The Lizardman’s 2004 Year in Review [The Lizardman]

Posted on January 13, 2005 by BME

The Lizardman’s

2004 Year in Review

Let the egoism continue! Once again, here is a review of the past year from the perspective of The Lizardman. Now, I’m not trying to apologize for my shameless self-involvement but this time around I have tried to include some more general references of note as well. Enjoy the linkfest.

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January

Some things never seem to change (substantially). When I was writing the 2003 version of this column a year ago I had a small stack of books and pc games I was working through surrounding me.

As I sit here doing this one, I have a similar Christmas booty in front of me. January 2004 saw me off to a good start on the year. Shannon was kind enough to make my IAM page more open to the general public. I began a series of sideshow personality interviews beginning with my good friend The Amazing Blazing Tyler Fyre. I was filmed by MTV and National Geographic. I got one of now favorite and most beloved gadgets – the Treo 600. And perhaps most notably from a performance body modification perspective I once again worked at the AMJAM Tattoo Expo during which I had my lips tattooed.

February

This was the month of the nipple piercing – thank you Miss Jackson! When I get to nipple on broadcast TV and a pierced nipple at that, I simply cannot contain myself. My feelings became expressed in a BME column, of course, and not surprisingly were far more enthusiastic than those of the popular press. February also saw this story on magnetic implants, a good month for modification. For my own mods I experimented with Kaos’s new silicone eyelets to stretch my septum. The results were positive except that after stretching with their eyelets I got my septum to a size where the only jewelry I could wear were the eyelets since non-squish-able jewelry over half an inch won’t fit up my nostril to be inserted into the piercing. Ultimately, I went back to a half inch for the jewelry options. Show wise, I made an appearance at Godsmack’s Grammy Party in LA, did a three day run in El Paso and Las Cruces (selling out and setting an attendance record for one of the rooms), and confirmed our spot on the Spring Jager Tour with Slipknot.

March

I moved to Texas but I didn’t escape the cold. March saw me drawn back up north for a small show at the bar in Albany where I used to work (now under new management and ownership) and a trip to Stratton, VT for the US Snowboard Open as an award presenter for Sobe. I also made a trip out to San Francisco to appear on Unscrewed. Back home in Austin, my wife became one of the new Satan’s Cheerleaders.

At the end of the month I left for the Spring Jagermeister Music Tour but not before getting
my fingertips tattooed.

April

All of this month and half of May were spent on the road as the host of the Jagermeister Music Tour. This was one of the best tours I have ever had the honor of being part of and stands out as one of the great experiences of my life.

May

After returning from tour I took easy for a couple weeks before heading up to Detroit for the Inkslinger’s Convention. More noteworthy for the month were the ocular modifications appearing on BME like the stories on eyelid piercing and eye implants.

June

Ronald Reagan died this month; my feelings about him are pretty well summed up in the Ramones’ song: Bonzo goes to Bitburg. It was good month for promotion. A number of TV shows I shot for were aired and I received the first shipment of Jagermeister sponsored gear: shot glasses & lighters. This was also the month that I celebrated my 32^nd birthday and got my ears tattooed.

July

Start of a month with BMEfest and its pretty much all downhill from there. That is, unless you are buying a house. This was the month that Meghan and I found and put in our offer on what would become our home.

August

Things got busy fast in August. Meghan and I closed on our new house, which meant moving. All the while I was spending 4 days or more a week in Dallas as a guest performer with the Brothers Grim Sideshow. I also went out to the Navajo Nation and performed at Window Rock fest. I believe I may have set a record this month, as well, when I pulled my car with my stretched earlobes for an audition tape – I didn’t get the part though, for being too extreme.

September

I continued to split my time for the first half of the month between Dallas at the sideshow and home in Austin. While home there was moving, unpacking, and renovations to be done. In Dallas we not only performed but also filmed with Discovery – a series of vignettes for a number of programs that should air in 2005. I also got a little tattoo work done. A short trip north was made for the Boston Tattoo Convention during which MTV finally decided to air our wedding (without letting us know).

October

The month for me began with a new round of debating and interviewing over tongue splitting legislation. This time it was in New York. It behooves us all to stay abreast of what is being done legislatively – even in states other than our own. I got a little more green fill done this month but the mod I remember most, if you want to call it that, was a serious ear cleaning. I had a sudden wax buildup that nearly deafened me and needed to be removed by a doctor. With the Fall Jagermeister Tour not starting till the end of the month I only had one show to do (Theo’s in Corpus Christi) and passed the rest of the time mostly relaxing at home and learning to program
pocketc.

November

Another national tour! We hit the road with Jagermeister once again. While on tour Meghan and I celebrated our one year wedding anniversary.

December

I didn’t get back from the jager tour with Slayer till over half way through the month and then it was all holidays. While not much happened modification-wise for me personally, there was this story on BME about pierced eyeglasses and, of course, the ten year mark for BME.

* * *

There you have it. I promise some more substantive columns soon but for those looking for more year end nostalgia why not try here.

Erik Sprague

because the world NEEDS freaks…

Former doctoral candidate and philosophy degree holder Erik Sprague, the Lizardman (iam), is known around the world for his amazing transformation from man to lizard as well as his modern sideshow performance art. Need I say more?

Copyright © 2005 BMEzine.com LLC and Erik Sprague / The Lizardman. Requests to republish must be confirmed in writing. For bibliographical purposes this article was first published January 13th, 2005 by BMEzine.com LLC in La Paz, BCS, Mexico.

RTFM: Keith Alexander

Posted on January 10, 2005 by Jordan Ginsberg

“Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Keith Alexander’s presence in the body modification community has been felt for nearly fifteen years now, both online and in the physical realm; from rabblerousing on USENET to organizing events such as 1998’s promotional party for Dee Snider’s film Strangeland — dubbed the Night of 1000 Scars — on which Keith served and is credited as the Bodyart and Fetish consultant. If one were to throw a penny in the air at any BME event, it’s almost a certainty that they’d hit someone who has either been offended by Keith, learned something from him, or in all likelihood, both.

Currently a technologist in the interactive world, Keith has done piercing and scarification work out of Gauntlet, his own Modern American Bodyarts studio and others, as well as toured as a guitarist for Dee Snider’s SMF — an intimidating range of experience to be sure. Factor in an ostensibly brash, sarcastic personality, and a conversation with Keith can seem like a complex waiting to happen — and to the weak of heart, it may very well be; he is an educator though, and maintains that even the worst of his ball-breaking comes with a message. Continuing his tradition of being in on the ground floor of BME’s new ventures (he was the first person ever interviewed for BME, as well as one of BMERadio’s first phone interviews), Keith recently spoke to BME about being a successful member of the modified workforce, his issues with the term body modification itself, and his reputation for being an abrasive, RTFM-type personality.

* * *

BME: Let’s talk transitions. You’ve, occupation wise, sort of been all over the place from veritable rock star to body artist and now you’re in the corporate world. So generally, how does your past affect you? The corporate world is not really known for being the most accepting of a more liberal lifestyle, and tends to be seen as more of a conservative kind of environment.

KA: You know, the word “corporate” is kind of used in too broad a sense. There are a lot of corporations out there; Modern American Bodyarts was a corporation, so you could say it’s less a matter of what the structure of the business is as far as a legal standpoint and more of what the mindset of the business is. So, I never worked for IBM — I interviewed for them and actually, I got a call-back but I had accepted a position before them. It’s really… you’re just talking about physical aspects?

BME: Well, physical, and as well, some people may see that, well, this guy was a touring musician and then he cut people for a living for a couple years.

KA: I’ve always said I have more balls than brains, and my enthusiasm has always carried me through. One job I got in the interactive industry, the woman who hired me, after she hired me she said, “Oh, by the way, I just want you to know, I was on one of your sites today,” and I thought, “Oh no, shit!”

BME: [Laughs]

KA: I said, “Which one?” And she said “Modern American,” you know and she said, “and the first picture I saw was of a pierced penis, and that was my introduction to you.” And she still hired me. So it’s really … I hear so many people just whining about, “My quote-unquote mods keep me out of jobs,” and I really don’t buy into that. If you have a full facial tattoo and you got it when you were sixteen and it’s shitty art, then maybe that is working against you, but I don’t have much sympathy for you. So again, I’ve never really had a problem, it’s always just a matter of setting the goal and going for it. I’ve counseled and helped so many of my friends with going through transitions like that because I’ve done it so many times, and the advice that I give them is to just pick what you want to do and go for it.

Corporate

Koiporate

BME: And I think there is a trend these days for a lot of younger people getting heavy work done without really thinking it through and then a couple of years later they’re trying to get a job in the workforce and going, “Well, what the fuck happened?” And a lot of these people I find can be very holier-than-thou about it, to say, “I had this work done and in spite of that, you have to hire me,” and it can be a dangerous thing.

KA: It’s such bullshit, because the bottom line is if you can do the job, and your resumé and experience and so on carry you through, people will be willing to overlook a certain amount of work. But if you have a certain amount of work and you aren’t good enough, then what do we need, affirmative action for people with facial tattoos?

BME: Oh exactly, I think it can be used as an excuse—

KA: Right, and it often is. I think 99% of the time it’s an excuse, and I think there’s some serious emo component to it — whiny personality types, sometimes over-medicated, they’re obsessed with the meds that they’re taking; I’ve met more tattooed assholes than not-tattooed assholes.

BME: Right. But there are probably more assholes in general than not-assholes.

KA: [Laughs] Yeah, but you know, back to the transition bit, I’ve… I’ve done so much, like when I was fourteen I was working on Wall Street. My dad was a bit of a big shot on Wall Street and also a bit of a musician, so I think I kind of get it genetically because he had a foot in both worlds as well, as did my mom. But you know, I was working on Wall Street from when I was fourteen to eighteen; I worked at 2001 Odyssey, I was a DJ there in the height of disco fever — that’s where they filmed Saturday Night Fever — so I’ve always found myself right before these trends, for lack of a better term. I’ve always found myself in a bit of a position to help push them along a little bit. So it’s almost just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. And to use a bit of a cliché, a Joseph Campbell riff, it really is about following your bliss, it’s about identifying what gets you hard and going for it.

BME: Now, do you think as years progress, obviously today a higher percentage of people have at least visible work done than they did ten years ago—

KA: True.

BME: And do you think another ten, fifteen years from now, will corporate worlds and business worlds have to start making concessions and acknowledging that there’s a critical mass and that the potential workforce is overwhelmingly modified?

KA: Oh, I think so for sure. I mean, just generationally — the older generations dying off and the younger generations coming up, and the majority of them have work. But, we overuse the word “modification” a bit too much too. It’s one thing to have a tattoo on your arm, but it’s another thing to have your ears stretched up to three inches and a labret at triple-zero gauge. So, look, we’ve reached critical mass as far as public awareness goes: Everybody knows there’s people like us and people crazier than us doing these things. So, they’re aware of it, it’s just a matter of your resumé and experience being able to back it up. I don’t think that, given the choice between a person who is somewhat qualified and not pierced or tattooed and a person who is extremely qualified and pierced and tattooed, I think that the business environment is such these days that you have to make the right choice to go for the person that’s best for the job, visible work or not.

BME: [Agrees] And as far as what you were saying before, about an eyebrow piercing or whatever being different from a facial tattoo or a sleeve, even — I know that you take issue with the term “body modification” to an extent and have even done workshops on it, so is body modification something that is more of a permanent thing?

KA: Well, the whole point of that workshop is to get people to admit that there really are no answers. I mean, I certainly have a bias, but I acknowledge — I can step back and say, well maybe it’s not everything to everybody, and it’s nothing to everybody, there’s no right or wrong. My beef with that word is when people who just have a tattoo say, “Check out my mod.” It annoys me. It annoys me from a standpoint of, they’re co-opting, I hate to use that term, they’re identifying with a subculture that they’re not a part of. You’re a tattooed person — you have a tattoo. Is it a modification? Sure, we can split hairs and say it absolutely is, you’ve modified your body, definitely. But … it’s a tattoo. You know? It’s not a modification, it’s a fucking tattoo. Your eyebrow piercing is an eyebrow piercing — it’s a piercing. Those things taken together, you’re pierced, you’re tattooed, and somewhere along the line somebody came up with the term “body modification,” and, boom! People took to it like the trendoids that most people are. So I have a problem when people say, “Oh, check out my mod,” when they could just as easily say, “Hey, check out my tattoo,” and they wouldn’t be revealing that trendiness. It’s almost like a signifier when somebody says to me, “Check out my mod” and they show me their PA, it tells me that they got their PA to be part of something that didn’t come from inside them. Personally, if you’ve got a PA, just say, “Check out my PA.”

BME: So for you, body modification would be more, like, look at Erik Sprague or Cat, who actually undergo an overall body modification?

KA: If pushed for an answer, I would say that body modifications are amputations, you know, things that are out of the norm. A branding, a cutting, a piercing or a tattoo, to split hairs, are modifications, but to me they’re just brandings, cuttings, tattoos and piercings. It’s the stuff that falls outside of that that’s a modification. And there’s definitely a bias there, it’s somewhat naïve, and I realize, I’ve argued for hours with people about these things and facilitated those workshops for many hours and I’ve realized that my point of view is narrow. [Laughs] It’s definitely narrow. But I’m not trying to be part of anything. Anything that I’ve done or gotten into, I’m into because I’m into it! I’m not into it because I want to be a part of something. I didn’t start riding bikes like I do now because I want to hang out with the racers; I’m riding bikes because it satisfies a need in me. So people that look to without for satisfaction are people that, number one, I feel sorry for and I have a certain amount of contempt for. I’m sort of like the exact opposite of Shannon, where Shannon will be very nurturing and try to help people and show them the right way; right away, I’m on the defensive and I don’t want anything to do with somebody who has what is in my opinion the wrong motivation.

BME: Well, I suppose if you’ve spent enough time in the community, in any community, you can find yourself on either end of the spectrum. You can be a Shannon type where you are open to just about everything and you want everyone to experience everything to the fullest and love it, or you can be more like you and, like you said, immediately skeptical and—

KA: [Agrees] But on the other hand, I’m extremely compassionate to the people that have, what is in my, again, narrow point of view, the right motivation. To get a piercing from me, or to get any work from me, not just these days but for a while now, you go through, like, an interview process in a sense via email that most people wouldn’t deal with. When I get emails, I just reply to 90% of them, “Sorry, I’m a little bit too busy to do it,” but the other ten percent, I’ll ask them, you know, “Why do you want this?” or, “What is it you’re doing this for?” And I just did some piercings in an S&M situation, and the guy was kind of a little upset that I was talking right to the girl, because the dynamic is the master/slave thing. I don’t give a shit what you guys do outside of here, and I understand the dynamic, but I’m touching her, not you, so why don’t you just wait over there while I talk to her? To ascertain that she wants it for herself. So I’ve always been very … look, it’s karma! And if I’m doing something to somebody who doesn’t want it, that’s on me. So it’s in my best interests to really ascertain the reasoning behind the motivation.

BME: People have to understand that there are lifestyle decisions that people make, but at the same time, when you are bringing someone else into that, you have to be—

KA: Yeah. And most people are. Like, I get called an elitist and I want to argue with that, but it’s really not hitting the nail on the head. It’s more of, I’m so protective of my karma; I mean, coming from somebody who just breaks balls mercilessly—

BME: [Laughs]

KA: But I’m still … I would say there’s almost always a lesson in my ball-breaking, that I’m doing some form of teaching in that. I know it sounds really weird to somebody who might be on the receiving end of it, but my motivations are almost always coming from a good place.

BME: That’s what my observation is. From, say, RAB [USENET’s rec.arts.bodyart], or on IRC channels or even in IAM forums, you do very much have a “read the fucking manual” personality to you, but if anyone takes a second look at it, you’re obviously speaking from experience. You know that information is out there.

KA: Look, I’m getting into skiing now, so I know that I’m going to ask a few questions in a few forums that are definitely, you know, “read the fucking manual”-esque, but I am going to Google for it and I have started the educational process. But, when I see people who are so blatantly, didn’t even Google the keyword once, that tells me more about them than anything else. Granted, I speak of karma, I should really just, move along, move along, but there’s something in me that feels it’s of value to say to somebody, “What the fuck?” There’s definitely some value in kind of like, slapping somebody awake a little bit like, hey, if they’re not asking these questions on their own, they’re not asking questions in life.

BME: And you are an educator; you do teach classes, you do these sorts of workshops and there are different types of teachers. There are some who will just be very nurturing to the slowest kid in the class and hold everyone else back, or ones who say, you know, you’re not an idiot, as much as you’re making it look like — you can do things on your own.

