the right path for us). The things we do and the things we document on BME, almost universally, are good, in the purest sense of the word. They bring us joy, they expand and enrich our lives and horizons, they help us view the universe through larger eyes, they feel good and make us feel good about ourselves, they teach us and they help us talk — and all without hurting anyone else. Yet millions of dollars in resources are dedicated to enacting laws to ban our practices and to ban us from even talking about them, and trillion-dollar corporations do everything they can to make operating businesses on the subject hellish. My wife and I even risk prosecution and imprisonment in countries close to our hearts due to being BME’s publishers.

Why would the power players of modern society so resist the oldest form of human art and expression? It’s simple and disturbing: we are an affront to conformity, the conformity they need to maintain their power structure.

Let’s be real clear on something. The average person is an idiot. So blank and malleable in fact that the stranger telling them for a few seconds what to do — or what to buy — will be heeded. Don’t believe me? Explain advertising. The simple fact that advertising exists is all the proof you need to know that the vast majority of people are sheep. If this were not true, advertising would be based exclusively on the comparative merits of the product, which we all know is not the case. It’s one of those “can’t see the forest for the trees” scenarios — because of the abundance of ads, most of us don’t see their real message revealing the pathetic nature of most humans.

By definition, a person with piercings or tattoos — or who likes to shove a football up their rectum (damn near killed ’em!) — is breaking the rules and unable to believe that the status quo applies to them. The more they engage in body modification and play the more they realize that the status quo is a myth, that happiness really does come from within, and that life is what you make it — not what you pay someone else to make it. Thus we, the modified, are dangerous to them. It’s no lie that many of us have experimented with “risky behavior” as we are accused — because we don’t accept their rules. Because we want to know for ourselves. Because we desire to take an active role — or an active roll — in life.

I could go on and on with statistics to prove it (and have done so on my IAM page), but one of the things that has been revealed within the last four years of political turmoil is how far removed the average person’s worldview is from reality. At this point not much over 10% of Americans believe in the concept of evolution any more, and polling has showed that adherence to these views are deeply linked to political allegiance — or, to put it another way, the average person believes what they’re told to believe, not what they observe or understand to be true. Not only that, but the average person not only does not want to discover the truth for themselves, but they become openly hostile when that truth is expressed to them, and violent if it is presented alongside difficult to refute evidence.

People who “break the rules” by doing things like abnormally* modifying their physical form take a step toward rejecting this idealogical control structure. Because of this we have ridiculous and hypocritical laws restricting body modification,

	* Abnormal: Not typical, usual, or regular; not normal. Much greater than the normal; “abnormal profits”; “abnormal ambition”. Syn. Exceptional, Rare. Normal: Conforming with, adhering to, or constituting a norm, standard, pattern, level, or type. Syn. Routine, run-of-the-mill, obvious, mediocre. Below are a few photos of abnormal people attending some of the earlier BME BBQs:

or pushing it back far enough into adulthood that it is less able to be a formative experience. Those at the upper end of the power structure do not want those below them realizing the power structure is illusory — so they combine a two pronged attack of restricting growth at the edges while dumbing down and bulk-marketing that which they can’t stop. Body modification and other fringe lifestyles are treated with a mix of derision, restrictive legislation, lampoonery, and finally watered-down price-slashed mainstreaming.

“Trust not him that hath once broken faith; he who betrayed thee once, will betray thee again.”

– Shakespeare

In this column I’d like to give you a behind-the-scenes look at some of the things body modification artists and studios have to deal with that clients may not be aware of, and that younger artists may still need a warning about. It’s very easy for us to get a false impression of the world because of the crowds of mod-friendly people who characterize BME members, but the world in general is far from so accepting a place. You all know about how this restricts our lifestyles on a surface level, but what you may not be aware of is that these sometimes prejudicial laws are also a tool for profit and business manipulation.

