Posted on 01/10/2007 2:00:53 PM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
With assists from Madonna, Britney Spears and Lenny Kravitz, body piercing made its way into mainstream America during the last decade. It's now common for high school girls from middle-class backgrounds to have pierced navels, metal bars running through the cartilage of their upper ears, and piercings in spots their parents don't care to imagine.
That, among many factors - aesthetic, spiritual and sexual - has led devotees of body modification to move on to new extremes such as scarification by cutting or branding, and decorative objects implanted under skin, or even in the whites of eyes.
The growing interest in body modification is also raising questions about which procedures must be performed by medical professionals, as opposed to people who hold only licenses to tattoo and pierce.
As a result, some Americans are traveling to Europe to have some of the more extreme procedures performed. Eyeball implants, for instance, are being legally performed at an ophthalmology clinic in the Netherlands. The 15-minute procedure involves slipping a-inch piece of platinum alloy (shaped like stars, hearts, four-leaf clovers, or musical notes) under the surface of the eye.
Sub-dermal implants, which are much more common and are worn by a growing number of Madison residents, are usually Teflon, silicone or surgical-grade metal that are slipped into pockets fashioned between layers of skin and sutured in place. One popular motif is called "heart on heart," in which a silicone heart is slipped under the skin above a person's real heart.
Little silicone horns are on either side of the forehead are another popular subdermal implant. "Beading," or inserting rows of small beads beneath the skin, is another trend. So are magnets implanted under the skin of fingertips, making possible party tricks such as attracting beer bottle caps to fingers.
"When someone with magnets in their fingers enters a room they can feel the electrical field, and it's like having a sixth sense," said John Kid, a body modification artist at Blue Lotus Tattoo and Body Piercing Lounge, which is one of Madison's eight licensed tattoo and piercing parlors. Radio frequency identification chips, best known as Soviet espionage tools, are also being put into people for reasons other than political intrigue.
Scarification, however, is routinely and legally done at licensed Madison piercing parlors. Fraternity members are among the best customers for branding, getting their Greek letters burned into unobtrusive body parts. Fraternity branding has been going on since the 1950s, beginning with black fraternities and moving into frats of all types. Some members of the military also get branding with the names of their units. Modern human branding is usually different from the cattle branding seen in TV westerns, when a red-hot iron goes straight from a fire to sear the animal's skin.
The hot iron of choice for modern body branding is a Hyfrecator, the medical tool used for melanomas and vasectomies that vaporizes tissue with intense heat.
Scarification by cutting begins by drawing a design on the skin, then lightly cutting the epidermis to get a blood line, and gradually deepening the incision.
"I am always concerned about going too deep, because every client's skin is different," said Kid, who has performed many such procedures.
Keloids, the leathery scars that can develop after skin is injured, is one of the variables, and people with dark skin are more likely to develop them. In scarification, some keloid formation is desirable. But occasionally keloid formation gets out of control.
Dr. Eric Berg, a dermatologist at UW Health, said one patient came to him with keloids growing like kudzu across his back.
"A sunburst pattern cut on his back kept growing for a year after his scarification," he said. "Instead of staying beautiful, if you can call a scar beautiful, it became huge, painful and thick. Cutting it off was not an option because it so large," he said, though laser, cortisone, and scar-reducing pads can be helpful in some cases.
Why do people subject themselves to unnecessary pain and to procedures that would be difficult and expensive to reverse if they have regrets down the road? The reasons are complicated and different for everyone.
"This is how I express myself," explained Jade Lansdowne, a 34-year-old Madison resident and mother of four who has numerous piercings, as well as scarification and branding. "I'm not an artist. I don't paint or anything like that. So I express my creativity with my body."
Dustin King, a jewelry artist and computer geek with facial branding and letters that spell "STAY AWAY" tattooed on his knuckles, says, "I do this to set myself apart. Some people are a little scared of me, so this filters out half the people I wouldn't want to know anyhow. It eliminates people who don't have open minds from my life. Plastic surgery is widely accepted, and that's more hard core than what body modifiers do, so why is there prejudice against us? (Dental) braces are more painful than anything we do, and it's done only for looks. Some people assume that people who look like us are punk degenerate criminals, which is not the case. Or they think we're rock stars."