KA: Absolutely. I mean, that’s the thing I love about digital communication! That like, Google is a cut and paste away. My biggest beef online is, well, among many of them, is when people say, “What should my next piercing be?” That blows me away. Words fail me when I see those kinds of questions. And at times I wish I was a bigger person and I would just say fuck it, you know, move on, and I usually do — I don’t go for all the low-hanging fruit. But every now and then there’s a personality that I really just need to connect with for whatever reason.

BME: And people can see that as you being an asshole, but if you think about it for a second, it’s really you being more compassionate and not holding this person’s hand and saying, you know, “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine—”

KA: Exactly, and I’m really glad you see that, because it’s funny, on RAB or IRC, more IRC because it’s real-time, the majority of people at first blush hate me, and then as they stick around or observe me a little bit more, they see that there’s a method to the madness. And I see it happen every day. I see people that the day before were saying, “What a dick,” are now saying, “You know, he’s right, listen to him.” Like, there’s a few women on IRC — they’re kind of young — and I’m very straight with them whereas most people would be, “Oh, don’t worry, it’s okay,” I’ll give them the link to read the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. You know, when somebody’s just whining about wanting their boyfriend’s company, all suffering comes from desire, so I’ll paste that. And if they ignore it, well, you’re happy being miserable. And then all bets are off and now you’re fair game. BME is supposed to be very much a safe place, and I agree with that, but the world is not a safe place, and I’m not evil at the root of it, but I’m definitely a little… me and some people don’t really get along. And I think it’s really important that when a person is ready to walk, you let them walk. You can’t walk behind them with a fuckin’ mattress everywhere they go.

BME: No, absolutely not. And you have to draw a line between compassion and just being realistic. There is too much sensitivity and political correctness as of late; everyone needs the chance, everyone needs a voice — well, they do, but you’re not entitled to [respect] just because you’re breathing.

KA: Right, exactly. That’s a great point. And that’s something that I really see come to the fore in digital communications — there’s a lot of noise out there, and one of the reasons that I’ve made the in-roads that I have over the years is because the choice of words I use are generally… I’ll answer a question with one sentence whereas other people will go on for like three fuckin’ paragraphs and say the same thing, if they even answer the question at all. So I’m kind of lucky in the sense that I know how to interact online, and a lot of people don’t, so they get frustrated and right away, you know, I’m an asshole or you’re an asshole or whoever’s an asshole. Instead of taking the time and lurking a little bit and seeing how things can be worked most effectively, they foam at the mouth and… and that’s when the fun really starts. [And] I know that there’s a living person on the other end of the computer screen, but at the same time, it’s still just text. So, like, on RAB in particular, especially with certain people whose names I don’t even want to mention, I will call names, but to me it’s almost like poetry, to say “Hey, cocksucker” is the same thing as saying “Hey, [your name],” you know?

BME: [Laughs] No, I know what you mean, and it really just comes back to this, I forget who it was, I think it was… it was a Bill Maher comedy special and he went on about the pussification of America—

KA: Right, totally.

BME: And I mean, I’m not saying we need chauvinists and people just berating others for the sake of it, but people are being babied by this culture a lot, and whether it’s telling someone in a boardroom that their idea is stupid and flawed or telling someone who comes into a piercing shop and saying, you know what, maybe this isn’t for you—

KA: Exactly. What’s the word, the feminization of America. Guys aren’t allowed to be guys — you know, there are a lot of masculine traits that are bad. I truly believe that the reason we have so much war and all these things is because of testosterone, you know, but we are definitely not allowed to express ourselves that way. I talk with my girlfriend a lot about that I curse a lot. And to me it’s just a matter of, it makes the language more colorful, it adds emphasis. So you know, I say “God damn it motherfucker!” — that says as much as saying “Oh wow, it’s really a drag that I, you know, whatever.” I remember when I was a kid, Dee Snider — I would see him when I was really young, like fourteen or fifteen, and I read an interview with him and he was asked why he curses so much, and he said, “Have you ever talked to cops or firemen? You know, people curse. And when I’m onstage, I’m talking to my friends, and people curse to their friends. So, I curse onstage like a fireman or a cop would talk at a bar; we’re all friends here, so I feel comfortable enough to curse.”

BME: And on your personal website, I read one article you linked to that basically just said that there are no bad words.

KA: Well, that was, uh, I used a bad word at work, and I got called on it. The fucked-up thing about it was when I said it there was nobody around me, nobody was in the fuckin’ room. Someone was outside the room and I said it loud enough that they heard it, and they reported me two months after I said it in response to me calling them out on something, and the next day I get called down and it’s like “Holy crap!” I was laughing, I couldn’t believe it! I was just like, blown away, like, “Yeah, I remember saying that word but I know there was nobody around and I know the way I said it” — I said cunt. [In my office] I totally broke down and was like “Fucking cunt!” and you know, I didn’t call anybody a cunt! It was just hilarious. It’s just a fucking word.

BME: And especially that word in particular has such a stigma to it with some people. Now, abruptly switching topics and to backtrack a little, you mentioned doing piercings in an S&M situation a little while ago, and being that you are in the quote-unquote corporate world these days, what is your current relation from a business standpoint or a practitioner’s standpoint to body modification, if you want to call it that? I know that it’s appointments only—

KA: Yeah, and that’s basically it. First of all, you have to be intriguing. If you just write to me and say, “I want a guiche, how much?” I’m not going to do it. But if you write to me and say, “You know, I’ve been doing some research online, and your name came up a couple of times, and you seem like you’re gay-friendly, and I’ve been thinking about a guiche but I ride bikes a lot, and I don’t know if it’s the right thing for me,” I’m going to send you my phone number. But, you know, “I want a PA, how much? Does it hurt?” We’re not going to work. There’s a great little studio up here that I use when somebody does intrigue me enough that I want to work on them, but to be totally honest, I really miss my shop. You know, we opened up in ’96, and it was really just Gauntlet, Venus, and us, there was nobody else, and I was the first one in Brooklyn. If you talk to anyone who was in my shop, it was really magical; the colors that we chose, the music that we played, every single [thing]. It was a small place, only like four hundred square feet, but every little thing had so much thought and love put into it, that you would walk in off this pretty gnarly street in Brooklyn and people just go “Holy crap! This is like an oasis!” So I miss having that, because now when I go work in somebody else’s shop, you know, they’re very respectful and they let me do whatever I need to do as far as music and lighting and so on, but it’s just never going to be the same — it’s just not the same place. So part of me really wants to find a partner, maybe a jewelry-maker; I’m not too hip on a tattoo artist because I don’t like the noise of the machine going all the time, but I would love to find somebody where I could open up a small little space and just maintain that environment the way I’d want it to be. But it’s not going to happen any time soon.

BME: Now, what initially caused you to move away from it? Was it a business thing, or—?

KA: No, I got so into the Internet. I mean, www.modernamerican.com just did unbelievable things for my reputation — not even my reputation with clients, but my reputation with the press. I was getting, you know, a dozen calls a week to be on talk shows all over the world, there were more interviews than I ever could have imagined, and I thought, this is all because of my website — because that’s how they’d find you! So what I did is, I think in ’98 I made the decision to start phasing it out and start looking for a job in the interactive industry. My dad would come into the shop and take appointments for me, and I would spend less time in the shop and more time over at Fox, Rupert Murdoch’s organization, in digital publishing. I took an internship over there, and at thirty-five years old I beat out all these college kids for this internship — it was my enthusiasm; I really saw the future, and I still see the future of what digital communication is going to be. So I was really lucky in that I got that job, and as time went on I just realized — it’s funny, because I also quit Dee’s band on the eve, the proverbial eve that they were leaving for Spain and Italy, to stay at Fox. And everybody at Fox was like, “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re not going to Spain with Dee Snider to play Twisted Sister music because you want to be an intern at Fox?” And I told them that at the time, and still to this day, that was as exciting to me as playing in front of 20,000 people. The ability to FTP into a server in Australia still gives me goosebumps. Like, I cannot believe the magic of this whole sphere.

BME: And it’s different for someone like you because younger kids these days, they’re growing up and they know the Internet and digital communications from day one, whereas someone who’s been around and can see the progression from a computer that you could, you know, house a family of four in, to—

KA: [Laughs] Exactly, right. So it’ll be interesting to see what turns those kids on. And what I think it’s coming full circle to is that at the end of the day it’s really about what you have to say. The technology itself should always be transparent; unfortunately most of the time it’s not transparent, it’s broken or it’s too big or whatever, but it’s going to get to the point where it’s so transparent you can’t even see it, and all that’s going to count is what the headline is, what it is that grabs this person’s attention. So it’s a cliché, but it’s really about the content.

BME: And just to backtrack once again, obviously you were at Gauntlet and then you had Modern American but from a practitioner’s perspective, you’ve seen the community expand and become so saturated and to open up a shop like you said, you would like to get a partner — opening up a shop these days could be a very hit-or-miss endeavor and enterprise. Would that be a concern, or do you think that your history and your work would speak for itself?

KA: You know, it speaks for itself. I mean, without sounding like a totally conceited asshole, I get a dozen requests a day. I mean, the work is there for me, it’s just a matter of do I want to take it on. I mean, it wouldn’t be a street-level shop, that’s for sure; it’d be appointment only. And there are requests coming though — I wish I was getting the requests back then that I get now. I even have form letters at this point that I send out to turn people down — I cannot believe the amount of requests for piercings that I get, so no, I wouldn’t be too worried about that.

BME: Okay, because I know that locally for me, even Tom Brazda just recently had to close down Stainless Studios and again he moved it to just a more or less one-man, appointment-only operation. And it wasn’t, I don’t think he was tired of running a business, but the business aspect just wasn’t happening [as a standard shop]. And then, you know, you walk down the street and there’s Jimmy’s Tattoo Emporium and Café—

KA: Oh yeah, that’s one of the things too, is that tattooing was illegal in New York City for a long time — like, ’62 until very recently, I think ’97 — and when they legalized it, all of a sudden, every tattoo shop that opened up threw a piercer [in], so there was definitely a saturation at that level. But you know, I’m definitely kind of like two levels above the average piercer and reach the people that really care about it the majority of the time. I get, certainly 25 to 30% of the requests I get are the usual misspelled, “Will you peirce my naval?” kind of shit. But those are just people who search and randomly come across me, those aren’t the people who really care; the people who care will find me.

BME: These days though, do you think that people who want to be a body piercer or a tattoo artist or do scarification work — it used to be just a labor of love but now you have to be a shrewd businessman to do it as well. You look at guys like Brian Decker (IAM:xPUREx) who do incredible work — but he looks like he’s starving; he just can’t get the clientele and he struggles to make it happen professionally sometimes it seems.

KA: Well, there are a lot of levels going on. What you said in number one was all true, but there are various levels of cause and effect there that make these things happen. Number one, a guy like Brian who’s talented beyond belief — he’s young. At least he appears young. I don’t think he can do it all on his own, I think that’s why he uses Shawn Porter a lot to run interference for him, but me and Brian went at it for a little bit, because to me it’s like, you live and you die alone; if you can’t stand up for yourself and do it for yourself, you know — you just have to be able to! And I don’t think that Shawn, and I love Shawn, you know, I’ve done work on Shawn, Shawn and I go way back. [But] a guy like Brian, he really needs to stand on his own and then I think he might be more aggressive about it. I get requests fairly often, maybe one or two every couple of months saying, “I want to break into the business, I love body modification more than anything else in the world, can you help me?” And I usually write back a little along the lines of how it’s not really a viable career choice, and it’s not. Number one, the market isn’t there; if you take any business classes they give you the example of the hardware store, and you figure out if Town X can support another hardware store based on the population, the median income, and those kinds of things. The chances are, the town that you live in isn’t going to support you as a piercer. So, as a viable career choice for the future, it’s probably not there. Short term, if you want to spend the time and learn, you know, you could make some money but you’re not going to buy a house on it. So it’s really a matter of your goals. Some people are very happy living on rice and beans, and they might say at 25 that they’d be happy doing that at 65, but I think that as you get older, your concept of what success is changes. To me, success was always doing what I wanted to do, so I could die tomorrow and I’d feel extremely successful. But the truth is, I don’t have much money in the bank; I don’t have many assets; my net worth is nowhere near what it should be — but I consider myself extremely successful. So if this person who is eating rice and beans and opened up a small piercing shop but truly loves it, that to me is the lynchpin, the fulcrum; if you’re just getting into it because you think it’s cool, fuck you. If you’re getting into it because you think you’ll make some money, fuck you as well. But if you’re getting into it and learning it because you love it, you know, more power to you, and those are the kinds of people that I help, and it’s relatively often.

BME: I think that when someone is very new to this and all of a sudden they find BME or they find spc.Online or whatever and all of a sudden it’s this whole new world that they’ve never known before, it’s very romantic at first—

KA: [Agrees]

BME: I know that I, me personally, after going to hacks and verifiable psychopaths for my first piercings I eventually became friends with Blair, and—

KA: Blair is probably the best in the world—

BME: Exactly, and spending time with him and actually developing something of a friendship with him… it’s very romantic to want to do this for a living and be as content as Blair, you know, who wouldn’t want that?

KA: Blair is the exception.

BME: Exactly. It’s a very different… that’s Blair’s personality.

KA: And why do you think he’s so successful? He loves it so much, he kicks ass at it. If you get into it and you’re not as passionate as he is, or as I was back in the day, or Tom for that matter, you know, you’re doomed to failure, or you’re doomed to mediocrity at the very best.

BME: And even Blair — he worked at a host of different shops before he eventually bought Passage with a partner, which is in the heart of Toronto’s gay community. So he gets lots of business, but he even had to institute a pervert tax, essentially—

KA: [Laughs]

BME: Because guys would come in and they would book consultations with him and hit on him the whole time, or drop their pants and be like, “Well, how do you like this?” So he raised his prices dramatically for that sort of thing. But if someone came in and they were obviously with it and weren’t going to sexually harass him on the job, they wouldn’t necessarily be “taxed”. [But] a lot of people aren’t in that position to be able to make concessions like that and be like, “Well, you’re sort of a dick. I’ll pierce you, but I’m not going to talk to you afterwards, but you know, here’s an apadravya for two hundred dollars.” I’m exaggerating, but—

KA: Yeah, that’s one of the problems I had; I would charge the same for PA as I would for a nipple, and I’m not saying that Blair does this but I’ve seen a lot of other piercers that will charge like three times the amount for a genital piercing! Like, nothing could be easier to do than a scrotal piercing — it’s the same thing as doing a fucking earlobe, basically, but you’re charging three times as much. It never made sense to me, but I can totally relate to what he’s saying. I’ve had it happen to me a shitload of times at Gauntlet, and at that time I wasn’t half as comfortable with sexuality as I am now. You know, I’ll never forget the first time I did a PA — it freaked me out! I had never touched anybody’s dick other than my own, and I was like holy crap, that was the weirdest thing I’d ever done! I did it, I aced it, I was psyched about it, but it was like, wow, that’s bizarre. And you know, there was definitely a pervert community [laughs] that gets off on piercers like that.

BME: And I think that some people who want to get into the business, they don’t take into account that they may not be as comfortable with other peoples’ bodies as they are with their own. And you know, you’re a piercer and all of a sudden a 300 pound woman walks in who wants a hood piercing, and are you going to be able to handle that sort of thing?

KA: Totally.

BME: Still, I talked to Blair, I hung out at his shop for days on end, and there were very minor rumblings of apprenticeship, and after a while I was like, you know what? Learning the skills would be incredible, but at the same time, as far as an actual profession goes, I don’t know if this is actually for me. And I think that’s where a lot of people get mixed up.

KA: Yep. Well, you know, you’re obviously self-aware, and the majority of the people in this world are not self-aware, and they’ll go whichever way the wind blows or what have you… it’s your personality. Whether or not you’re into the things you’re into or not, it’s your personality that sets your course in life. And if you don’t have the right personality to get what you want, you never will [get what you want], or you’ll just take whatever comes your way.

BME: But you know, at the same time, when I would go and talk to Blair, we would hang out and I’d learn… he’d teach me how to take care of biohazard or how to operate the autoclave, and there were things I learned, but at the end of the day it was not for me. And I think people who romanticize it to the point where they will just get facial tattoos right away or stretch a huge labret—

KA: It’s not a sport, I say that all the time, it’s not a sport. How big can I stretch, how quick? But you used the right word, that’s the perfect word is romanticizing it; you make it seem like something that it’s not. You know, it’s like girls, or anybody for that matter, who want a tongue piercing. I tell them all the time, and they’ll wink like, does it make oral sex better? And my line is, if you can’t give head without it, having it’s not going to help. You know, a PA’s not going to make you a great lover if you weren’t a great lover to begin with; it certainly shows a certain mindset that’s admirable that you’re willing to go to places to make your sex life better, but really it comes down to personality type. The best thing to do is just live your life and lead by example. You know, that’s what I like to do; I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in big presentations, I’ve just given a great presentation, everyone’s just kind of blown away, and then I roll up my sleeves and people are like, “Holy shit, that’s a lot of work,” and you know, I’m totally aware of when I do it, how I do it, why I’m doing it, and so on. So you just have to set an example by the way you live your life.

