BME: Body Modification Ezine

“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

“Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

– Jorge Luis Borges

I’m ashamed to say that if you’d asked me three years ago what Buenos Aires (or any South American city) looked like, I’d picture some shanty-town Caribbean city with a Hispanic population — making me a typically ignorant imperialist North American. However, through IAM I started meeting Argentinians (and others from across South America), and it soon became obvious that South America had a cultural diversity and modern society not much different than our own here in Canada. Since then, Rachel and I have wanted to visit what seemed from the outside like a wonderful place.

After several aborted attempts, we finally made plans to attend the Buenos Aires, Argentina tattoo convention hosted by Piel Magazine (pielmag.com) at the end of October 2004, organized in part by our friend la Negra (iam:la negra). The trip was almost aborted as Rachel was quite sick before we left, but she bravely faced the fifteen hour flight and we were met by Javier (also from Piel) and la Negra at the Buenos Aires international airport.

Luckily a few wrong turns on the way into the city let us see the sparse outskirts, which looked quite similar to poverty stricken regions of Canada or the United States. As we moved toward the heart of the city — the airport is about a half hour drive — it became clear that this was a truly monstrous metropolis. At ten million people, it dwarfs anything in North America except Los Angeles and New York, although it’s still far from the largest Southern city. I asked Javier how many tattoo studios I would find in the city, expecting a hundred or so. “About a thousand,” he told me, “but most are very local.”

The “modification scene” in Buenos Aires, and I imagine across most of South America, feels like it did here in Canada ten years ago. On one hand, it’s good, because it means everyone is enthusiastic and incredibly excited, but it also means that many people are operating below what is generally considered safe. While attempts have been made to set up professional organizations to encourage the use of proper contamination control and so on, only the better studios go to that effort. In part because of US financial wars with South America, Argentina has had several devastating economic periods recently as well as political turmoil, which has made many systems bribe-based. This has complicated cleaning up the tattoo industry because while an autoclave is officially required by the health board, the inspector would far rather visit for a monthly fifteen peso bribe. So they’re quite happy to turn a blind eye when a studio chooses to pay this bribe rather than go the more expensive route and upgrade their facilities.

That said, don’t get the idea that Buenos Aires is a backward or criminal city — it’s a safe, modern, multi-cultural metropolis. The food is good and the water is perfectly safe to drink. A myriad of languages are spoken (including English), Internet access is easy to find, the architecture is beautiful, the people are warm and friendly, and the heart of the downtown bears an uncanny resemblance to Toronto’s waterfront region. Temperatures are about the same as you’d find in the southern United States, and other than the truly maniacal driving style, most of what you find in Buenos Aries is incredibly close to any number of European and North American destinations.

The convention itself was hosted at the Centro Cultural Borges, an art gallery in the traditional sense of the word. Approximately fifty studios and suppliers, mostly from Buenos Aires, but with some travelling from across South America and one from Spain, filled two halls which over the weekend were attended by about ten thousand visitors. Entry cost was eight pesos — less than three dollars. Because of the devalued currency, most things cost very little in Argentina. Cab rides across town cost only a dollar or two, a large apartment can be rented for a couple hundred dollars a month, a beer costs less than a dollar, and meals cost less than half what we’d pay in Canada. Tattoos in Argentina cost about a third what they cost in North America and Europe, which is in part why only one artist from off the continent made the trip. It’s unfortunate though — I can’t imagine a much more rewarding working vacation for an artist than South America.

People at the convention were very friendly, and while many spoke almost no English, we had a note reading (in Spanish), “May we take your picture for a Canadian tattoo magazine?” Everyone was gracious and happy to help out, and a lot of people took my picture as well. The bustle of the convention was much more “happy” than any convention I’ve been to up north. I don’t know if it’s because it’s a booming culture, or just because South Americans are joy-filled, positive people in general.

Below are some of the photos that Rachel took in the studio space that Piel provided for us. I can’t thank Javier and la Negra enough — they went out of their way to make us feel welcome and provide us with anything we needed.