Kid, who has 14 piercings and numerous tattoos, describes them as "my art collection." His first piercing was done when he was a 15-year- old high school student in Sun Prairie.
"I didn't fit in, and by doing this I set myself aside," he said. "Then I realized that getting pierced and tattooed was good for me."
Many of his tattoos have emotional significance to him, and they include the name of his 9-year-old son, the names or initials of loved ones who passed away, and the image of his personal hero Fakir Musafer, who founded the "Modern Primitive" body modification movement that links flesh and spirit.
"Body modification has been going on for thousands of years, and it's a primal urge," he said.
Kid points out that the necks of women in certain tribes were stretched so they'd look beautiful and sexy only to men of their own group. Members of other tribes believed their bodies looked raw and unfinished without modifications, and certain tribes in Cameroon believed their scars were the only thing that distinguished them from pigs and chimps.
Some Africans modified their bodies to avoid enslavement. "Europeans didn't want slaves with body modifications," Kid said.
The first body piercing Kid performed on a woman was on the one-year anniversary of the date she was raped.
"It was her way of reclaiming her body. For a lot of women, body modification is a form of rebellion and self- transformation in patriarchal cultures," Kid said. The demand for piercings spikes during finals week at UW- Madison, Kid said.
"It's stress relief, fighting fire with fire. Some people like the pain," Kid said. He estimates that on an average day, seven to 10 piercings are done at Blue Lotus, but it jumps to 20 or more some days.
But Kid, 29, is well aware that his passion for body modification has caused problems for him.
"I wanted to ask my girlfriend to marry me, and before I did that I asked her parents for their blessing. They couldn't give it," he said, with sadness in his voice. "I want to do it the right way. I don't want to marry her without their blessing. They think I'm nice and they like me, so I'm sure it was because of the way I look. Sometimes I forget how people react to the way I look. I shouldn't, but I do."
He would also like to go into a medical profession at some point, and knows his appearance could close a lot of doors for him.
"I'm willing to compromise," he said. "But only to a certain point."
This is a little beyond getting a tattoo, IMHO.
Provided they live that long....
I suppose this is one way to get noticed if you have nothing else to offer the world besides your existence.
I find that these people are more often than not the kind of people who commonly refuse to engage in my personal form of body modification: going for a jog every once in a while, or doing a few crunches here and there.
Sick sick sick.
Call me a sexist, but will never cease to be amazed at the amount of pain, suffering and humiliation females will undergo in order to fit in with the crowd - no matter how disfigured the crowd is attempting to get. Males aren't exempt of course.
The female form is infinitely beautiful and one of the most obvious signs of divine creation - to despoil it with ink, barnyard appliances and three-dimensional objects is a crime against aesthetics and a pathetic display of conformism.
Far from "reclaiming one's body," it is an outward and often permanent sign that one is insecure in their own skin (literally) and would rather deal with the simplicities of self-inflicted pain rather than working out complex feelings and emotions.
I sure can't understand why anybody would want to have implants in their eyeballs, not to mention foreign objects placed under their skin.
I've also seen pictures of people who have modified themselves to look like vampires and such - creepy.
I know a young guy who had a post put through his chest and it will have to be surgically removed because the skin has grown around it, forming a tunnel. He has to clean it daily, and it can still become infected. He definitely has issues, but is a really nice kid. Very low self-esteem, which seems common.
"...new extremes such as scarification by cutting or branding, and decorative objects implanted under skin, or even in the whites of eyes."
I don't understand this desire for self-mutilation. I have a couple of tattoos but I think this is going too far.
I hope these kids realize that the body doesn't stay healthy for ever.
Some Africans modified their bodies to avoid enslavement. "Europeans didn't want slaves with body modifications," Kid said.
Wrong, they did this to identify which tribe they were from!
This is a little beyond getting a tattoo, IMHO.
Yes it does.....
I missed a tattoo post? Wow, where was I?
These people are totally self-obsessed and obviously have nothing better to do with their time than think about bizarre things they can do which (they hope) will gross out the rest of us. Maybe they should get a life and then they could stop making stretching their ear-lobe holes the center of their day.
Sorry.
Those places that "parents don't want to think about" wouldn't be genital piercings, would they?
You have to be 18 to get pierced (legally) or at least escorted by a parent. So who is mutilating their kid's genitals?
Stripper mommy family values.
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