Whether you’re pierced or not or you’re tattooed or not or whatever it is, you know, because too many people talk, you know how it is, this is how you should do it, this is how you could do it — show me, don’t tell me. And just live your life the way you think it should be lived. And like Blair is doing; he’s living the authentic life, and I feel strongly that I am, and you sound like you are; I know Shannon is, and Shawn for that matter. You have to live an authentic life, and then you’ll be happy. If you’re living an inauthentic life, it’s going to show.

Please consider buying a membership to BME so we can continue bringing you articles like this one.

Being A Modified Jew

Posted on August 19, 2004 by BME

“See, I have engraved You on the palms of my hands”
– Isaiah 49:16

“One shall say, ‘I am the Lord’s,’ and another shall use the name of Jacob, and another shall mark his arm ‘of the Lord’ and adopt the name of Israel.”
– Isaiah 44:5

“I decked you out in finery… I put a ring in your nose, and earrings in your ears…”
– Ezekiel 16:11
See also Exodus 35:22, Numbers 31:50, Judges 8:24, Isaiah 3:21

20040819-1
I fell in love with the art of the tattoo in my early twenties. The choice that I was able to consciously make to beautify my own body was exhilarating. Choosing the placement, selecting the artist and design took research and thought. Seeing the colors and designs come alive on my flesh is intoxicating.

But I am a Jew. How does body modification fit into my life?

The answer is: Beautifully.

20040819-2 Judaism has a long history of distaste for tattoos and piercings. It is my understanding that this stems from the Jewish concept that we are created b’tzelem Elokim (in the image of God) and that our bodies are to be viewed as a precious gift on loan from God, entrusted into our care, but not our personal property to do with as we choose. This distaste grew stronger with the Holocaust and the tattooing that was forced upon the Jews in the prison camps.

Let’s discuss a common misconception:

Can you be buried in a Jewish cemetery and participate in Jewish ritual if you are tattooed or pierced?

20040819-3 It is not prohibited to bury someone who has tattoos or body piercings in a Jewish cemetery. Although the Torah is interpreted by some to prohibit making a permanent tattoo on one’s body, those who violate this prohibition may still be buried in a Jewish cemetery and participate fully in all synagogue ritual.

I asked IAM member RachelG about her experiences with this and she replied with a personal story regarding being buried in a Jewish cemetery with body modifications:

“After an unfortunate tragedy where a close modified friend of mine committed suicide, his family was allowed to bury him in an orthodox Jewish cemetery. He was practically fully suited in tattoos and wore three earrings in each earlobe. At the funeral service I spoke at length with the orthodox rabbi who was performing the service about Jews and body modification. He told me that these misconceptions were not only outdated, but any Jew who believed in them was not following the ways of God. Jews are a very accepting and understanding people. Who are we to judge one for intentionally changing one’s body to fulfill their own desires?”

20040819-5 Deliberate, permanent disfigurement of the body would be prohibited. But such practices as ear piercing and cosmetic surgery (such as elective rhinoplasty) are not prohibited. The purpose of cosmetic surgery is to make the body more beautiful, not to disfigure it. (from torah.org)

Being modified does not prohibit you from participating in Jewish ritual. The fact that someone may have violated the laws of kashrut at some point in his or her life or violated the laws of Shabbat would not merit such sanctions. The widely believed prohibition against tattooing is certainly no worse.

20040819-6 What puzzles and disturbs me is the quote from a rabbi stating that such practices as ear piercing and plastic surgery(1) are not prohibited because they are meant to beautify and not to disfigure. Who is to say that the purpose of my body modifications are not to make the body more beautiful? Is this for a rabbi to decide? I believe that the decision of what makes my body more beautiful is my own. Why is plastic surgery regarded as acceptable and other forms of body modification are not? What about circumcision which is a permanent modification? Who makes those decisions?

20040819-7 Circumcision is also becoming a challenged ritual within Judaism as more and more Jews regard this practice as a social choice. This is a major body modification and disfigurement to a small child that is not given the choice to modify. It is also common practice among non-Jews to circumcise a male newborn penis, and this practice is not specifically Jewish, though it is common practice among Jews specifically. For more information on the complex issue regarding facts and myths of Jewish ritual circumcision, I invite you to visit jewishcircumcision.org. There are many modern changing views concerning the modification of infants without their consent.

20040819-8 For many people, conscious modification has become a way for them to take ownership of the beauty of their own bodies. For a very long time I felt uncomfortable in my own body. I was too fat, too short, my breasts were droopy — I could come up with a list a mile long. I discovered through modification that I loved my own body more when I got to choose what was happening to it. I would not knowingly disfigure my body. I intend to beautify it at my discretion. I am not the only one and I am far from the only modified Jew. By choosing to tattoo my body, I also feel that I am reclaiming this ritual for beauty rather than the hate and disrespect that was the intent of the Nazis forcibly tattooing the Jews during the holocaust.

20040819-9 My Judaism and my body modification go hand in hand for me. They are both part of who I am and how I represent myself. I am a tattooed Jew. I am proud of both of these facets of my life. I am not ashamed to go to Shul and I am not afraid of the questions. What I dislike is the assumption that I am not as good a Jew because of my modifications. I completely disagree. What I dislike is the prejudice my own Jewish people bestow upon me, and others, for choosing to reclaim the ancient art of body modification. This in itself does not convey the Judaism of acceptance that has always been expressed to me in Shul. I believe this inter-judaic prejudice stems from a sociological prejudice thinly veiled by a misunderstood religious excuse.

How did my family react?

20040819-10 My family ignores it. Don’t ask, don’t tell — sound familiar? — but still love and respect me as who I am. My family’s beliefs are those of conservative Jews and I respect them for that. However, I follow more of a Reconstructionist view. Reconstructionists define Judaism as the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people and most Jewish people, including Reconstructionists, no longer accept its binding authority. While Reconstructionists are lovers of tradition and support community celebration of the Jewish sacred year and life-cycle events, we also believe that the face of the Jewish community is changing and that individuals have the right to adapt Jewish tradition to new circumstances. That doesn’t make us any less Jewish than those who live by Conservative or Orthodox law (although there would be plenty of argument within Judaism about this).

20040819-11 I think that the belief that body modification is prohibited by the Torah is antiquated, just as other Biblical laws are (and have thus been adjusted to fit modern times). Judaism is evolving in some sects; no longer do we have to hide what may be seen as “against the Torah” to practice our faith. It is quite a relief to do so. If you choose to practice your faith, there are many ways to do so. When you are dealing with Orthodox, Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative movements, we will not agree on each others interpretation of the Torah.

20040819-12 Body Modification is just as much a part of my life as my faith in Judaism. I believe that my modifications beautify my body and bring joy to my life. They do not take away from my faith in God. My personal practice allows me to be who I am, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Liz Polay-Wettengel

¹ Editor’s note: It should be added that rhinoplasty has been historically a “Jewish” procedure with the goal of masking — publicly destroying — the Jewish identity in the face of bigotry. One could make the argument that tattoos that uplift the Jewish identity are a far better way to serve God than rhinoplasty ever could be.

20040819-biopic Liz Polay-Wettengel (iam:TattooedRedhead) is an executive general manager in Boston Massachusetts where she lives with her husband and two cats. She has a professional background in the music business and writes for several online blogs. Liz has been an active member of the IAM BME community since 2000 and currently runs the membership sponsorship forum and the Jew Crew community forum.

Online presentation copyright © 2004 Shannon Larratt, Liz Polay-Wettengel, and BMEzine.com. Requests to republish must be confirmed in writing. For bibliographical purposes this article was first published online August 19th, 2004 by BMEZINE.COM in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

AMPUTEE ART – The BME Cultural Corner

Posted on December 17, 2003 by BME

Amputee Art

Our masters (the spirits) keep a zealous watch over us, and woe betide us afterwards if we do not satisfy them! We cannot quit it; we cannot cease to practise shamanic rites.

– Shaman quoted by Wenceslas Sieroshevksi, 1896

Welcome to the BME Cultural Corner.

My name is Blake of The Nomad Precision Body Adornment and Tribal Art Museum. This new section of BME/News will focus exclusively on the historical and cultural aspects of bodymod in a traditional context. Personal narratives, stories, articles, rare photos, and new scientific discoveries relating to the endless human need to alter the body will be found here.

In introduction, I am a piercer of fifteen years, museum curator, and self-educated anthropologist. I have also authored a new book (A Brief History of the Evolution of Body Adornment in Western Culture) which is available here on BME. My interests are purely traditional culture — one might call me a conservative democrat, as far as bodymod goes.

The subject of this first article of the Cultural Corner will be amputation — a subject, I admit, I never thought I would be writing about in a historic context. Only lately associated with the bodymod community, and profiled in a recent one-hour Discovery Channel special as well as Shannon’s book Modcon, deliberate amputation is generally misunderstood. It can be said that amputation is not ornamentation (unless you wear a severed digit in your earlobe), more exactly, it is augmentation.

Randomly ask any amputee today about the nature of their “disfigurement” (ignoring all of the social idiums on couth), and expect one of several primary answers — assuming you haven’t pissed them off or trodden on some painful part of their life better left alone.

Our first hypothetical example: A legless man in a wheelchair — mid 50’s — perhaps he lost them on a mine in Vietnam, his “mobility and vitality” stolen from him in his youth by the “enemy”… non-consentually.

Next, an older man (yes, women can be amputees too) missing a forearm and a hand… his whole life haunted by the feeling that with both hands he is incomplete as a person until that appendage is sacrificed. Consumed with a deep, unnameable need to remove part of the anatomy considered essential — perhaps an “accident” with a Skilsaw — and now he is content… an indescribable inner part of himself somehow satiated.

For our third example we turn back the hands of time (no pun intended)… about 30,000 years! The place is a dark cave in Paleolithic Europe. With the entire clan in attendance — spellbound — an elder shaman severs a digit from his hand. Does he hate himself? No. Does he have issues? No. The primitive mind and developing psyche of humanity is consumed wih offerings of magic, sacrifice, the spirit-world, and the animal kingdom, upon which he depends for survival.

Amputated finger tips. Left: 30,000 years old (© Pawel Valde-Nowak), right: 6 years old (from BME’s collection).

What is transpiring in the cave is one of earliest known forms of “religious rite” or spiritual practice and enactment of ritual. In fact, discoveries at Oblazowa, a Paleolithic site in Poland have sparked a huge controversy in the world of prehistoric art. Known to science, yet rare, are hand-stencils on the walls of Paleolithic European caves with missing digits. This “Amputee Art” was previously regarded as examples of illness, accidents or a strange system of communication — until now.

New evidence has unearthed (in the same caves that housed the amputee art): a thumb phalanx, and other human finger bones found in association with shell pendants, stone beads, the perforated teeth of an Arctic fox, a Mammoth tusk boomerang (the oldest boomerang ever found), and other ritual objects. They date to more than 30,000 years ago.

Pawel Valde-Nowak, the scientist who excavated the site believes that this proves that “fingers were amputated in a ceremonial context” and that amputee art gives “depictions of hands (with missing digits) a very particular symbolic meaning”.

Even with our imaginary time-travel, early language, grammar, and syntax prevent the modern mind (if we could ask) from communication with the shaman in the cave. “Why?” we might inquire, yet the ritual context of this ancient amputation lets the scientific mind extrapolate, respect, and appreciate the ceremonial, even religious rite associated with the ancient amputation.

Amputations. Left to right: Performance artist Roger Kaufman who has changed the length of nearly all his fingers and toes (photo: Efrain Gonzalez), healed amputation with original finger tip (photo and model: Jerome Abramovitch), and an “amputation party” in Russia (both photos: BME archives).

With scientific evidence substantiating this new theory, further conjecture will be limited only by lack of further archaeological evidence… in the art world, the controversy will likely continue for decades to come. Now science has established ritual amputation to the earliest days of modern man and dated the practice to Paleolithic times, paralleling the emergence of humanity’s oldest forms of ritualized ornamentation and adornment; piercing and tattooing.

Amputation, drugs, religion, meditation or ritualized body adornment are means by which we may glimpse the divine, or, that which is greater than the sum of our “parts”. These vehicles of transcendental experience are doorways to an ancient state of mind. To borrow a quote from my book, “the ways by which we find release and transcendence as a species are varied, indeed.”

Blake

Blake Perlingieri is a body piercer of fifteen years, a museum curator, and a self-educated anthropologist. He is the author of A Brief History of the Evolution of Body Adornment in Western Culture and can be found online (and offline) at nomadmuseum.com.

Copyright © 2003 BMEzine.com LLC. Requests to republish must be confirmed in writing. For bibliographical purposes this article was first published December 17th, 2003 by BMEzine.com LLC in Tweed, Ontario, Canada.

Who is Jim Ward? [Running The Gauntlet – By Jim Ward]

Posted on August 17, 2003 by BME

1: Who Is Jim Ward?

A recent MTV documentary called me “the granddaddy of thae modern piercing movement”, in case you were wondering who I am. Maybe that gives me sufficient credentials to write a bit every now and then about the history of modern piercing and how it has evolved into what it’s become today. After all I helped create a lot of that history.

Even if you never heard my name before, maybe you’ve heard of the business I started back in 1975 called Gauntlet. That business provided an outlet and a means for me to make the world aware of the wonders of piercing.

In the months to come I’d like to tell you something about your roots. The modern piercing movement didn’t just suddenly happen. It evolved, and part of that evolution started with me. Not that you’re interested in my whole life story, but a little background to put it all in perspective wouldn’t be out of place.

I was born in the bleakness that is Western Oklahoma six months before Pearl Harbor. Looking back on it much of my childhood was just as barren and desolate as the landscape.

I couldn’t wait to escape. In the back yard of one place we lived, there was a beat up old trailer with wooden slat sides and flat tires that had long ceased to be roadworthy. I remember often climbing up to the top and looking out at the distant two-lane highway and longing to follow that road anywhere just so long as it was away from the desolation of small-town life.

My parents were childhood sweethearts who eloped and secretly married shortly after they graduated from high school. The year I was born they both turned 21, perhaps a bit young to undertake the responsibilities of a family. Seldom was the rod — more often the belt — spared. They thought this would build character and assure that I wasn’t spoiled. Instead it resulted in a fearful, timid child indoctrinated with Presbyterian guilt. Years later in therapy I remembered being told, “We punish you because we love you.” Translation: punishment equals love. Not difficult to understand how S/M became rooted in my psyche!

Fifth grade was my last school year in Oklahoma. My teacher was Miss Newman, a horse-faced old maid so uptight she considered “fanny” a dirty word. What I remember most vividly from that year was an incident involving one of my classmates. His name was James and he was an impish kid with a knack for getting into mischief. He and several others were in the boys’ restroom during recess one day. After finishing at the urinal he turned and demonstrated for the rest of us how his penis got bigger and harder when he stroked it. Whether or not he had any clue what that was all about I’ve no idea. I was simultaneously appalled and fascinated. Something told me this was naughty and sinful and that I should pray for him.

My family moved to Colorado just in time for me to hit puberty at age eleven. Growing up in a very religious household where the subject of sex was hardly ever discussed left me totally unprepared for what was happening in my body. My mind kept flashing back to that day in the boys’ room when James had played with himself. Inevitably I had to try it myself. It felt so good I didn’t want to stop. Suddenly and unexpectedly the most incredible sensation swept over me, and, with an uncontrollable spasm, white fluid shot from my penis. Don’t ask me why, but I called that white stuff cultured piss. In retrospect it seems amazing that the whole experience didn’t freak me out. Perhaps the guilt and shame and the fear of discovery were more powerful, so powerful, in fact, that I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone.

Once the intense, guilty pleasure of masturbation had been discovered, nothing, despite my greatest efforts, could stop me from doing it for very long. Prayer didn’t help. Memorizing and reciting bible verses didn’t help. Not quite understanding why, I began to develop crushes on some of my classmates, the young men who worked as church youth counselors, and on the newly appointed youth minister. Before his conversion, one of the counselors apparently had been something of a bad boy and had gotten into trouble. He had a tattoo on one forearm, and I found myself strangely attracted to him. I wanted desperately to be close to all these guys, to please them, to be noticed by them, to…? There was an undefined longing for something for which I had no name. It was agony.