People almost seemed not to believe me when I told them how much I was enjoying myself both at the convention and in Buenos Aires. Maybe the grass is always greener on the other side, but to those of you in Argentina, let me be clear: there are many things about your country that I envy. Don’t assume things are better in the north — they’re just colder! Along those lines, I asked Javier what his plans were for the future of this convention, now going into its fourth year. He told me that one day he hoped it would be a world class international convention.

This surprised me — this year saw top quality artists from around the continent attending, tattoos, piercings and modifications, art fusion demonstrations, body painting, music, art galleries, contests, demonstrations, and everything you’d expect from a big international convention — including a performance by Norway’s Pain Solution. Other than not getting much media attention outside of South America, this already was a world class convention as far as I was concerned.

“When do you think that will happen,” I asked. “Maybe in year four or five?”

Javier didn’t think it would be recognized as a large international convention until maybe year fifteen. I hope he’s wrong — the only thing that keeps it from happening is jingoist North American tattoo media (BME was the only one there) and the economic issues that make it less profitable for traveling artists to attend. Maybe after reading this, and looking at the snapshots we took around the convention, studios will start to think seriously about visiting Buenos Aires and other Southern conventions instead of boring themselves with yet another American or Canadian show.

Think about it: the airline ticket is no more expensive than flying across North America. Sure, you’ll charge less for the tattoos, but your cost of staying in Argentina is half to a third what it would cost to visit a North American city convention, and you’ll gain far, far more on a personal level than you ever could staying close to home. I know I’ve already said it a couple times, but South Americans are vital, wonderful, gregarious, welcoming, happy people, and their continent — and its inhabitants — are extremely attractive.

As good as time as we were having, especially getting to finally meet many online friends in person for the first time, unfortunately the illness that Rachel had contracted in Toronto got progressively worse over the week, and on Saturday night, the second day of the convention, we had to fly back — as I write this she’s currently in the US receiving medical care. She as well though, even through the sickness, agrees that Buenos Aires was a wonderful city and looks forward to returning and exploring more of the country and the continent.

So our coverage includes only the first half of the convention. Sadly this means we missed Håvve’s Pain Solution performance, which I’ve been looking forward to since reading his book — I’m sure there will be more coverage on Piel’s website as well over the next few weeks. But missing it gives me an excuse to travel again!

South America is far from a cultural wasteland. There’s another Buenos Aires convention coming up at the end of November, and a convention farther south in Patagonia from the 10^th to the 12^th of January, 2005 (that’s the poster on the left of course). I believe it’s being organized by the artist that’s the first portrait in Rachel’s studio set above. Everyone I talked to spoke highly of this tattoo convention — “It’s wonderful; you spend all day swimming in the river, and then the convention opens at five and goes until two in the morning.”

“Ninety-nine out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”

– William Torrey, US Commissioner of Education

One of the dirtiest and hardest to break urban legends in body modification is the idea that there’s some physical reason why young people can’t get piercings. The fact is though that there is no physical reason why people of all ages can’t get tattoos, piercings, scarification, or even more “extreme” modifications. Not only that, there are no valid reasons of any kind unique to minors barring them from body modifications. None. Yet nearly every area bans all or some modifications for those under the age of eighteen, and even more surprisingly, this ban is supported by the vast majority of professional piercers who rationalize it for a variety of questionable reasons.

Like Father, Like Son

I was tattooed as a minor and I was pierced as a minor, including genital piercings. All of these things had a highly positive effect on my life, and I believe were instrumental in helping make me an independent adult capable of thinking — and doing — for myself. I’d like to now take a look at a few of the reasons presented by people opposed to piercing and otherwise modifying minors and break them down, and then propose what I believe the reason for this ban is, and why it’s fundamentally wrong.