There are a lot of people who’d like to see the body modification industry go away or at least be under heavy regulation. Some feel this way for moralistic reasons, and others, such as those in government health agencies, are simply trying to do what they believe is in the best interests of public safety. Then there are those in competition, such as ear piercing gun manufacturers (or even just competing studios), who want piercing to be popular, but are motivated to keep financial traffic away from certain studios so they can drive as much of it as possible to their own establishments. What the industry needs to understand is that these people aren’t going to fight you by firebombing your shop — they’re going to play the system into shutting you down.

Luckily, these Police officers are modification friendly. (photo: CJ)

In order to play the system against you, they (whoever “they” may be) need to find a place that you come into conflict with the law. Most obviously this can involve finding (or sometimes fabricating) procedures that may not be entirely legal; tongue splitting, scarification, suspension, or other health code or criminal violation. If the assault is from outside the industry the outsiders tend to be easy to recognize at least.

Hey Shannon,

    Hate to bug you but this has come to my attention over the last couple of weeks through **** ***** and ***** at ***** **** Tattoos. Over the last week there have been a large number of people calling us and other shops saying they are looking to have their tongues split. What is odd is these are not heavily modded people, or even slightly "in the know" of the industry. As we all know, if you really want this done, you probably have a general idea of who to contact and/or you are at least well acquainted with your piercer because you probably would have some other work. These are so called "normal" people with no mods and they are all doing it by phone call only. We have had even one request come from an underage kid whose parent's had allegedly agreed to sign for him to have this done. These requests are flooding into our shop, through call-ins, other shops like ****, and ***** **** Tattoos, which causes me to believe that a possible investigation is happening in Ontario right now for body art practitioners that "cross the line."

We of course deny any and all knowledge/involvement and urge others to do the same. Just a heads up.

*****

In “the old days,” those doing procedures that were gray or overtly illegal operated by word of mouth, accepted new clients only when they were referred by an existing client, and certainly never advertised or talked to reporters — even photos sent to private insider publications like BME or BCQ were sent through anonymous email accounts with no names attached. When it comes to procedures like tongue splitting, practitioners should consider the wisdom of their predecessors’ discretion.

Sometimes though it’s not so easy to identify one’s enemy. Since piercing is a business, and there are now people who make their living at it, sometimes those people get carried away with fighting their competition. I’m reminded of a well known Chicago piercer, ***** ***** who conspired with the Health Board to have his competition shut down, which eventually lead to the death of a number of America’s first studios. By managing to convince the Health Board that he was their lone ally, even though he was piercing out of a tiny single room studio in the back of a clothing shop without even a separate sterilization room, he was able to dramatically increase his income and reputation — but at what cost?

Later the Health Board in the same region put a ban on suspension performances. Seeing another opportunity, this piercer attempted to “rat” on any competing shop who he felt was involved in BME BBQs or other events that might legally cross the line. It boggles my mind that someone who did “legally questionable” procedures themselves as well as suspensions would choose attempting to initiate prosecution of others for those activities as their line of attack, but ***** ***** is far from the only piercer I’ve seen try and convince the government to go after his competition, the whole time professing to be doing “the right thing”.

Others, like Canada’s **** *****, genuinely believe that instituting a conservative piercing industry is the right decision. One part civic duty, and one part — and much larger part — shameless self promotion, ***** keeps himself in the public eye with body piercing world record attempts and rabid promotion of body modification safety. An apparent career nomad, as he moves into a new region, piercing shops in the area start to feel heat due to his actions.

I work at a shop here in ***** called ********. The owner, **** *******, has been trying to get a proper body art bylaw instated here for approximately seven years. As of about a month ago, '****', or ***** ****** as I know him mostly, popped up and started trying to get the bylaw proposal thrown out with all sorts of ludicrous allegations. He wants to make scarification type mods illegal, and has been a thorn in our side since the first day we met him. We don't want to make anything illegal, and that is not what **** has been working for, for so long. We simply want to have, at the least, a minimum standard, and people checking up on the industry to make sure things are being done properly. '****' is a media hound, and will do anything, or say anything, to get himself some attention. He even went so far as to generate fictitious death threats, allegedly from our shop, in a hope that the police that showed up today would arrest my boss, so that he couldn't speak, in support, at the final council meeting tomorrow.