Charles Atlas (click the picture to see some of his comic book ads).

Do comic books still contain those ads for Charles Atlas where the cartoon bully kicks sand in the face of the “97-pound weakling” only to get his comeuppance later when said weakling becomes a buff bodybuilder? The ads usually included a large photo of some muscle-bound hunk. In spite of the fact that I lacked any knowledge of the mechanics of sex, I frequently locked myself in the bathroom or the basement and jacked off looking at those photos and fantasizing myself naked and bound and forced in some vague way to please my tormentor.

In time the burden I was carrying became unbearable, and I finally sought counsel from the church youth minister. The moment was painfully awkward, and I don’t remember how I expressed what was troubling me and I don’t recall everything that was said. I do remember Rev. Bill telling me there were three kinds of sexual expression: between a man and woman, between two men (for some reason he didn’t think to include two women), and masturbation. His mention of male/female sex elicited no response. It’s possible mention of the male/male thing made me pale or blush. I don’t know, but it probably wasn’t difficult to see how uncomfortable I was when he got around to masturbation. His counsel was low-key, and frankly I don’t recall much about it. He did take the time at least to enlighten me on the basics of sexual intercourse.

Rev. Bill in church (c. 1958). The first man I ever had a sexual encounter with.

Soon after this talk with the youth minister I had one of my first sexual experiences with another person, Rev. Bill. One night we found ourselves sitting in the darkened church talking about something. Rev. Bill put his hand on my leg and slowly moved to unzip my fly, reach inside my pants, and begin to play with me. I was nervous and found it difficult to get erect, but I didn’t want him to stop. I reached over and began to fondle him. This mutual masturbation continued for a little while until he excused himself and said he had to go to the bathroom. A few minutes later he returned and it was clear that the encounter was over. We had one other such experience the following summer at church camp.

I lost contact with Rev. Bill. His proclivities eventually got him into trouble. He ended up marrying a woman some said was old enough to be his mother — I don’t recall if he ever had a child — and moved to a church in the Seattle area. Some years later I learned he had died of AIDS.

As my high school years were drawing to a close, I became increasingly hostile to the religion of my family. My best friend, with whom I had done some sexual experimentation, was an Episcopalian. I began going to church with him and eventually became a member.

The Episcopal Church was in a little tourist town called Manitou Springs. Across the street from it was a very nice little gift shop that didn’t sell the usual tacky souvenirs. Instead it was a place to find beautiful local crafts plus fine china, glassware and the like. John, the owner, was quick to spot a young gay man, and discovering my lack of experience, set about introducing me into the local gay community, such as it was in 1959. I worked for John that summer and was taken under the wing of a kindly older gentleman named Frank who introduced me to the various expressions of gay sex, at least the non-kinky variety. I was beginning to discover myself.

Frank in his Knights of Columbus regalia (c. 1959). He brought me out.

For several years after high school graduation I bounced back and forth from one school to another trying to find a vocation, but was so emotionally fucked up I couldn’t stick with anything. The mid-to-late 60s found me in New York working in various design-related jobs. Two things were noteworthy about this period, for they would have a significant bearing upon the establishing of Gauntlet. First, I took a number of classes in jewelry making. Second, I discovered the world of gay S/M and piercing.

From the onset of puberty my masturbatory fantasies always involved S/M. When I jacked off I would frequently experiment with various kinds of bondage. I also discovered that intense nipple work was a big turn on and began experimenting with all kinds of clamps.

The year was 1967, and I was living in Brooklyn Heights in an ancient brownstone apartment building at the foot of Joralemon Street known to the local gays as Vaseline Flats because of the sexual orientation of many residents. From my bathroom window I could look down on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and the East River.

A few blocks away on Montague Street, two gay guys, Steve and Marc, had opened a small bookstore. A friendship developed. As we became better acquainted, they disclosed that they were members of the New York Motor Bike Club, a group of gay men into leather and S/M. Here was my opportunity to explore that side of my personality that I had kept secret for so long. I felt much like I did when I discovered I was gay and that I wasn’t alone. There were others who shared the same drives and longings.

In the mid-60s the gay S/M scene was nothing like it is today. Things were far from codified. No one had ever heard of safe words. It wasn’t even clear whether wearing ones keys on the left meant you were a top or a bottom and vice versa. On the East Coast it was said it meant you were a top, but if you were from the West Coast it meant you were a bottom. The bandana color code was still several years in the future. Just how much actual S/M was going on is hard for me to say. In my own experience what passed for S/M was mostly rough sex with a little role playing and bondage thrown in on occasion.

Here I am (c. 1967) at the New York Motorbike Clubhouse in my new outfit.

The “leather boutique” where you could outfit yourself and your toy collection was also some time away. One afternoon I took the subway to Delancy Street, one of New York’s Jewish neighborhoods. This was hardly the place I would have expected to find a motorcycle jacket, but someone from the motorbike club had given me the address of a tiny clothing store where I could find one at an extremely low price. A very orthodox looking merchant waited on me and helped me find a jacket that fit.

My next stop was a Western wear store where I purchased a pair of Levi’s, a pair of Wellington boots, and a black cowboy hat. Having grown up in orthopedic shoes I expected the boots to be uncomfortable, but to my amazement they weren’t. With my purchases in hand I could hardly wait to get back to my apartment. I immediately took off all my clothes, put on the boots and jacket, and jacked off in front of a mirror, the feel and smell of the leather fueling my lust. It felt like a rite of passage. I was finally becoming myself.

About this time I read a magazine article about a man who had made an extensive sea voyage. To mark the occasion he had had his ear pierced. Reading this article triggered something in my psyche. I simply had to have an ear pierced. It didn’t matter that it was 1967, and most men didn’t wear earrings. This was just something I had to do.

A fellow NYMBC member, Ron did me the honor of piercing my ear.

The New York Motorbike Clubhouse was a storefront near the foot of Christopher Street, a short distance from the docks and the leather bars. With Steve and Marc’s sponsorship, I joined NYMBC and made friends with a number of the members. One of them was a man named Ron. Ron had been a merchant seaman and had the tattoos to go with the profession. Even his earlobes were tattooed with stars, in the middle of which were piercings. His tattoos and pierced ears turned me on, and led us to share some sexual exploits. We ended up as good buddies. It was natural that when I made the decision to have an ear pierced, I asked Ron to do it. One weekend we got together and Ron pierced my ear with a large sewing needle. With a bit of maneuvering he was finally able to insert a small gold ear stud through the piercing. It was done.

At the time I was working in a decorator showroom that sold tacky pictures and statuary to interior designers. Naturally I was concerned that my pierced ear would not be acceptable to my employer. Still I had to leave something in the piercing for at least six weeks until it was sufficiently healed to be able to leave it out through the work day. Every morning before I left for work I would carefully clean the piercing and put a Band-Aid over it. If anyone asked I could always say I cut myself shaving. No one ever asked. At the end of six weeks I would take the stud out before going to work and insert it again when I got home. The piercing healed and is with me today.

For several years nipple play was something that I found highly erotic. I’ve no idea how it even came about, but at some point I began fantasizing about piercing my nipples and wearing gold rings in them. It was a fantasy that never ceased to turn me on, but I was afraid to actually admit it to anyone. One Saturday afternoon I even attempted to pierce my own nipples.

An ex-lover of mine was a watchmaker. He had a small tool box filled with various materials that he used in his trade. Among them was a small roll of thin gold wire. I snipped a few inches of it and from it fashioned a couple of small gold rings about 3/8″ in diameter. Although I filed the ends so there would be no burrs or rough edges, they still had no closure and were way too thin for the job. At the time I had no way of knowing this was important.

That fateful Saturday afternoon I took the gold rings, the cork from a bottle of wine, and a push pin and soaked them in a small dish of alcohol. After cleaning my nipples with some of the alcohol, I pressed the cork against one side, the point of the push pin on the other, and taking a deep breath forced the pin through and into the cork. It hurt, but not that badly. By this time I was sweating and feeling a bit light-headed. After lying down for a few minutes, I recovered enough to proceed. It would be necessary to remove the pin to insert the ring. When I did, the wound began to bleed a little, but fortunately not enough to be a problem. The difficult part was trying to maneuver the round ring through the straight hole. This took several harrowing minutes, but I finally succeeded. All that remained was to do the other nipple. Somehow I managed. It was a testimony to my determination that I finished. But soon afterward I freaked out a bit at what I had done and removed the rings. By the following morning, were it not for the pleasurable tenderness, I would not have known what had happened the previous day.

Fernando, a legend in the NY leather scene, was the first man I ever saw with pierced nipples.

But the fantasy of pierced nipples would not go away. Finally after a few weeks I gathered up my determination and my trusty makeshift tools and repeated the ordeal. This time I left the rings in place, though I was very closeted about having them and carefully removed them before going to bed with anyone. After sex I would get dressed, go to the bathroom, and reinsert the rings.

At this point in my life I had never seen or heard of anyone with pierced nipples even in the pages of National Geographic. That was soon to change. One weekend night I went to the Village to hang out at the NYMBC. Standing shirtless by the bar was a hunk of a man. Even in the subdued light there was no missing the glint of gold on his muscular chest. His nipples were pierced. I learned that his name was Fernando and that he was something of a local legend. Though I was never fortunate enough to enjoy the intimate pleasure of his company, he at least let me know that once again I was not alone.

Next: From New York to Hollywood

Jim Ward is is one of the cofounders of body piercing as a public phenomena in his role both as owner of the original piercing studio Gauntlet and the original body modification magazine PFIQ, both long before BME staff had even entered highschool. He currently works as a designer in Calfornia where he lives with his partner.

Copyright © 2003 BMEzine.com LLC. Requests to publish full, edited, or shortened versions must be confirmed in writing. For bibliographical purposes this article was first published August 17th, 2003 by BMEzine.com LLC in Tweed, Ontario, Canada

The Myth of the Modern Primitive: Emulation and Idolization

Posted on July 27, 2003 by BME

Counterpoint by Blake of Nomad

"A ritual can be described as the enactment of a myth. By participating in a good, sound ritual, you are actually experiencing a mythological life, and it's out of this that one can learn to live spiritually."

– Joseph Campbell

The myth of the Modern Primitive — a term coined by Fakir Musafar some twenty years ago when the body modification movement was in its infancy — is now applied broadly to anyone whose personal modification can be traced to an existing (or once existing) ancient or primitive culture; a tribal tattoo or a stretched earlobe for example.

Emulation or idolization, as Shannon suggests, can imply a mindless “because-it’s-cool” mentality — one based merely on aesthetic admiration. While anyone who can see must respect a Polynesian tattooed full body suit or the lobes of an elder Dayak, I suggest that the inclination toward tribal body modification transcends cultural barriers.

To refer to primitive cultures in general as “brutal and repressive” (does our own regime not brutally repress other societies around the world?) is to ignore the fact that these cultures, despite their “unsophisticated sociological moral structures” (a Western judgment according to Eurocentric ideals) prevailed for, in many cases, thousands of years. The reign of our Western society, a mere two centuries, is a drop in the bucket of time when compared with, for example, Egyptian dynasties that lasted over 3,000 years, did not destroy their environment, and left a legacy of architecture, high culture, art, jewelry, and demonstrated mastery over geometry. Recent archaeological evidence suggests that the labor force that constructed the great pyramids was well cared for — after all, a hungry worker gets little done. A vast network of modest domiciles, marketplaces, shops, even brothels and wine cellars tell us that although people died, the Pharaoh’s workforce was well organized, well rested, and drank, ate, and got laid.

The success of any civilization historically has depended on a social hierarchy, political or military infrastructure, and a spiritual, ritualistic, or religious dogma enacted by those “closest to the Gods”. Traditionally, tattoos and piercings were incorporates of that spiritual and social fabric. In Egyptian culture (the example I am using here), contrary to what Shannon suggests, it was primarily the upper-class who were tattooed and pierced.

The propaganda, mind control, and military threat utilized by the Nazi party affected societal control in a way much different than Aztec priests offering human sacrifice. Although prisoners of war were sacrificed, there was also an entire order of people who were offered consensually. In fact, these people were revered and considered it a high honor to have their blood and themselves offered to the Gods. Today, our own government utilizes many of Hitler’s principals of power (military threat, economic sanctions, propaganda, etc.) but “human sacrifice” no longer has the context of ritual and the spirit world. War is brutally and arbitrarily effected with technology and sophisticated weaponry (war is a timeless human motif; ancient or contemporary)… we need not even look our enemy in the eye.

I believe today’s “Modern Primitive” rarely supposes these “rituals (profound) and modifications (beautiful)” to be true expressions to aspire to of the romanticized “noble savage”. Rather, the primary reasoning for modern people to modify their bodies in a primitive fashion has more to do with aesthetics than rituals; an innate genetic predisposition of all humans. Modern people have the same human inclination as the primitive tribesman.

Author’s Note

A reminder that Anglo-Europeans also have a tribal heritage. Although we have been disassociated from it for over a thousand years, it is still our history as well.

I am a self-educated anthropologist, and piercer primarily of Italian descent. The oldest human mummy known to science and archaeology is a bronze-age man found on the Italian side of the Swiss Alps. He had over seventy black “tribal” tattoos, corresponding to chinese meridian points (acupuncture) and a healthy pair of 5/8″ stretched earlobes!

DNA profiling found that he had living relatives in Italy today. That’s my people! Not the mindless caveman you’d think for 6,000 years ago! More on that in my book (scroll down to the bottom for more information).

It is our societal context, lack of ritualistic format, and our disassociation from our own tribal past that is the difference. With self-education and practice we can rediscover these things.

It is more than curious to me that cultures separated by time and geography practiced nearly identical forms of body modification. In fact, the stretched earlobe is the single most prevalent and occurring form of body modification in human history (I will spare the reader by not listing those cultures here). This suggests a deeper intuition that transcends race and culture. The act of “taking control”, as Shannon suggests, is in fact a human necessity.

I don’t think it is possible to presuppose or describe simply people’s motivation to self-decorate and modify. In a society nearly devoid of ritual, the 18th birthday navel piercing and mini-tribal tattoo is a modern Western-derived rite of passage. It is not one handed down by our elders, but a newly reinvented one (because tribal drives are still buried inside the genetic memory of the suburban American girl), and one with valuable social and even spiritual potential.

Spirituality is very much about transcendence (of fear of pain, of social stigmas, and so on) and in any capacity is a deeply personal experience (even if we cannot articulate its meaning)… if it happens at all.

It is an ironic juxtaposition indeed that the “underground subculture of the Modern Primitive” is a “system (self)sustaining” within mainstream society. This society whose premise of conformity and normality omit modifying the body altogether as social necessity — one of conformity and “sustaining the group” above all else — is the mainstream of unmodified individuals! The evolution of the individual, I agree, must again take precedence over that of sustaining the society because as a society, we are fractured and subdivided (the tribal connection to our collective human past has the potential to bond all of us together). Individual freethinkers must again step into the limelight of humanity to save us from ourselves.

With any mass-produced cultural product (religion, pop music, body jewelry, or a government-engineered ignorant society) the potential for transformative experience is reduced to a simple mathematical equation — percent and ratio. There will always be a few fortunate individuals within the group who will delve deeper and due to early conditioning, personal experiences, acquired knowledge, and individual constitution gain far more than the “mindless masses” from their transformations. The “thick fog of fashion” pervades every aspect of adornment, regardless of time in history or civilization. Our own ignorance (culturally and collectively) is ultimately all that will damage body modifications’s ability to enlighten. Again it comes down to the individual.

Fuck the group. Know yourself and then relate to those who are like-minded and God forbid a few of you hang out and become a group… at least in “my group” everyone designed their own tattoos….

In a global society another strange juxtaposition of culture has occurred. Many tribal people now emulate and idolize tattoos of the West. On a trip through the rain forests of Central America with my wife two years ago, in the middle of nowhere, at a small stand by the side of the road, we got out to stretch our legs. Several heavily tattooed midgets of mixed Spanish-Mayan descent came out of the woodwork to check me out. They were covered with images of Elvis, skulls and crossbones, daggers, pinup girls and WWII airplanes. And there I was with my “tribal” body suit (all of my designs derived from dreams and vision quests marking significant times of my life). We checked each other out, shook hands and smiled a lot… a certain unspoken understanding had transpired. In an age of cross-cultural-trans-global-sociological influence, who was emulating and idolizing who? It no longer matters.

I AM GOD

Be God, create beyond yourself reject the placebos of everyone else wash and melt from your unconscious, slumbering mind and depart from the life-eating lull of the grind. Smash and remake rebuild and design unlearn from the core then extend to outside your chosen, ethereal, and leaving you blind id-image-synaptic as seen through your eyes.