While an oft repeated lie, this is simply false. For most of human history people have engaged in tattooing, scarification, and piercings to mark puberty and coming of age rites, these acts taking place generally between age ten and fifteen. These modifications “survived” well into adulthood with no ill effects from either the youthfulness of the body or its subsequent growth. If anything, a young healthy person may heal modifications with more resilience and positive results than an aging individual. In any case, there is no functional or biological reason why minors can not successfully be pierced, tattooed, or otherwise modified.

This is fundamentally insulting, but it is a reason that’s presented very regularly. First of all, “taking care of” a piercing or tattoo is very easy and it’s well inside the grasp of even a fairly young child. It’s no more difficult than wound care in general (ever cut yourself as a kid?), and certainly far easier than tasks we expect a minor to be able to handle such as taking care of a pet, doing chores around the house, and so on.

It’s somewhat difficult to pinpoint exactly when a person has experienced enough of life to be able to make major decisions, but luckily this is an issue that we’ve had to face in far more grave scenarios than — gasp — a navel piercing. We allow people to drive cars (which actually kill people when things go wrong) in their mid teens. Education decisions that will affect a person’s life far more profoundly than a little scar from a regretted piercing start getting made by people in their early teens. We allow people to marry and have children in their teens — you may disagree with this, but the law does allow it. As decisions go, the potential negative outcomes of a piercing or tattoo are dwarfed by the potential outcomes of many, many other decisions that teens are forced (and permitted) to make.

The fact is that minors are out there having sex. Like it or not, it’s rare for someone to “wait” until they turn eighteen or get married. Some people do, but it’s not normal, nor is it legally mandated. Pop music and youth fashion is highly sexualized (and publicly so), far more so than a navel piercing or even a genital piercing (which is private) when it comes down to it. Without a radical puritanical overhaul of Western society such an argument is hypocritical at best.

        …or to put it more simply…

Certainly one can make these sorts of subjective arguments about what’s appropriate behavior and what’s not, but let’s first mention that when you look at human history, body piercing and body modification is normal — our modern Western society is an odd-ball in that we don’t embrace it. In any case, while parents certainly may have some right to control or at least guide their children’s behavior, the government has no place stepping in and making the rules for them. If a parent wants to punish their child for getting an eyebrow ring, they can do so, but it’s not the State’s place to restrict the practice.

So now that we’ve seen that the presented reasons are deceptions, or at best ignorance, let’s talk about the real reason body modification for minors is illegal.

Allowing minors to engage in body modification risks them breaking the bonds of artificially extended adolescence, and helps free them from the bonds of slavery. Modern society is built around a large “slave class” of workers who are subservient to the social machine, and people are kept loyal to it through fear and blindness helped by never allowing individuals to fully move out of childhood. This makes them dependent on the State and the corporation, afraid to strike out on their own into a world that makes individuality and liberty extremely difficult to obtain.

I’ve written in the past about the education system and its goals, and this article is in part a rehash of some of those points. To simplify, the purpose of the education system is to slow down people’s ability to learn independently, making them easy to manipulate and enslave. This was done after the excellent education Americans received in the 1800s started resulting in “class jumping” where poor but well educated and bright individuals became wealthy, and those that were unfairly abused by corporations had “discontent” due to their awareness — a smart, informed person doesn’t like being a slave, they discovered, and it’s hard for rich people to stay so much richer than everyone else without slaves (or as they put it these days, indentured servants low wage employees).

The things that we learn as we graduate high school are within the intellectual grasp of the vast majority of ten year olds, given a functional education that is. I’m sure many of you reading this remember devouring books as a young child, and maybe even being told to “stop reading those books — you’re too young!” when you strayed into the science books (or whatever your interest was).

The truth of the matter is that once you hit about sixteen it’s all downhill from there as far as the way your brain (and your body) works. If you are conditioned before that point to be a slave, it’s harder and harder to break out the older you get. That’s why almost every “primitive” culture — which needed all of its members to help on the hunts, the food gathering, and so on — engaged in body modification and other “manhood” or “womanhood” or “warrior” status rituals at young ages. If people don’t define themselves as strong, independent, and competent people as youths, they will forever be constrained to relying on someone else for guidance and even food. How different is a person who’s been conditioned from birth to be dependent on their government and their employer and unable to go out on their own any different from a slave in the most traditional sense of the word?