I enjoy being able to submit photos of my mods, but with him on the site, I think that I will have to be more selective about what BME gets to see.

****** ****

Later this same piercer decided that BME was a part of the problem, and began “harvesting” the site for any photos or stories that he felt could do damage to competing businesses. He even went so far as to phone in fake complaints to the police when BME events were being held in an effort to make life unpleasant for the members of the site in return for them not helping him shut down his competition.

Police, called to investigate a suspension party, instead reveal their sense of humor. (photo: CJ)

While regulatory and internal attacks are the most common, as I mentioned earlier, the ear piercing gun industry is another source of grief. The gun lobby has already managed to silence through threat of lawsuit many of the people who spoke out against them, but now that government health agencies are starting to regulate in response to the dangers of piercing guns, manufacturers are beginning to target piercing studios themselves. I believe this is in an effort to convince the government that studios are “even worse” than piercing guns.

Hi Shannon,

I just wanted to give you a “head’s up” about the “Ear Piercing Manufacturers *** ** **** ******” ‘s president – **** *****. You may have already heard of this jewelry salesmen / lawyer. He has harassed the APP and several other organizations related to personal services. He individually approaches health units and tries to convince them that the Ministry of Health has allowed ear piercing guns to be used on cartilage, etc. (assorted lies). He has a big surprise coming when the revised PSSP comes out.

Anyway, I just received a package from his office in **** with pictures from your site (Sprocket in Stratford, etc.) where he is actually looking for health violations and reporting them to me (piercing without gloves, etc.). I am sure that he has already forwarded his information to the Health Unit in Perth. He has managed to get himself into meetings at the Ministry of Health in Toronto, and was actually *** ** *** ****** **** **** ***** *** ******** Health Canada’s version of the PSSP.

Have a great day,

*********

The point of all this is that there are always people who can profit from your loss, so there will always be people who will use any dirty trick they can to try and cause you to lose. Above are only a very small number of the attacks I hear about weekly. Most of them come from those who seek financial gain, and others come from moralists and theocrats, but whatever the source, the preparations and defenses required are the same.

A few basic rules:

1. Be a professional, be safe, and have high standards in all things.
2. Be polite to the authorities and the system, but know your rights, and know where their rights end, and don’t be afraid to assert either.
3. Don’t say anything online in a public or semi-public forum that you wouldn’t feel comfortable telling your local newspaper and your competition.
4. If a procedure is not explicitly legal, don’t charge for it and don’t do it on people you don’t know and trust.
5. If part of a procedure such as the use of anesthetics is not explicitly legal, don’t publish photos of it or have the clients write about it in a way that links back to you.
6. Don’t talk to strangers about the procedures, and don’t become a braggart. Boasting about procedures is as likely to cause you grief as it is fame.
7. If you decide to do an interview with the media, don’t be afraid to say “no comment”. Reporters aren’t your friends — they have a goal that’s distinct from your own, and what’s a “good story” for them is not necessarily the one that’s in your best interests.

These things should be common sense. Laws are in flux, and it’s not always clear what’s permitted and what’s not, and where the lines are going to be drawn, and even with clearly defined laws, they can still be used as a tool to negatively affect the lives of others. While I certainly encourage people to share their experiences on BME, I also urge people to be prudent in selecting which ones should be shared anonymously. Remember that as much as you have friends watching you, you also have enemies watching you.

Shannon Larratt
BME.com

“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws.”

– Ayn Rand

Earlier this year Tony DeLuca and others introduced several pieces of legislation to regulate piercing and tattooing in Pennsylvania. House Bill 832, which requires parental consent and presence for the tattooing and piercing of minors, passed earlier this year, albeit with a typically unrelated Senate amendment also banning greyhound racing. The second and much longer bill, House Bill 615, has passed the House and is currently in the Senate’s Health and Welfare committee.