…..BLAKE

PS. Shannon’s thoughts on corporations and craftsmen I am in agreement with, as well as his advice on the ways one might obtain a meaningful tattoo (avoiding fllash). If you want the same tattoo every Joe has — you know, that one on the wall — why bother? However, if that Tasmanian Devil has deep personal meaning for you, then you did choose the right tattoo.

blake-and-fakir Blake’s book, A Brief History of the Evolution of Body Adornment in Western Culture: Ancient Origins and Today is available from his website, nomadmuseum.com, and will be added to the media section of BMEshop shortly for online ordering. Fakir Musafar writes that this 150-page oversize book is a “must have” for all serious modifiers.

The grandson of dental surgeon, noted socialite, and traveller Dr. Naomi Coval, Blake Andrew Perlingieri was inspired by his grandmother’s travels to remote tribal areas in the early to middle parts of the 20th century.

Professionally, Blake began his carreer in 1990 at San Francisco’s premier piercing studio, Body Manipulations. At this time the only other studio was Gauntlet, L.A.. In 1993, Blake and his former partner, Kristian White, opened Nomad, the first tribal studio in the industry. Blake and Nomad have been featured numerous times in Fakir’s Body Play and all of the early publications and TV media of the day. In 1995, Nomad opened Australia’s first piercing studio in Melbourne. From 1996 to 1998 Blake brought his tribal gospel to the east coast and operated Venus with Maria.

In 1998, Blake returned west to open as sole proprietor Nomad Precision Body Adornment and Tribal Art Museum. Combining his famous jewelry collection with his recently inherited grandmother’s tribal art, Blake seeks to educate the children of the future, raise awareness about endangered tribes, and provide a cultural and educational context to body adornment for modern people.

The photo on the right was taken by Fakir Musafar.

Copyright © 2003 BMEZINE.COM. Requests to republish must be confirmed in writing. For bibliographical purposes this article was first published July 27, 2003 by BMEZINE.COM in Tweed, Ontario, Canada.

Young people unite: Body modification can FIGHT THE POWER [The Publisher’s Ring]

Posted on July 18, 2003 by Shannon Larratt

Young people unite: Body modification can

FIGHT THE POWER!

“When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.”

– Charles Evans Hughes

“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.”

– John F. Kennedy

More and more laws are being passed restricting the rights of young people to legally obtain body modifications. Even in areas where it is legal, schoolboards enact secondary rules restricting access to the (mandatory) education system to those with body modifications in order to ensure that these young people are not able to express themselves freely, and the similarly corporate controlled workplace also does everything it can to prevent those with piercings and other body modifications from obtaining employment. The establishment presents a series of deceitful justifications for this in an attempt to mask their true purpose: social control. In this article I will show that these laws and regulations are nothing but system sustaining safeguards to ensure that the education process continues to do its government defined role — the production of a uniform social product — and that it is essential for young people to defy these laws en masse.

Let me put it simply: laws restricting body modification have nothing to do with public safety. They exist exclusively to protect the interests of the corporate and political power structure and by tolerating them, we empower our oppressors.

I should note that the history and political issues I raise here are predominantly American and Canadian, but, like it or not, the United States does tend to define where the rest of the world is going as it plows our path to the future. Think of it as the canary in the mineshaft.

The lies they tell to justify themselves

Access to body modification tends to be restricted for young people, both in- and outside the school system, for a number of false stated reasons. I’ll mention a few here again, but it’s a subject I’ve written about previously (for example, in Joe Hatred Strikes Again!), so I’ll be brief. The point is that the listed reasons are lies (and obvious ones at that), and once we’ve revealed that, we need to start asking ourselves what the real reasons are.

Body modification as an indicator of “risky behavior”

It’s regularly written that there’s a link between body modification and activities such as drug use and adolescent sex. Ignoring the fact that the studies claiming this are wholly unscientific due to inadequate and non-representative sample groups, let’s assume for a moment that the statement is true. Now let’s examine two other examples of true statements:

“If someone points a loaded gun at you and pulls the trigger, you are more likely to die a violent death than someone who has not been shot at.”

“During slavery, a free man was more likely to engage in financial fraud than a slave.”

In the first statement, there is a direct cause and effect — the first action (the gun firing) leads to the second (the violent death). In the second statement, which is also true, there is no cause and effect — freedom does not lead to crime, even though a free person is more likely to commit a crime. A person who is inclined to risky behavior is perhaps more likely to be attracted to body modification, but taking the body modification away from them has no effect on their interest in the risky behavior — one could argue it risks increasing it as the body modification acts as a channel for those drives (ie. a safe way to express them), but that’s a debate for another column.

Body modification as disruptive to the education process

Some people have claimed that body modification needs to be kept out of schools since it is unfair to other students who are not able to concentrate on their studies because of the distraction. As I’ve pointed out before, I find it difficult to believe that young people are this shallow, and in any case, this argument could equally be applied to expel ethnic minorities, the disabled (wheelchairs, crutches, braces, and disfigurements in general all have the potential to be just as distracting), or even exceptionally attractive or unattractive students.

The real reason that this justification is clearly deceptive is because it’s too late. If this was the reason, it would have been implemented when body modification was rare. When I was in school over ten years ago, the schools gave me no grief for having a mohawk or stretched piercings. However, now that it’s becoming common — even normal — it’s perceived as a threat.

Body modification as unhealthy

Just like we do not allow young people to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, many have suggested that we need to stop them from engaging in the “dangerous” activity of body modification. The problem with this statement is that there is effectively zero evidence showing that responsible body modification is dangerous, and the little evidence that there is shows that any risks that do exist are a fraction of those that apply to activities that we embrace as a culture — from organized sports to driving, or even junk food (which I discussed in a previous column, Ban it all!).

Others have made statements such as “piercings aren’t safe in a growing body” or “young people can’t take care of their piercings”, which are both patently false. There’s no evidence that body piercings shift badly due to growth when placed properly — the only “evidence” I’ve ever seen illustrating this theory is more likely piercings done poorly from day one (after all, the law is such that few talented piercers will take the business risk losing their shop for piercing a minor — leaving them to end up in the hands of what are all-too-often bottom-quality piercers). As far as the latter claim, it’s an offensive and ageist statement that I feel is barely even worth dignifying with a response any more than a claim such as “blacks and women shouldn’t vote”.

But, since so many people believe that body modification requires more maturity to take care of than a fourteen year old can muster, let me point out this: taking care of a body piercing is no more difficult than cleaning oneself or taking care of a minor injury, something which we routinely expect adolescents to be capable of. Children are going through puberty these days as young as eight years old — surely those issues are far more difficult to cope with than a navel ring? And in any case, historically youths have had no difficulty dealing with the responsibilities of healing even large scalpelled piercings or scarifications — unless of course we are arguing that Western youths are somehow radically less competent than those in “simpler” cultures (and yes, given the statements about the education system I am about to make, I appreciate the irony in that suggestion!).

“We know what’s best for you”

Kids shouldn’t do this because it’s an expression of some sick kink or gateway into sadomasochism. Kids shouldn’t do this because no one will hire them looking like that. Kids shouldn’t do this because it’s just wallowing in mental illness. To that I simply respond, “faith based logic.”

Ultimately these types of issues tend to be nothing more than one group trying to force its social ideals on another — often with almost pathological zeal and hatred. As one reader writes in response to tattoos being on the cover of the The Spectrum, a paper in Utah:

“I’m looking at the July 11th edition of Where It’s At. I have to hold it together because I was so angry upon seeing the cover that I tore it in half. You must have the idea this is Haight-Ashbury or Los Angeles or San Francisco. Just to remind you, this is good old conservative St. George. That kind of salacious drivel we don’t need here. Raising children is hard enough without you glorifying destruction of one’s body. The tattoo claiming, ‘Your body is God’s temple; it’s up to us to wallpaper it’ is so much evil nonsense. Personally my reaction is one of revulsion and nausea when I see this form of ‘art.’”

I won’t begin to comment on the level of psychosis and pure hatred that it takes to tear up a newspaper because the cover upsets you, but “God says it’s wrong” is a cop-out in that it offers no evidence for its spiteful claims, and creates a debate that “by divine proclamation” denies any right to respond. Let me let you in on a little secret — assuming God exists, God’s first interest is in the promotion of love and happiness. To suggest anything else for an omnipotent figure would paint Him as evil. Not only that, but nowhere in the Bible is there any dictate against body modification (the laws of Leviticus which briefly mention funerary cuttings are later overturned as “the old law” in Romans) — this is the word of man masquerading as the word of God.In any case, while wisdom may often come with age and experience, it’s not an automatic thing — man may be justified to God by acts of faith and not acts of law, but here on earth if a claim is made, it has to be backed up with facts. “Sick”, when it comes to personal expression, is simply a product of personal and cultural bias — for example, many would argue that to adhere to the mold is a betrayal of what it means to be human.

As far as issues such as the job market, factors are in such flux that it’s unreasonable to make such predictions. Body modification is mainstreaming at an incredible rate — studies show that 30% of Americans have a body piercing other than their earlobes, and according to Ohio University one in seven have a tattoo, with dramatically more in younger demographics (a 10:1 ratio according to some studies, which suggests we will see a generation where body modification is actually the norm). It’s very quickly becoming a modified world and given the permanence of these activities, there is no risk of “the trend disappearing”.

The mental illness issues are deceptive as well. Body modification is a form of communication and expression; studies are very clear that restricting the ability to communicate or self-express is one of the most detrimental things you can do to a mentally ill individual — most treatment involves the encouragement and facilitation of communication. In the rare cases where the body modification actually is an expression of something wrong on the inside, the body modification is a healing factor or at worst a symptom, rather than a contributing part of the problem.

It’s just a stupid trend that people are going to regret later

In my previous column, The Benefits of Being Different, I discussed how while there is a move to shift body modification into a commodified trend and group fashion, body modification in the sense discussed on BME is ultimately self expression rather than herd expression. As far as “regretting it later”, even if it turns out to be a trend and all but disappears in ten years, because of its permanence and because such an incredibly high number of people have taken part it must lose its discriminatory value.

I am reminded of a scene in the Star Trek episode, “Past Tense”, in which Dax, an alien with spots on her face and body very similar to those of Beki B (a model recently featured on the cover of In The Flesh, a book on the “cultural politics of body modification” by Victoria Pitts), travels back in time to to 2024, and meets an official named Chris who helps her obtain ID:

Chris: You know, those are… very unusual.

Dax: (laughs) Oh, you mean my tattoos?

Chris: That is amazing work. Where did you have them done? Japan?

Dax: How did you guess?

Chris: Well, I used to have one myself. A Maori tribal pattern used to go all the way down my arm. Got it in highschool back in the nineties like everybody else… Of course I had to have it removed. Well, you know how it is. To get the governmnet contracts you have to look like all the rest of the drones… Does that make me a sell-out?

Dax: Probably, but I won’t hold it against you.

I’m sure that if this turns out to be a trend, there may be a “fear the mullet”-like backlash while the trend dies, but I find it highly dubious to suggest that any long term damage will be done socially to those with body modifications — there are simply too many of us.
The History of Modern Schooling

To understand why the school is a battleground on this subject, one must examine its history and modern role. In the mid 1800′s, young Americans were some of the best educated and most free individuals on the planet — and America had no formal education system (being largely derived from the guild — apprentice — system of learning that embraced “learning through doing”). Schools were locally organized and had no rigid structure such as state testing, national textbooks, or even a defined curriculum. Children learned to read young, and because the US had rejected European copyright law, academic books and literature were readily available and consumed by the lower classes. The end result was an exceptionally well educated population that truly embodied “the American dream”.

The problem was that the liberty that these people embraced — and the spoils they demanded to earn (this was long before the concept of the welfare state) — ran contrary to the growing corporate power in the West, as well as the political corruption that sought to conglomerate control in increasingly expansive and wealthy federal hands. In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education wrote:

“We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes.”

They realized that once the lower classes were educated, it became crystal clear to them that the system was not treating them fairly or equally, and that they would demand a fair share of the country’s opportunities. Over the next twenty years, the US radically overhauled its education system to combat a well informed populace, with an end goal of producing adult infants with little ability to think independently. They worked to eliminate the ability for people to learn on their own by dragging out the education process, replacing it with mind-numbing repetition and learning through memorization, rather than understanding. The goal also included coaching students into blind patriotism and consumerism. John Dewey, one of the fathers of modern education, wrote in 1897:

“Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.”

How often have you heard that a teacher’s role is to mold young impressionable minds, to prepare them for life (not life in the independent sense of the word, but life in the sense of their “duty to the machine”) — that is, to turn them into good little soldiers, happy to be ambitionless drones, working for the sole purpose of raising money to hand to their corporate slaveowners? William Torrey, the US Commissioner of Education at the turn of the 20th century wrote of his students:

“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.”

John Taylor Gatto, who quit teaching in 1991 to become a school reform activist while still holding the New York City Teacher of the Year award he was just given, writes:

“Great corporations, great universities, government bureaus with vast powers to reward or punish, and corporate journalism increasingly centralized [control over the education process] in fewer and fewer hands throughout the twentieth century, keeping a steady hand on the tiller. They had ample resources to wear down and outwait the competition.

The prize was of inestimable value — control of the minds of the young.

After 1900 the new mass schooling arenas slowly became impersonal places where children were viewed as human resources. Human resource children are to be molded and shaped for something called The Workplace, even though for most of American history American children were reared to expect to create their own workplaces.

In the new workplace, most Americans were slated to work for large corporations or large government agencies, if they worked at all.

Not only was the new form of institution spiritually dangerous as a matter of course, but school became a physically dangerous place as well. What better way to habituate kids to abandoning trust in their peers (and themselves) than to create an atmosphere of constant low-level stress and danger, relief from which is only available by appeal to authority? And many times not even then!

Horace Mann had sold forced schooling to industrialists of the mid-nineteenth century as the best “police” to create moral children, but ironically, as it turned out in the twentieth century, big business and big government were best served by making schoolrooms antechambers to Hell. School became jail-time to escape if you could, arenas of meaningless pressure as with the omnipresent “standardized” exams, which study after study concluded were measuring nothing real.

The new purpose of schooling [is] to serve business and government … [achieved] efficiently by isolating children from the real world, with adults who themselves were isolated from the real world, and everyone in the confinement isolated from one another. Only then could the necessary training in boredom and bewilderment begin. Such training is necessary to produce dependable consumers and dependent citizens who would always look for a teacher to tell them what to do in later life, even if that teacher was an ad man or television anchor.”

A truly terrifying and dystopian vision of the system that we are currently watching play out on a world stage, which Gatto has documented impeccably in his book The Underground History of American Education.Now that you understand why the state and the corporation instituted the modern education system — to produce compliant and patriotic consumer drones — let’s take a look at how body piercing and body modification fit into that equation.

What are the real effects of pierced kids?

Over the past month BME has been actively conducting the largest controlled study of people with body modifications ever done (click here to learn more about this survey and to browse its results). As of this writing approximately four thousand people have been interviewed, with just over two thousand of those being 21 years old or younger. Of those people, it is true that, as the mainstream claims, 80% have tried marijuana, and 84% have engaged in sexual intercourse (with about a third having done so before the age of sixteen), but let’s take a look at some of the other results that they don’t tell you about.

In the absence of anything suggesting negative effects of body modification — mental or physical — I believe it is important to ask the question, “how do you feel?” In deciding whether something that doesn’t harm anyone else is valid or not, we ought to be investigating how it affects the way the bearer perceives their life. In the response sets below (limited to those 21 and under), I have marked the positive answers in green, and the negative answers in red, with the neutral answers marked in blue (and I’ve left out the people without piercings if you’re wondering why the numbers don’t fully add up):

As you can see, in a truly overwhelming majority, those with body modifications report back positive effects on their life, with virtually zero reporting back anything negative. You can browse the full survey data for yourself, but almost universally the only negative effects reported involve finding oneself the brunt of bigotry — and we can no more fault the modified with this damage than we can blame blacks for the actions of the Ku Klux Klan. Sure, “freaky kids with nose studs” made that decision for themselves, whereas people don’t choose the color of their skin, but that’s irrelevant — it’s simply a piece of misdirection intended to allow one to get away with blaming the victim, rather than the aggressor. It’s like saying, “but look how she dresses — she was just begging to be raped!”