While the piercers and parents who parrot these “rules” are largely unaware of this underlying reason, you can bet that the lawmakers are very aware of them and work incredibly hard to sustain this repressive status quo.

With that in mind, let us re-examine the above objections to modified youth.

Eleven years old, self stretched

Young people tend to be healthier and better able to heal modifications than aging individuals. If you’re going to do things like stretch your ears, your body is far more accepting of it the younger you are. In simple terms, the younger you are when you start stretching your ears, the better they will look when you’re done.

Caring for body modifications is really quite simple. Even if a minor willfully ignores the care required, the consequences are almost always extremely minor, and can teach young people in a safe fashion what will happen to them if they are not responsible for their decisions.

Body modification is both “minor” and profound at the same time. By taking responsibility over their lives and bodies in this way, young people learn how to take care of themselves and how their decisions affect them.

Too much of a minor’s sexuality is out of their control. The media tells them how they have to behave and dress and express themselves, and massive pressure is on them to engage in sexual behavior before they are ready. This is already happening, it’s legal, and it’s very dangerous — teen pregnancy (and abortion), rape, STDs, and other problems are frighteningly common. Body modification allows a young person — or an older person — to take personal control over their sexual identities and encourages responsibility in a safe and healthy way.

Well, this one might be true as stated, if the parent has limited empathy for their child that is. Children do not always have the same beliefs or interests as their parents, and ultimately, as they start to assert that personality, parents have a choice of going to war over it, or learning to love their child for who they are and making compromises so they can remain a family. Simply saying “no” without real discussion is a poor way to parent and has resulted in far too many broken homes, a tragedy that could have been averted with nothing more than an open mind.

I hope I’ve helped clarify that the end result of allowing young people to modify their bodies is not only positive, but could help catalyze much larger and extremely beneficial societal change. We can move forward to a draconian future where immense government and corporations dictate how the drones lead their lives, or we can move forward to a collaborative utopia where everyone is valuable and everyone is allowed to express themselves, working together for both common and individual goals.

I believe that this freedom is an essential notion, and that unless we imbue it in the youth, our society becomes something far darker than it even is now. Piercers, I’m not asking you to break the law — I’ve already put myself at great risk by writing this — but please don’t keep repeating the lies. Let young people and parents know just how positive body modification is for a young person. Let legislators know that it’s safe and healthy and most of all improves people’s lives.

And young people, all I can say to you is that when I — and most of the current generation of “celebrity” piercers — were your age, there were no studios and we had to pierce ourselves. At least you have the benefits of resources like BME so you’re not running blind like we were! Write about what modification does for you, good and bad, and submit it to BME or your own sites and journals. Write about it for school to help educate your teachers. Try and explain to your parents why it matters to you. Get them involved even. If body modification is good, we can prove it through our lives, right?

But please understand this: This is an uphill battle, and as “mainstream” as body modification is, it’s far from accepted. Don’t join this army unless you’re willing to fight, and fight hard. If you get modifications that the public can see, you will have to work twice as hard to get your share of jobs and education. Do everything you can to educate yourself, both at school and outside of school. Get in shape, learn every skill you can — welding, flower arranging, everything — and just make yourself an amazing individual that can do a lot of things and think intelligently on a lot of subjects. The more “powerful” and independent you are, the more you can assert yourself as an individual, and the less power anyone else has to tell you how you can live your life.

Most of all though, don’t believe their lies, and don’t accept their prison.

Shannon Larratt
BME.com

Recommended reading: “Underground History of American Education” by John Taylor Gatto. You can read it online for free here. This book will change the way you look at the Western world and its institutions. Read it before it’s banned.

PS. To the nutcases who are calling the FBI because of the photo at the start of this article, of course it’s a fake photo. We don’t live in a perfect world, yet.