It’s not so much that the bill is bad, but that’s it’s just typical government. In its errors and poorly considered drafting it illustrates the truth of the motto, “that government which governs best, governs least.” Like far too much modern legislation, the public would be best served if tax money was not wasted developing and enforcing this new law. The bill is ineptly written, and like most government actions, is beholden to special interests and lobbyists, as becomes clear when we begin with the definitions section.

“Body piercing.” The process of breaching the skin or mucous membrane for the purpose of insertion of any object, including, but not limited to, jewelry for cosmetic purposes. The term does not include ear piercing or nail piercing.

The disclaimer that “ear piercing” isn’t covered by this piercing bill is fairly normal due to the insidious lobbying power of the ear piercing gun industry. However, the instant we read a line that’s clearly fraudulent — can we seriously be proposing that an ear piercing is fundamentally different on a biological level than, say, a nostril ring? — we can be certain that the entirety of the bill is tainted.

The definitions section goes on to define “corrective cosmetic artist” (another group with lobbyists) as something separate from just a tattoo artist. Tattoo artists tend to get started after a year or more of apprenticeship and careful guidance from an experienced mentor. “Cosmetic” tattoo artists on the other hand are often nothing more than estheticians with a week’s training (buy now, and it’s included in the price of the equipment!) — much of the cosmetic tattoo industry is akin to artists who buy a “tattoo kit” out of the back of a lower end tattoo magazine and learn to tattoo from the included videotaped instructions. But I digress…

The bill also talks about safety regulations, registration and accounting processes, but leaves them open-ended, saying that the Department of Health will still have to define them. It is difficult to fully comment on the validity and benefits or lack thereof with a law whose heart reads “to be announced.”

But let’s not get disheartened too quickly. The bill has an interesting limitation put on it.

(f) Limitation.--Nothing in this act shall be construed to permit the department to regulate artistic aspects of tattooing, body piercing or corrective cosmetics which are unrelated to health, sanitation, sterilization or safety standards.

Sounds good, right? Unfortunately it’s a typically hypocritical statement, since we’ve already read that the bill is imposing artistic limitations by giving special status to ear piercing, exempting it from the regulations. Even if you use a spring loaded altar for bacteria to rip a hole in your lobe rather than an autoclaved needle, it’s still body piercing, and it still carries the same family of risks, if not more.

The bill goes on to list some unusual requirements and restrictions for the artists themselves — “minimum health standards”. I believe that most of these are well-intentioned, but in reality are somewhat nonsensical. Infectious diseases are taken very seriously by the bill, as they should be, but the ideas are misapplied.

(b) Infectious diseases.--A notarized statement from a licensed physician shall be provided to this department... confirming that the artist was examined by the physician, a test of the artist’s blood was made and the results of that test indicate that:

    (1) the artist is free from all contagious and infectious diseases, including hepatitis B;

That sounds great, I know, but it’s basically irrelevant. Under no normal circumstances is the client at risk from the piercer’s blood — the risk is entirely the other way around. Diseases like this require blood to blood contact, and while a studio that doesn’t control contamination issues could pass blood between subsequent clients, or a clumsy piercer could have a needlestick injury pass blood from client to piercer, there is no reasonable way for blood to pass from piercer to client. This bill is incompetently written by people who do not understand the issues involved. Especially in the case of government and law enforcement, comprehension must come before legislation, and that is not happening here.

The bill also requires that aftercare instructions be given. Of course I support that, but the bill steps in to make an unusual footnote.

The written instructions shall advise the customer to consult a physician at the first sign of infection and contain the name, address and phone number of the tattoo or body-piercing establishment.

Yeah, and next time I run out of gas in my car, I’m going to call a metallurgist. First of all, most of the time someone thinks their piercing is infected, it’s not. Second of all, doctors have far less experience with body piercing and tattoos than those who actually work with them every day. This clause will have two results: it will generate increased income for doctors, and I believe that, if the instructions are heeded by the client, it will result in a lower standard of care due to doctors’ inexperience with body piercing.

Some interesting social restrictions are placed as well.