The fact is, people with body modifications become happier, more self-determined, and more willing to define their own lives on their own terms (hence the “risky behavior” I suppose) — exactly what the establishment and those who seek to sustain the status quo are afraid of. Now, maybe you’re saying “but healthy people shouldn’t need these crutches; harming yourself to achieve happiness is nonsensical.” There are many things that don’t add up on their own. To give an oft-cited example, the cost of policing a bank robbery is almost always higher than the amount of money stolen — that is, money would be saved by simply repaying the bank with taxpayer money, rather than going to the great expense of capturing and prosecuting the culprits. However, we understand that the larger effects (the damage to society) if we were not to use this “damaging crutch” would far outweigh any losses in the acceptance of the crutch. To give an example closer to home, recent studies by the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery showed lower levels of depression as well as “very significant improvement in quality of life” following cosmetic surgery — and such surgery is of course an order of magnitude more dangerous than body modification.

The fact is that even while over-emphasizing the small amount of damage done by body modification, when it comes to improving the lives of those involved, it is a net gain scenario. To put it simply, all things considered, it improves lives and makes people happy. And those involved feel very strongly about this — not only do over 70% of these youths say they’d not take a better job in exchange for removing their modifications, but 61% go so far as to say they’d actually choose a worse job in exchange for being able to keep their body modifications.

These are people who can’t be bought. To put it simply, they’re not slaves.

So why are these rules really in place?

As I mentioned earlier, high quality education was not perceived as a “threat” until it started to affect the ambitions of the lower classes. President Woodrow Wilson once said:

“We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

He said this while describing his goals for the future of business in America. The Rockefeller Education Board agreed, stating:

“We shall not try to make [students] into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple…we will organize children.”

That is, education first and foremost must maintain the status quo; it must keep the class system stable, and it must keep ideas from flowing between demographic groups. The wealthy are able to maintain themselves due to the sheer bulk of their money — I hope it’s clear that the role of the schools in this caste system is primarily to repress, not to empower. Any ideas that break those molds, that run contrary to that conformity must be immediately destroyed lest they threaten the system. In the 1950s we watched rock music be attacked when it moved from black communities to white communities (where it was eventually commodified and lost its meaning), in the 1970s punk rock was attacked when it moved up from the lower classes (also diluted into commercialism), and most recently hip hop was attacked as it moved out of the ghetto into the suburbs. In White America, rapper Eminem says:

“See the problem is I speak to suburban kids
Who otherwise woulda never knew these words exist
Whose moms probably never woulda gave two squirts of piss,
Till I created so much motherfuckin’ turbulence…
Surely hip hop was never a problem in Harlem only in Boston”

While there are forces working to commercialize the “rebellion” and individualism in body modification (as discussed in the previous columns on indigenous cultures and on class warfare), the current predominant drive is to try and squelch it at its root by blocking access to the next generation (who are recognizing its value in growing numbers).When social scientists claim that those who engage in body modification also engage in other “risky behavior”, what they’re really saying is that those with body modifications are less likely to accept the rules, and more likely to decide for themselves what is right and wrong in their lives… and this is exactly what the last hundred years of the education process have been fighting to stop. In some ways, body modification is the single largest threat the system is currently facing.

When it was just some S&M characters doing it in the closet, they didn’t care — it was going on behind closed doors, and only affecting adults who desperately wanted to keep their kinks a secret, so they still played the game. When it was just gays and lesbians doing it, they didn’t care — probably hoping that they’d marginalize it in the process with homosexuality being a relatively stable minority rather than a growing threat. When it was societal outcasts they didn’t care — it just made them easier to identify — but now that it’s affecting their kids, and affecting enough of them to radically change society, they know that they have to stop it before personal freedom and expression becomes normal and acceptable.

And you can bet they’ll use every deceptive dirty trick they can think of.

Who is “they” you ask? Is this kind of like “the man”? Who it is at this point is difficult to pinpoint, because no actual person or even group of people exist any more — in the past one could blame the aristocracy that initiated the process, but it is far more convoluted than that now. Ask yourself who owns a large corporation (since large governments at this point in Western nations are almost wholly corporate owned and controlled). Certainly there are people at the top of the corporate hierarchy that manage to skim off significant resources and are motivated to help sustain it out of greed, but they don’t actually own the corporation or society, and certainly have no power to universally control it.

Others would say that it is the shareholders, or the voters, that own the corporation or government, but it’s obvious that while they do take part in the system, their value is largely symbolic and they carry little control as individuals. The fact is that at this point larger, older organizations own themselves — no one is in charge. They exist with one drive alone, as their free market model dictates: survival and market domination. In the case of governments and megacorporations which exist in a monopolistic state, they do this by sustaining the system.

In the 1997 movie Cube, the characters find themselves trapped in a homicidal maze, symbolically representing the megacorporation. As the characters debate the question why, one of them explains that while it once had a function, no one remembers it any more:

“There is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It’s a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan. Big Brother is not watching you.”

As another character points out, there is no establishment conspiring against us — just guys at desks doing their jobs. The monster is headless and soulless; as they say, it’s not the individual player that causes our problems, but the game itself.What are we going to do about it?

Step one: Don’t let them kill body modification

First we need to stop the efforts to kill or stem body modification by resisting these rules and regulations — and by responsibly and logically proposing alternatives that find a middle ground which protects both our safety and our liberty. That is, we should support laws that ensure safety standards and responsible practitioners, but we need to stand up against laws that actually restrict the artform — for example, laws in some states banning suspension, dermal punches, and even certain styles of piercing and jewelry (such as the laws in Florida banning the use of Tygon in piercing).

Call their bluff when they’re overstepping their power. Many of the restrictive anti-modification laws are a violation of clearly defined civil rights. Not only that, especially in the case of school rules, the people making the rules may not even have the authority to do so — in many cases it has been as simple as pointing this out to make the issue disappear a la the young child shouting “the Emperor wears no clothes!”

Use the media to your advantage. One of the reasons they think they can get away with these actions is because they do it in the shadows. Especially in the case of school suspensions over piercings, it’s not uncommon for the decision to be reversed with an apology as soon as the media becomes involved — since it can very quickly result in a hailstorm of negative national attention that risks the jobs of the people responsible. Body modification is still a hot topic for the media and they love doing stories like this, and are very often extremely sympathetic.

In addition to direct involvement with the media, letters-to-the-editor are surprisingly effective and can reach a large audience. If your local area enacts restrictive laws, be sure to write letters to all the local papers and have your friends do the same in their own words. When you’re doing so, be concise and polite — read your letter over a few times and make sure that your argument is well constructed and will appeal to the common sense of readers… and have a sense of humor — while crazy kook letters are published, the ones that help the cause are ones that are well written and fun to read.

Talk to your parents; try and make them understand you. If you’re a minor, your parents will have as much legal say over your life in these matters as you do. They can act as a powerful advocate for you, so if you can help them understand that body modification is something positive in your life, that’s not hurting you, they can speak on your behalf — and going back to the media, the media loves united families — having a parent say “I love my pierced daughter” not only speaks to the public in general and makes for good TV, but it inspires other parents to say, “hey, maybe my kid’s not so bad after all.”

Remember, the government is in theory your representative. Your local town council, school board, state representatives, and so on, are all voted into power by you and your family. If you send them a strong enough message, and they feel that their constituents disagree with something that’s happening, it is their duty to act as your advocate and correct the wrongs (and they’ll do it out of self-preservation). Not only should you be writing letters to and calling your local government, but you could also collect polls and get general public support.

And never forget — the squeaky wheel gets the grease. So called “special interest groups” have so much power not because they have the voting numbers, or because they are “right”, but simply because they are very vocal and good at lobbying politicians. When you’re writing your representative, be sure though to follow the same rules as writing the media — be polite and concise, and when possible, provide backup for your statements such as relevant studies.

Be the best you can be. This may be the most important point in this section. I can not emphasize enough how important it is for you to get good grades and be a positive part of your community. If you’re a problem student that doesn’t play sports, doesn’t volunteer at the Red Cross, and is failing half their classes, you’ll just fall into the stereotype and it’ll be hard to argue your case. On the other hand, if you’re a B+ student that works hard, is friendly, worked on the school yearbook, and volunteers at the local animal shelter on the weekends, you can make a very strong case for yourself — they’ll be left having to explain why body modification somehow “voids” all your contributions to society.

Consider civil disobedience. When all else has failed, you can of course practice the time-proven method of simply breaking the unjust laws, forcing them to either prosecute you or discard the law. There are several US states that still have restrictions against tattooing, and in them a small handful of brave artists have performed public tattooing for the specific purpose of being arrested to force the government to justify their anti-freedom actions in court. Many have spent significant time in prison for this, and some have even been successfully prosecuted.

Most recently this happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as reported by KTUL:

Those who are caught giving tattoos [in Oklahoma] go to jail. Two men spent several hours behind bars after police raided a business Thursday night.

“They came in while were were tattooing, said we were the police,” says tattoo artist Shawn Morrow.

Morrow is back in his store where he encountered police Thursday. They arrested him and an employee in the back of his shop for giving tattoos. And it wasn’t unexpected.

“It was bound to happen,” Morrow says. “Somebody has to be the example, someone has to fight for the the cause. I’m willing to fight the cause, go to court and press this issue to get it legalized.”

Morrow says the arrest is a first step. [He] says allowing tattoos shops to operate publicly would make it much safer.

“If they were really worried about the health concerns of tattooing, then they would legalize tattooing,” he says.

Other artists, such as Diane Maiden of Manchester, New Hampshire, take a more active role, by suing their local governments over such restrictions, often with the help of groups such as the ACLU. Unfortunately these cases still often lose, with courts agreeing with the government that tattooing is not valid art or communication, and thus not protected under the First Ammendment. It’s still a long battle ahead, and those artists fighting it deserve our thanks.Don’t let them turn us against each other; don’t succumb to greed. When you’re running an above-board business, running it “criminally” is ultimately damaging to that business… As such, it’s not uncommon for some less scrupulous body modification business owners to, instead of fighting unjust laws, use them to attack their competition — I’ve even seen numerous cases where artists will attempt to manipulate local government into enacting laws that would in effect allow only them to stay in business. I am reminded of Afghanistan where rival warlords reported each other as al Qaeda operatives to the Allied forces who then ran bombing runs that served not the war against terrorism, but simply empowered one drug warlord over another.

To cite a recent example, at a private BME event being hosted in Chicago flesh pullings were being planned. The piercing would of course be performed by a local piercer — another local piercer heard about this and because there are regulations in the area making such rituals illegal, he spoke with the health board and supported them in threatening the organizers, allegedly in the interest of shutting down his competition — and as a result those aspects of the event had to be canceled. Some might argue that he was in the right; after all, he was operating legally, and those at the BME BBQ were about to break the law, and no one would claim that suspension is risk-free. I briefly interviewed the piercer responsible:

BME: Why are you trying to get the Chicago BBQ shut down?

S: I got a call from the Health Department on Thursday asking if I was involved with suspension at the so called “event”. My reply was that I wouldn’t risk my career just to break the law.

BME: But this isn’t the first time you’ve used regulations to strike at your competition. What is this all for you? Marketing?

S: I’m in no way ashamed that I tell people the truth. Body suspension is not protected as an art form in my state. I’m not scared to let people know that they’re putting themselves at risk. I’m not into telling people who’s right or wrong, but facts remain facts.

The problem is that when you support the law’s injustices, even passively, and instead of fighting for this community or for the rights of its members, decide to “play the game” and use it to your advantage (even if it means hurting others), you are holding up these injustices and empowering them. Having personally seen lives changed and even saved by body modification and body ritual, I could never bring myself to sink to such a level, but the sad truth is that I’ve had variations on this conversation — usually far worse — dozens of times with dozens of different piercers.To those body artists who fight against this community in exchange for a second studio and a few more dollars in the bank, I remind them that one day they will need to answer for their treachery and betrayal. As they say, karma’s a bitch…

Step two: Don’t let them commodify body modification

When it’s clear to them that they’ve lost the battle to eliminate body modification, their “plan B” (as it was with rock, punk, and hip hop) will be to commodify and appropriate and turn it into a trend that they can use to serve their own goals. It is essential that we resist their efforts to keep us docile and subservient on both fronts.

We’re seeing the same happing right now with the RIAA in the US toward music “sharing” technologies (such as Napster, KaZaA, and so on). First, when the technology was young, and the threats seemed fringe, they simply ignored the P2P community. Then, as the popularity increased, they fought to destroy it through increasingly aggressive lawsuits and attempts to legislate. We’re now seeing the final phase begin, and an increasing number of companies (Apple’s iTunes coupled with its iPod player for example) are learning how to use these technologies to both kill off the original threat and profit from it.

At its simplest, always make sure your modification interests revolve around you and expressing yourself, rather than something you’ve been told to believe in — don’t go buying that Tickle Me Elmo Bellypiercing Kit that gets you a discount when you wear it at McDonald’s. Remember, when it comes to commodification, they can’t do it if you won’t buy it!

Step three: Above all else, know yourself and be yourself

If you want a piercing, get it. If you want your face tattooed, do it. Make sure everyone you know does the same if they want to. However… that doesn’t mean rush out and get that FTW on your forehead — rights do come with responsibilities as well.

If you take body modification seriously (and odds are if you’ve read this far through this you do), then you know that it’s a powerful thing — use it right, and it’ll dramatically improve your life. Use it wrong, and it’ll do nothing to improve your life, and may even hurt you, especially if we’re talking about things like facial tattooing. If you’re honest with yourself, and care about yourself, then you’ll take the time to make good decisions when it comes to your body — or at least learn to judge which impulses you feel are “genuine” and which are passing fancy.

Have fun and be happy, and remember, body modification is about you!

And remember, the only reason that people don’t have rights is because they don’t stand up for them.

I realize I’ve been brief in this section; in future columns I will talk about cases where resistance was successful, as well as illustrating those that failed. While there are parallels between what we’re facing and the civil rights movement in general, freedom of expression is much less agreed upon as a universal right, so it’s easier for them to strike at us with what would otherwise be instantly recognized as bigotry.

This is a Slave Revolt

Let’s be clear here — we’re talking about a slave revolt… and that means that if we lose, the lot of us will find ourselves crucified along the side of the road as an example to those who’d also seek to be individuals — some would argue that’s already happening. Some might even argue that there’s something to be said for the life of a slave; in theory, it’s easy — your needs are provided for, you know what you’re supposed to do and think, and as long as you do what they say, life’s worries are minimized. But at the same time, life’s borders become very narrow, and we’re reduced to cogs in a corporate machine.

And, as I will illustrate in my next column, as cogs in the machine, we will be replaced. This is not only a fight worth fighting for philosophical reasons, but a fight for the survival of our species as we know it.

Until then,

Shannon Larratt

BMEzine.com

PS. Enormous thanks is due to John Taylor Gatto for his incredible research on this subject which helped inspire this column. I whole-heartedly recommend his book on this subject (available at johntaylorgatto.com), and I would not have been able to compile this without his help. In addition, I think it’s also important to note that there are many fine teachers working to reform the system from within — they deserve great credit for doing so.

Piercing guns are blasphemy! [The Publisher’s Ring]

Posted on May 9, 2003 by Shannon Larratt

Piercing guns are blasphemy!

“The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”

– Elbert Hubbard

Those of you who have been reading BME for a long time probably remember our “No Piercing Guns” t-shirt published about five years ago, which we discontinued after lawsuits were threatened and launched against us and others with similar warnings. The gun manufacturers’ objection was with the list of reasons printed on the back, centered around the sterility issues as well as some of the design flaws that made the guns unsuitable for body piercing in general.

This shirt addressed the core problems with classic-style piercing guns (essentially a spring-loaded device that propelled a piercing stud through flesh and was then reused on every client with minimal contamination control; rarely any more than an alcohol wipe), starting with the sterility issue. Because the guns were designed to be reused and their plastic bodies precluded the ability to autoclave them, bloodborne pathogens could easily be transmitted between clients — there are numerous known and well-documented cases of hepatitis being spread by these guns.

The shirt also addressed the issue that the stud was relatively dull (far duller than a piercing needle) and was basically just rammed through the tissue with force. Now, on earlobes you can probably get away with this and not affect healing dramatically, but on other parts of the body significant damage could occur. Most notably in upper ear cartilage, these studs have been documented as being able to actually shatter the tissue, leading to collapse of the ear altogether and other serious problems. The “one-size-fits-all” nature of the studs (short; designed for a close fit around an earlobe) compounded this problem and by compressing the tissue could lead to increased swelling and irritation, which often would eventually lead to infection and/or rejection.

Finally, the design of the guns in general was not really conducive to accurate placement. While they could “hit their marks” on lobes most of the time, their design made it difficult to accurately place the jewelry in any other part of the body — although I should point out that most reputable piercing gun manufacturers do emphasize that their guns are only to be used on earlobes and even go so far as to cancel the contracts of businesses that abuse their guns.

