Modern Primitives Make A Point About Our Times

Jul 25, 1995

John Leo

The days when body-piercers could draw stares by wearing multiple earrings and a nose stud are long gone. We are now in the late baroque phase of self-penetration. Metal rings and bars hang from eyebrows, noses, nipples, lips, chins, cheeks, navels and (for that coveted neo-Frankenstein look) from the side of the neck.

"If it sticks out, pierce it" is the motto, and so they do, with special attention to genitals. Some of the same middle-class folks who decry genital mutilation in Africa are paying to have needles driven through the scrotum, the labia, the clitoris, or the head or the shaft of the penis. Many genital piercings have their own names, such as the ampallang or the Prince Albert. (Don't ask.)

And in most cases, the body heals without damage, though some women who have had their nipples pierced report damage to the breast's milk ducts, and some men who have been Prince Albert-ed no longer urinate in quite the same way.

What is going on here? Well, the mainstreaming-of-deviancy thesis naturally springs to mind. The piercing of nipples and genitals arose in the homosexual sadomasochistic culture of the West Coast. The Gauntlet, founded in Los Angeles in 1975 mostly to do master and slave piercing, now has three shops around the country that are about as controversial as Elizabeth Arden salons. Rumbling through the biker culture and punk, piercing gradually shed its outlaw image and was mass-marketed to the impressionable by music

videos, rock stars and models. The Gauntlet says business has doubled every year for the past three years.

The nasty, aggressive edge of piercing is still there, but now it is coated in happy talk (it's just body decoration, like any other) and a New Age-y rationale (we are becoming more centered, reclaiming our bodies in an anti-body culture). Various new pagans, witches and New Agers see piercing as symbolic of unspecified spiritual transformation. One way or another, as Guy Trebay writes in The Village Voice, "You will never find anyone on the piercing scene who thinks of what he's doing as pathological."

The yearning to irritate parents and shock the middle class seems to rank high as a motive for getting punctured repeatedly. Some ask for dramatic piercings to enhance sexual pleasure, to seem daring or fashionable, to express rage, or to forge a group identity. Some think of it as an ordeal that serves as a rite of passage, like the Plains Indians' Sun Dance ritual, in which males were suspended from hooks in their chests.

Piercing is part of the broader "body-modification" movement, which includes tattooing, corsetry, branding and scarring by knife. It's a sign of the times that the more bizarre expressions of this movement keep pushing into the mainstream. The current issue of Spin magazine features a hair-raising photo of a woman carving little rivers of blood into another woman's back. "Piercing is like tooth brushing now," one of the cutters told Spin. "It's why cutting is becoming popular." One of the cutters has a bland justification for back-slicing: People want to be cut "for adornment, or as a test of endurance, or as a sacrifice toward a transformation." Later on we read that "women are reclaiming their bodies from a culture that has commodified starvation and faux sex." One cuttee says: "It creates intimacy. My scars are emotional centers, signs of a life lived."

But most of us achieve intimacy, or at least search for it, without a knife in hand. The truth seems to be that the sadomasochistic instinct is being repositioned to look spiritually high-toned. Many people have found that S&M play "is a way of opening up the body-spirit connection," the high priest of the body-modification movement, Fakir Musafar, said in one interview.

Musafar, who has corseted his waist down to 19 inches and mortified his flesh with all kinds of blades, hooks and pins, calls the mostly twentyish people in the body-modification movement "the modern primitives." This is another side of the movement: the conscious attempt to repudiate Western norms and values by adopting the marks and rings of primitive cultures.

Not everyone who pierces a nipple or wears a tongue stud is buying into this, but something like a new primitivism seems to be emerging in body modification as in other areas of American life. It plugs into a wider dissatisfaction with traditional Western rationality, logic and sexual norms, as well as anger at the impact of Western technology on the natural environment, and anger at the state of American political and social life.

Two sympathetic analysts say this about the body-modification movement: "Amid an almost universal feeling of powerlessness to `change the world,' individuals are changing what they have power over: their own bodies . . . By giving visible expression to unknown desires and latent obsessions welling up from within, individuals can provoke change."

Probably not. Cultural crises can't really be dealt with by letting loose our personal obsessions and marking up our bodies. But the rapid spread of this movement is yet another sign that the crisis is here.

John Leo's column appears Tuesday on editorial pages of The Times.