(a) Unregistered practice.--It is unlawful for any person to ... assume the title of “tattooist,” “tattoo artist,” “body-piercer,” “body-piercing artist,” “corrective cosmetics artist” or other letters or titles in connection with that person’s name which in any way represents himself as being engaged in the practice of tattooing, body piercing, or corrective cosmetics, or authorized to do so, unless that person has been duly registered and authorized to engage in the practice under this act.

So, basically, the government is taking ownership over these titles as restricted professional terms (just like a normal person can’t call themselves a doctor). Outside of the fact that tattooing and piercing are arguably folk professions a la pottery or dowsing that can’t rightly be treated as “titled” professions, can we seriously expect a government agency that has already shown incompetence in its understanding of this industry to assign such titles?

...the department may suspect or revoke any registration issued under this act for any of the following reasons:
    (3) Being unable to practice with reasonable skill and safety to the public by reason of illness, addiction to drugs or alcohol, having been convicted of a felonious act prohibited by... The Controlled Substance, Drug, Device and Cosmetic Act, or convicted of a felony relating to a controlled substance...

This clause again shows the sociopolitical bias inside this bill, as the US government’s misguided “War on Drugs” perverts another law. Someone having a past conviction for drug dealing seems to me less worrying than someone having committed murder in the past — this bill bans the reformed marijuana user from being a tattoo artist, yet openly invites the convicted murdering rapist pedophile to pierce teen genitals. This entire clause should be removed. It’s irrelevant to the professional issues involved and the safety of the client.

    (5) Knowingly maintaining a(n)... association with any person who is in violation of this act or regulation of the department or knowingly aiding, assisting, procuring or advising any unregistered person to practice a profession contrary to this act or regulations of this department.

Guilt by association? You can’t talk to anyone who they don’t like? These are starting to read like parole restrictions. Read broadly, this clause could ban apprenticeships, ban attending tattoo conventions, and certainly ban discussions with online friends of various levels. It’s wrong to punish someone because of who they know.

Not in Pennsylvania!

Larry Leopard and Ron Garza prepare to devour a willing plain-faced virgin.

Finally, there’s one restriction that goes way too far.

    (d) Facial tattoos.--It is unlawful for any person other than a corrective cosmetic artist registered under this act, or a physician or surgeon licensed in this Commonwealth, to perform facial tattoo services on any other person.

Didn’t the bill start off by saying that no restrictions would be placed on the art? Only on the safety issues? Clearly restricting tattooing to only certain parts of the body is entirely motivated by cultural reasoning, not by safety concerns. The inclusion of this restriction effectively reduces the bill to nonsense. Allowing permanent makeup to be tattooed — where society chooses the artwork by seeking out this year’s “normal” — but banning art chosen by the wearer as an individual, is clearly contrary to not only the declared purpose of the bill, but to free speech and expression in general.

It’s a dangerous thing when a government deludes itself into thinking that it has the right — or duty — to decide what forms of expression its citizens use. Telling artists not only what they’re allowed to say, but also who they’re allowed to say it to, who they’re allowed to discuss their art with, and placing them under nebulous regulations has never been healthy for either art or for the culturally starved society that enacts these laws.

So what to do? While I could be wrong, I don’t believe that the authors of this bill are overtly opposed to body modification or are trying to legalize cultural bigotry. It’s simply well-meaning but incompetent and misguided bureaucracy at work, and the best we can do as citizens is first to try and inform the legislative branches of our society to not pass ill-advised laws, and to reform those that already have passed. Barring that, we are left with civil disobedience, a path which is as strewn with hardship as it is with honor.

This bill is just the tip of the iceberg. The political process does not start and end on election day. As a citizen, you have more responsibility than just voting — you have to stay informed as to what your elected representatives are doing, and you need to communicate with them about your wishes. You can bet that the ear piercing industry is doing so, and because of their efforts, the law skips over them. People have the same opportunity. You need to call or write your government representative and let them know the wishes of their constituents, and that applies to everyone in the world, not just to residents of Pennsylvania.

Shannon Larratt
BME.com