While I’m mentioning “reputable” piercing gun manufacturers (it makes me sick to say that) I’ll also point out that a number have redesigned their guns to use disposable cartridges which go a long way to making them “single use”, thus dramatically reducing the chances of passing contamination from client to client. In a perfect world one might be able to make the argument that this design of gun is perfectly appropriate for use on earlobes.

However…

It’s not a perfect world.

One has to take the human factor into account — this doesn’t solve the problem. It simply shifts the blame.

A body piercer is expected to have at least a year of apprenticeship before they’re considered “trained”. Not because piercing — the act of piercing itself — is in and of itself difficult, but because there’s an enormous amount of peripheral knowledge that must be learned and practiced in order to keep the client safe. It’s not unusual for a piercing gun technician to receive just an hour’s training in the food court of some mall… Do you really think that’s enough time to adequately explain and train the finer points of universal precautions?

You see, even if the disposable cartridge type of piercing gun goes a long way to addressing the obvious contamination issues, if the surrounding area (the gun body, the outside of the cases, the storage bins, the hands of the technician, whatever) becomes contaminated, it’s all for naught. The same of course goes for piercing studios, nail salons, barber shops, and any other business that comes in contact with blood; its safety really is judged by the lowest common denominator.

In addition to poorly trained staff potentially negating any benefits to the redesigned guns, the issues that make the gun unsuitable for anything other than at best earlobes have not been addressed and likely can not be addressed. And that — the fact that the gun will never be anything other than a tool for punching holes in earlobes — is the main reason that BME doesn’t support the piercing gun and doesn’t publish stories built around it.

But BME does publish things like self-piercing stories, often highly irresponsible and misguided. So why not publish stories using a gun? Doesn’t the end justify the means, at least a little? I don’t think so; in my opinion piercing guns are a dead end. Piercing guns have nothing to do with body modification. They’re a mistake.

Look at it this way; if you wanted to become an astronaut, would you teach yourself to drive a motorboat, or would you teach yourself to fly an airplane? Both are methods of transportation, and really, it’s a lot cheaper and a lot more accessible to learn to be the skipper of a little fishing boat… But it’s not a path that leads you toward the heavens — just as piercing guns will not lead you to body modification.

There is no direct bridge between the piercing gun industry and the body modification community. Sure, you can “move up” from the gun, but it represents not a step up from where you are, but instead a rejection of where you are and the embarkation on an entirely new path with sounder philosophies and methodologies. What that means is that by contributing financially and socially to the piercing gun industry, you are helping solidify a false path (and again, that ignores the fundamental health factors that on their own should be enough to convince any lucid individual to stay away from these devices).

If BME were to pledge support to the piercing gun industry it would be spitting in the face of the piercing and body modification communities by propping up a business that in my opinion not only endangers its customers but misleads them about their potential future. After all, the easiest way to keep a person from achieving enlightenment is by sending them on a holy quest that is anything but holy — nearly every religion warns in its own way of the danger of false idols and dead end paths.

I realize that I’m largely preaching to the choir here, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t have friends and relatives who end up in the sights of the well-funded and well-advertised piercing gun machine… Remember, “friends don’t let friends get gunned”. Unless you’re looking for a dead end path that’ll put your life in needless danger (and, if body modification is a spiritual act, perhaps even put your soul in peril), seek out a professional that can do a good job making all your dreams come true… not some hack that at best can do a shoddy job of making one dream come true, with no hope for the rest.

Needles, dermal punches, and scalpels make my day.
Use them well,

Shannon Larratt

BMEzine.com

Should Todd Bertrang Go To Jail? [The Publisher’s Ring]

Posted on January 17, 2003 by Shannon Larratt

Should Todd Bertrang Go To Jail?

"The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or to impede their efforts to obtain it."

– John Stuart Mill

As many of you know, body modification artist Todd Bertrang was arrested under charges of practising medicine without a license via “Operation Safe Medicine” in December for performing female genital cutting and other unusual procedures. Even though the procedures were all consensual, and Todd Bertrang has one of the highest customer satisfaction levels in this community, the state medical board investigators referred to the people getting the procedures as “victims” and called the procedures “illegal and disfiguring”*.

Let’s be honest for a minute about the world of underground extreme body modification: it’s a dangerous and unregulated industry which contains many shady characters, as well as many gems who are genuinely improving the lives of thousands of people. I’m not writing this column to tell you that I think Todd Bertrang is one of those gems, nor am I writing this to tell you the opposite. Todd is very up front about who he is and what he does, so there’s no deception going on, and readers can make up their mind for themselves.

But there’s a larger issue at stake: Do we as free individuals have the right to dictate what happens to our bodies? Do we as free individuals have the right to choose who will alter our bodies, or may we only do so with the approval of state-licensed “experts”?

People seek out Todd Bertrang over other practitioners (including doctors) because he is one of the few people experienced in and willing to perform radical female cutting including clitorodectomies (removal of part or all of the clitoris – and before you freak out, yes, sex is still a lot of fun afterwards) – these are not procedures generally offered by the “official” medical community in America. So not only are they telling Todd that he can’t do the procedure, but they are also telling us, as “free” individuals, that we may not have the procedure done by anyone!

Todd Bertrang’s first court date is January 21st in downtown Los Angeles at 8:30AM. Anyone wishing to go and show their support should go to the courthouses at 210 W. Temple Street Div #30 at that time.

To quote Shawn Porter’s comments on the subject,

Regardless of your feelings about Todd personally (I'm quite fond of the old pervert) his arrest brings with it a wakeup call that people ARE paying attention to what we're doing "underground" these days. Mark my words: this will not be the last arrest of a modification artist (Ask Alva and Steve T.).... so if you want to show up and lend Todd some support, I'm sure he'll welcome you.

And he’s right – they know perfectly well Todd isn’t practising medicine, and if they win this they will systematically eliminate any private practitioner not willing to pay their dues. Was Todd offering body modification services? Definitely. Advanced sexual services and counselling? Definitely. But he was not offering medical treatment in any AMA-traditional definition of the word.

I know a lot of people have issues with Todd. He comes from a different background than many of the younger generation of cutters and piercers, and I think they have difficulty understanding why he sees the world the way he does. On that note, I’d like to let Todd speak for himself. Several years ago I interviewed him for BMEradio. A transcript of that interview follows this column.

Todd can be reached via his website at www.toddbertrang.com or on IAM as (obviously) “Todd Bertrang“.

Thank you, and good luck,

Shannon Larratt

BMEzine.com

* You have to love how it’s “disfigurement” when we do it, but if the person doing it has paid their fees to the government to get a doctor’s certificate, it then becomes “cosmetic surgery”.

Shannon Larratt: Welcome back everyone, I’m Shannon Larratt and you’re listening to the 16th broadcast of BMEradio. Today’s show may be a little bit more discoordinated than usual cause we’re doing this interview across time zones, so it’s real late here and I’ve got coffee in one hand and a beer in the other hand. So, probably not a healthy thing. Anyway, the person we’re speaking with today is probably generated more online hate mail than any other body modification artist but at the same time almost everyone that’s had work done by him swears by him and never goes to a mainstream piercer again. His techniques involve almost exclusively large gauges and the majority of his procedures use a scalpel far more than a needle. His aftercare is radically different than what you’d be told by either your piercer or your doctor and to top it all off, his opinions are exclusionary and if you don’t do it his way you’re probably not doing it right. Todd Bertrang, thanks for talking to us today.

Todd Bertrang: That was quite an intro Shannon.

SL: It was.

TB: I was trying not to giggle on the other end. [laugh]

SL: [laugh]

TB: Oh boy, I hadn’t quite the idea I had that kind of reputation there [laugh].

SL: Well if you have anything it’s a reputation. Todd, the first thing I want to ask you about is piercing technique. Why go big?

TB: Well, the right size is not necessarily big. It’s the right size for the right body part. When you’re dealing in below the neck areas you’re generally dealing in an area that moves more such as the navel, in an area that swells and expands and contracts considerably with heat, cold, and sexual arousals such as your nipples and your genital region. When you’re dealing in a thin gauge such as a 14 gauge (ga), you put it in your earlobe or your eyebrow well hey, that’s just fine. But these areas do not do that. When you have a thin gauge in these areas it tends to be like a dull knife in the skin and continually cuts the skin area building up massive scar tissue which becomes hardened and then continually cuts over time and causes loss of sensation, migration, rejection, all kinds of serious problems such as a permanent pathway for all types of infectious diseases to get into the body. It’s really bad for you to start with the wrong thing in the wrong area. The difference here of opinion is if you have a thin gauge and you heal in a inappropriate manner, most people consider that if they have a ring in their thing it would be a good piercing. And that is not my opinion. A ring in your thing means that you have a ring in your thing and that’s it. It doesn’t make it good, it doesn’t make it bad.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: But it can be done generally better than putting, shall we say a 14 ga in your nipple for example, much better, with much better results. Doesn’t mean that the 14 ga is wrong it means that you, why go buy a Model T when you can go buy a Ferrari? You know? Why do that?

SL: Well, I think that some people would say that they like the look of the 14 ga.

TB: Sure. But some people do it just for looks.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: I agree most of these people who do it for looks have absolutely no concept of how good it can feel with the proper gauge and healing techniques. That is saying, “Well, gee I really want to make love to my boyfriend but um, is this supposed to feel good?”

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: “What’s an orgasm?” [laugh] And there’s people out there like that. I mean really really bad. I went to the Ink Slingers Ball here recently last year and these girls wanted to show me what kind of genital piercings could be done and this girl was thirty some years old, had kids, and had no concept what a hood was or what inner labia was. And Ellen Thompson [AVN magazine] was with me and she saw, “Wait a minute here. You’re like thirty something years old and you’ve got children and you don’t even know what labia is? You’ve never heard this word?” She was just aghast at this girl. And she had no concept.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Okay? And you’re dealing in the same thing if someone has education, takes the time to educate someone about heir body and what can be done and why and what the differences are, they won’t get a 14 ga in their nipple. The problem is, it’s going to take two or three hours to sit there and educate the person what and why and what’s going on and you’re dealing in a profit ratio of thirty plus percent for a 14 ga ring in your nipple as opposed to maybe doubling or tripling your money on a 6 ga ring, if you invest thousands of dollars to have them done properly, which most manufacturers don’t make 6 ga correctly.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: When Silver Anchor was in business literally I’d spend three to ten thousand dollars an order. Okay, and I don’t have the volume that most of these people do. That’s a lot of money. Okay, and I invest that to have my stuff done right and I would still only get my price down to six, 6 ga to twelve dollars a ring, whereas you can buy a 14 ga for a buck.

SL: Yeah. [affirmative noise] I think part of the other thing is, and this is even more the case in Europe that there’s this sort of denial that even genital piercing is a sexual thing.

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: I think there are a lot of piercers who don’t want to admit, you know they want you to believe that it’s a, that it’s just decoration.

TB: Last I heard I heard in England it’s illegal to get pierced for a sexual reason. You can pierce anything, until you say it’s illegal or something.

SL: It certainly was. It may not be now but it certainly was at one point.

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: And that point where you know those were the rules, that’s when piercing sort of defined itself.

TB: Right.

SL: Anyway, I was going to ask you more about this later, but since we’ve moved into it now.

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: I want to talk a bit about the overlap between piercing and sexuality. That’s actually how you learned how to pierce.

TB: Yes, it, when I saw my first piercing, which, if anybody’s read my interview from Gauntlet years ago it was a tremendous emotional, mental, sexual response. And this was, I mean I was 18 years old, and 18 years old and anything new and wild and wow, I mean your hormones are in full swing but at the time you just didn’t see this and this girl was very beautiful and she had her nose pierced of all things and it didn’t even, hadn’t even occurred to me that you could pierce anything besides your ear which was common, if you were a girl, at the time but I mean you didn’t see anything else. It was right here in LA, and I was just like, ‘Oh my god, this is just incredible.’ I must have followed her around the store with my mouth hanging open it was just, it struck me that, that tremendous. And when I finally went out and got pierced which took me, there was several things, it took me so long, one, the relationship I was in six years ago was just, couldn’t deal with it, but society at the time, if you were male and you had a piercing you were considered gay and there’s historical reason for this. Jim Ward, the owner of The Gauntlet was gay, a leather gay, and he was very very heterophobic and literally kept piercings in the closet for many years because of that. Because he didn’t want the straight people to get pierced. He didn’t like them at all. And when he did his first clit piercing, the girl literally had to sit there and show him what a clitoris was, he had no concept at all of what a clitoris was. And the, an interesting aside to Gauntlet, and I want to bring this up right now, my techniques which would make me so controversial are anything but gauntlet techniques. And everybody that is following literally what Gauntlet has developed. Jim Ward was a good businessman. He was the biggest and the best, he was backed by a millionaire, Doug Malloy, which is why he succeeded when everybody else at the time failed, because there were other small people around, but they didn’t have the money, they didn’t have the backing…

SL: Well I think I want to interject that too…

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: And I think that a lot of people forget that, that you know Gauntlet was the first business and you know there’s this mythology that at the time there were you know seven people in North America involved in piercing but that’s a load of crap right. There were…

TB: Gauntlet was the only store exclusively devoted to piercing, so I mean there’s the odd ear gun mall or tattooist doing the ear gun piercing in the store.

SL: What I’m saying is back then even though there weren’t you know piercing studios on every corner like there are now, there were still tens of thousands of people practicing piercing in their homes.

TB: Yeah there was people piercing in their homes.

SL: And I think that it was, it didn’t have you know the tribal sort of overtures that a lot of that it has now or any of that it was all in the sexual arena.

TB: It was entirely, piercing, even Gauntlet came from a sexual arena.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: It was all leather gay. It was all wild intense sex.

SL: [affirmative noise] But it wasn’t…

TB: Piercing came from an entirely sexual arena it hasn’t gone to what’s not sexual until recently when people consider you know all the young teeny-boppers who are afraid to admit that, “Gee I get my tongue pierced because I might give my boyfriend head tonight.”

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: You know, they’re too afraid to admit that, “Gee I wanna get fucked.”

SL: And it’s not just…

TB: I mean, they’re young kids, they’re immature young kids that do it, because they saw their buddy do it.

SL: And it’s not just, it’s not even just weird sex too, I mean I think piercing adds to even just vanilla sex.

TB: [affirmative noise] Oh yeah, it has nothing to do with any type of specific sex but it did come from a very heavy SM environment. Which was Gauntlet’s roots.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: And Gauntlet was created to cater to the leather gay SM environment this was the entire purpose of Gauntlet in its conception.

SL: Yeah, anyway I want to talk a bit more about this, but we’re going to take a quick music break, this is, my doctor just told me I’m not allowed to eat any more chocolate so…

TB: [laugh]

SL: This is some live Shonen Knife who does like chocolate.

(song plays)

SL: Todd we were talking on the break about how even, even just facial piercing is a kind of sexual behavior.

TB: It is. Totally.

SL: How’s that?

TB: Whenever you change your body whatsoever, or lack of change, having dreadlocks for example, I don’t wash my hair and I twist it around and round and round and it’s dirty and smelly, whatever you do, whatever you do, I don’t care what it is, you wear a suit, you wear nothing, you paint your body, you cut your hair, you shave your head, anything you do to it to change it’s look will cause your self and your personality to be perceived differently by those around you.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Which is causing a sexual attraction with those around you within a certain parameter based upon your perception of your self of those who you want to attract.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Piercing does this even more so than anything else you can do because it’s a statement, it’s a poke in the eye, “Look at me, look at my shiny thing in my body!” And draws attention to that. And how anybody can say that piercing is a non-sexual thing is literally wearing blinders about what sexuality is all about and what people do. Why does a girl wear a miniskirt, why does she wear makeup, why does she wear perfume, why does she spend thousands of dollars on nice clothes? Because she thinks she’s ugly? Cause she doesn’t want somebody to come up and ask her out? Cause she doesn’t want to feel good about herself? Or because she’s doing it because she feels good about her sexuality and wants to be sexual? You have two choices here.

SL: No, I…

TB: A or B.

SL: Anyway we, you were, we were talking about how you actually learned how to pierce and a lot of it was, it was a period in your life where you were I guess promiscuous and you know you experimented with piercing with your girlfriends and…

Sanctuary
by Todd Bertrang

Looking at the door
She did not know what was in store
Trembling with fear
She felt that HE was near
Locked in bracelets
Her neck in a collar

She knew she could be sold for a dollar
Timidly knocking
Kneeling down, she felt the floor against her stockings
Butterflies in her stomach
With her labia so incredibly swollen
She knew it was time for her virginity to be stolen
A fresh brand on her thigh
Combined, her slavery, her innermost thoughts,
Newly healed piercings

All those things made her so incredibly high
Abruptly she started
When she heard the name she had been given called
The doorway parted
She tried so hard not to be appalled
By the looks of the furs
At the base of the bed
In the dungeon of her Master
Knowing what he was after

A pan was prepared
That later she may be fed
From his hand if she was found pleasing
Now she knew, there would be no teasing
But she must fulfill every wish, every desire
Commanded of her
Brought forth gently by her hair
Made to kneel
The collar on her neck chained to the floor

The foot of the bed
Next to her the pan
Where, perhaps, later she may be fed
Swiftly put upon her back
Legs spread
Her engorged labia weighted down
By her newly healed piercings
Creating even more wetness
Then she had dared dream

She felt her body steam
As he spread her lips
She moaned
As his tongue and the stud he wore
Gently massaged her swollen vulva
Moaning then screaming in ecstasy
She knew herself owned
And what she truly was
A slave

Thank you Master she said

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: And through that, through that you learned what piercings worked sexually, how they worked…

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: And all of that…

TB: Through that I learned size, gauge, placement, diameter, I came up with a lot of the theories that I use today. I took a lot of time to develop those theories because of lack of tools, because of lack of proper jewellery and so forth. I literally had to front the money for a company to start so that I could get the jewellery in 8 ga made in half-inch diameter. It didn’t exist at the time unless you wanted to spend a hundred dollars a ring.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Like, which obviously I couldn’t afford that, it was too much.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: [cough] Back, the, it’s a, for a younger person in their twenties or their teens it’s really a myth of the sexual revolution and free love of the hippie days and all this sort of thing but the reality is until roughly 1990 if you were in the heterosexual crowd in a big city and you went out to a club and you wanted to go home and sleep with someone you literally went home and you met someone and you fucked them. It was that simple. It was that easy. You met someone on the street corner, they stuck their thumb out and within an hour you were in bed. And this was normal. This is what everybody did. No condom, no protection, no worry about AIDS, no worry about disease, and they did it for years, I never got anything. And at the time I was going out to clubs in Hollywood and if I wanted a girl to have a piercing, well guess who got to pierce her? They didn’t have them.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: You didn’t see people a lot in Hollywood with pierced anything. I mean, I was in the thick of the club scene in Hollywood and I had little 14 ga nipple rings and I had crowds around me because I had my nipples pierced. You didn’t see it. They were like, “Oh my god look at that guy.” And today this is common but it wasn’t then. But today, the other side of the coin is you don’t go out and just meet someone and hop in bed in an hour, that’s uncommon, it’s really rare.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Things have changed, society has changed. But that’s literally what I’d do, I’d go out and I’d go to clubs and I’d meet a girl and I’d bring her home and shave her pussy and pierce her nipples and if I liked her and she hung out and we went out again I’d pierce her pussy and if I liked her and hung out again and I’d pierce a few other things.

SL: [laugh]

TB: But, the I kept in touch with the vast majority of these girls and so it taught me a lot. It taught me a lot, a lot. Because when you, when you’re dealing in, let’s say I was in a massive volume store and I was doing twenty-thirty thousand piercings a year, well first off I wouldn’t have a chance to talk to these people, I’d just poke a hole and send them on their way and here’s your little paragraph of instructions.

SL: And more importantly you wouldn’t have a chance to fuck them afterwards.

TB: Well, regardless of whether you fuck them or not you don’t have the opportunity to actually sit down, and in a intimate environment see what’s really happening with their body and what’s working.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Regardless of whether you actually stuck something inside them you got to see…

SL: Well obviously that’s what I mean, you got to see how it works.

TB: Exactly. Exactly. I got to see what is working and why. What is working on my body getting them off, why is it working, what’s working on their body and all their different shapes and sizes and why?

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: In this very very intense sexual arena.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: And that gives me an insight that I don’t know that anybody else has. At all.

SL: You know, I think you’re probably right. The few promiscuous piercers I can think of are gay.

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: And that’s a whole different set of issues I’m sure.

TB: Yes, it’s a whole different set of issues, and while I’m not gay, I’ve still had plenty of anal sex which works very similar so I have, I have insights into all types of sexuality from the straight to the bisexual to the gay set because of the amount of women I’ve been with and the amount of different types of sex I’ve had so…

SL: [affirmative noise] Well let me ask, is it, I mean now that you’re doing this as a business a bit is it sometimes difficult, do the lines blur between client and girlfriend? Or…is it…

TB: When you have enough sexual experience.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: You can tell if someone wants to be approached or not, okay, when you’re a young male and you’re 18 or 20 years old you don’t know whether this girl wants you to ask her out. What you do is ask them all out or you don’t get laid okay?

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: I get a lot of flack for this because I go into BME chat and I try to explain to people, it’s like this is like going to a bar, I’m off here, I’m not working, and I might flirt with every girl in there but I’m flirting, this isn’t real, this is cyber here, one. This is what we’re doing, we’re in here to chat, flirt, have a good time. It’s not like they’re in front of me and their clothes are off.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: One and two, in a real live situation, you can look at someone if you have enough sexual experience and you can tell right away whether they want to fuck you or not and you have the option to pick up on that and decide whether you want them or not. But if you approach someone with the sexual experience I have you already whether they want you to.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: So I don’t…

SL: Yeah.

TB: Of ‘Gee should I ask this girl out and what’s she gonna say?’

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Ever.

SL: I mean, I think you know that one of the things that people accuse you of is sort of you know being on the prowl for young girls to, you know to modify in the chat rooms and things like that. How would you respond to people saying that?

TB: Well, it’s exactly what I was saying, it’s not, I’m off, they’re not walking into my house, they’re not walking into my studio okay?

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: I’m off, this is my off time. I’m out having fun. What, just because I’m a piercer, if I go to a club, okay regardless of the fact whether I’m a piercer or not, if I’m going out to a club to meet girls and get laid what am I gonna do? I’m going to flirt with them, I’m hopefully going to talk about my piercings, whether they want some, because if they don’t want any, why do I want to take them home?

SL: Yeah.

TB: Okay, if they’re not into piercing, I don’t even want to know their name.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: I just crossed them out. If they can’t talk about my piercings and I can’t ask them about theirs, they’re done, off to the next one. That’s in a club social environment where you’re going to go out and trying to get laid.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: But these people that are accusing me of that, they’ve never met me, they haven’t walked into my studio, they haven’t been pierced by me, okay? You don’t do that in a commercial environment.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Okay. And like I said, if, when the average person is accusing me of this, is in their mid twenties or younger, they didn’t live through the sexual revolution, they haven’t had hundreds and hundreds of sexual partners, which from their standpoint that’s just like, “Oh my god you’re kidding me you’re lying.” It didn’t happen. Where I’m standing from it’s like, that’s all I had, most of my friends had thousands. [laugh]

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: It was just a different lifestyle. Hell, I’m 37, I’m at the bottom rung of these. Most of my friends are 45-50 years old and they did it for a whole decade prior to me getting old enough to do it and they had thousands of partners. It was nothing.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: It was just really common, but if you have enough sexual experience you could look at someone and you could read their body language and you know, literally, you know if you could walk up to them stick your tongue down their throat and your hands down their pants and have them like it. Right then and there.

SL: But like you said, this is a different generation, these are, you know like you said 16-25 year old kids that just don’t have that experience and don’t know how to deal with this sort of thing.

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: So, you know who knows maybe it’s not, I mean, if it, may be appropriate in one environment but not necessarily in this one. Either way, this is, I didn’t want to really get into this in the interview.

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: It doesn’t really, who cares right?

TB: [laugh]

SL: Anyway, what I do want to talk to you a bit about after this song is a bit about your aftercare cause you use, I don’t know what the best word for it is, certainly a more organic aftercare than most sort of chemical ridden people are…

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: Recommending…anyway we’re going to continue on that Japanese pop trend, this is Robo Shop Mania — Smile and Shine.

(song plays)

SL: Alright Todd tell me, someone gets a say someone gets a PA [Prince Albert] from you what’s the aftercare you recommend?

TB: Depends on the gauge, what people don’t realize, they hear about this large gauge stuff and this and that the thicker you go the more intense it is. Cause you are causing more tissue damage so you really have to get your aftercare together. You can’t just go, “Oh do salt soaks.” “Oh use saline.” You know, you really have to know what you’re doing. And the more tissue damage you cause the more intensity it is and you really have to have the next level of intense aftercare just right to make it heal or you’re going to have a problem, a really big problem. So depending upon the person’s maturity level, what type of sexual response they want to achieve, what type of aftercare that I think they’re willing to do, and I sit there and explain the differences between an 8 and a 6 and a 4 and a 2 ga and what they’re really going to have to do to heal it and so forth, and literally, a 2 ga PA I can heal those on someone who’s healthy who doesn’t drink who actually eats red meat and doesn’t do drugs in 2 weeks. Done. But it’s a very intense 2 weeks. And somebody has got to be willing to deal with the intensity. They can’t just get this and go back to work and pretend nothing has happened.

SL: So what do they do?

TB: They’ve had very intense minor surgery. That they did.

SL: So what do they do?

TB: Say if we’re doing a 2 ga this is a scalpel procedure. It’s going to bleed.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: And I use three herbs for healing, which are antibiotic, anti-inflammatory, one’s a very good anti-bruising agent and I also use another herb that will slow and finally stop the blood loss. It’s not an instant, you put it on you have to soak it, soak it and finally it will stop the blood loss, so they’re going to be sticking their dick in a cup of these herbs for a good hour or two if it finally stops the blood. Depending upon how healthy they are, how much stress they’re under, how much sleep they’ve got, all this contributes when you’re dealing with a large gauge piercing, what you’re going to be able to experience or not they can expect to be sitting in the bathroom with this cup, with their dick in this cup for at least an hour and up to 3 or 4 hours, and then it will seep for about 24 hours which I’d rather sit with my dick in a cup than having a big baggie of blood the next day. It’s much better. It’ll seep for the next day or two and if their dick gets really large upon erection which some really swell, is then they’re going to have that nice big baggie of blood around their dick the next day if they get an evening erection.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: In the middle of the night. But…

SL: So what…

TB: Well they have, they have showers, they have a special herb that they put on…

SL: Todd, let me interrupt here.

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: The special herbs, can you say what they are or is this Todd’s magic formula that you don’t want to give out?

TB: Well, the main herbs are on the site, they’re lavender, red clover and arnica, arnica is the anti-bruising agent they’re all anti-inflammatory antibiotics.

SL: All fairly well known ones, yeah people can look them up on any number of sites, if they want to learn more about them.

TB: Right. The other herb is an Aztec herb called Quatrolatte and this herb if overused is extremely dangerous, but it’s extremely potent which is why I don’t have it on my site because you can overuse it very easily you can over dry yourself.

SL: What happens?

TB: Right.

SL: It dries out the tissue if you use too much.

TB: It can dry out the tissue and cause a major problem.

SL: Same as alcohol or…

TB: Well…

SL: I mean, same drying effect.

TB: It has a drying effect. It doesn’t have the crystallization effect alcohol will for lack of a better term. It, to give you an idea, let’s say someone has a bleeding ulcer, well contemporary medical science says, “Well we have to cut this out. And re-sew your stomach lining it’s the only way we can heal it.” Well, literally Quatrolatte will dry it up and cure it and heal it.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Quatrolatte is strong enough to where, let’s say you have a 3rd degree burn and just doing soaks with just this herb and peeling off the dead tissue as it dries daily, I’d say a third degree burn on your hand all you’re going to have by the time you’re done healing it is a slight discoloration.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: It’s that potent, but you have to know how to use the herb. You can really injure someone if you don’t know what you’re doing. And most people, they don’t know. So that’s why I didn’t put it up on the site.

SL: Where did you figure out how to use it?

TB: My girl Ophie who I’ve been with for 8 years her uncle was renowned Mexican herbalist who people fly in from all over the world and specifically mention I gave you of the hand burning, her aunt used that on her cousin and that was the result when she was a little girl.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: From just that herb.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: And when I met her I had a little bit of a subincision, and the next time I did a cutting, and she mentioned that herb and we brought it out and we tried it and I tend to experiment around on my own body before I use it on other people so I get the whole feeling of what exactly I’m doing. And that’s exactly how I learned to use the herb is on my penis.

SL: It’s definitely the best way to learn doing stuff on yourself.

TB: Right, yeah. I’m absolutely in amazement when people go, “Oh I’m a piercer” and they’ve got two or three piercings. Like, well no, you’re someone who pretends to be a piercer who pokes holes in people and takes money. That they have no comprehension of what they’re doing.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: That’s my opinion of those people.

SL: Well I know a lot of my understanding of the way piercing works is just by having had tons of piercings and you know, knowing how they’ve all healed differently and having treated them differently and you know seeing the different results.

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: Anyway, the next thing I want to ask you Todd is this is probably something you’ve gotten an awful lot of online flack about and you know when I’ve mentioned to people, you know I’m interviewing Todd Bertrang is there anything you want to ask him everyone said, ask him about his autoclave. Um, so tell me Todd what’s up with your autoclave?

TB: Well, I actually happen to have one. [laugh]

SL: But you don’t always use it?

TB: No. Piercers have this thing thinking that they have medical training. They don’t. Usually. Anybody that truly has medical training knows that there are chemical sterilization processes. Anybody who has medical training has heard of what they call an endoscope, what an endoscope is, is a camera that they can use to put down your arteries to see whether they’re clogged or not an endoscope is not autoclavable. There is nothing more infectious, or capable of being infected easier with more damaging results than your arteries or your heart. Period end of story. But if they can put an endoscopes in Wavocide and use it just fine but, ‘Oh my god we can’t put a piercing needle in it.’ They have no concept of what they’re doing at all.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: They scare me that they’re so ignorant of true medical terminology, medical science to say this is a must. Okay. The reason why they said it was a must is because the APP said it’s a must and the APP said it’s a must because an autoclave at the time cost forty-five hundred bucks. And Gauntlet didn’t want all these little piercing stores popping up doing piercings and they thought they could control it like that.

SL: Cause you buy a jug of Wavocide for forty bucks.

TB: Bingo. And be sterile.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Okay? Wavocide is perfectly sterile when used properly.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: This stuff is wonderful, when it doesn’t work anymore it turns colour you can see it’s not going to work.

SL: Yeah, no it’s true I’ve used Wavocide as well, I agree with you. You know and I think that brings up the point that is interesting that a lot of piercers they don’t really, they never really concentrate on understanding what they’re doing they, piercing for them is sort of a rules based system you know. And that’s why…

TB: [affirmative noise] Yeah, well you know the same with doctors, they go to medical school…

SL: Yeah.

TB: They get their PhD and all they know about is what they read. And piercers do the same thing, which is absolutely pathetic. There’s no concept for any room of improvement and any experimentation any true understanding of the process of what they’re actually doing to someone. And here they’re altering someone’s life.

SL: Well I think it would be alright if you’re a carpenter or something that’s a very established field you know where we’ve done ten thousand years of research but…

TB: Right.

SL: You know piercing in the west is a new field you know. I think people who are piercing need to be on their toes and need to really know what they’re doing and need to, need to always be learning and I think a lot of them aren’t.

TB: I’d say that 99.999% of them are not, or learn to a degree and they’re done.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: And the other side to the coin is there’s two ways to make money in this business. Okay? Put up with the fact you’re not, or you get to a point where all you do is production piercing. You’re in and out, you’re gone and it’s good enough to create a hole and a ring and see ya.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Because if you can’t do it that way you’re not going to make any money. There are people who make a hundred grand a year or better in this pierce, in this business but that’s the only way they’re doing it. They’re in and out the smallest as possible, okay, we can’t give them the next size up if we can get them the smallest one because then we don’t get that next size stretch.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Okay? And if their happy with your work they’re going to come back to you and get your jewellery, you get 70% back of everything you do and it takes this $30 piercing and by the time they come back and they stretch and every time they come back and they get something else or their buddy does and over the course of a year it turns this $30 piercing into two-thousand bucks.

SL: Sure, you’re selling them subscriptions instead of a single magazine.

TB: Exactly. And that’s what makes money. But unfortunately, as far as what the piercee is considered what it could be it’s absolutely detrimental to the piercee.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: I mean it’s fine if they want a 14 ga eyebrow but if they want a really good sexual piercing or if they want something really good otherwise, I mean a lot of the people don’t want a 14 ga labret they want an 8 ga labret. But they go in and, “Oh no no we have to start like this and stretch it up” because it makes them money. That’s all it’s about.

SL: Let me ask you Todd, what’s the difference, say someone gets a 12 ga PA…

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: And over the period of a year stretches it up to 2 ga, how is that, how is the end result different from a…

TB: It’s quite a bit different.

SL: Alright.

TB: Depending on how they healed it. Having had a 12 ga PA and stretched it out myself, assuming they even get good placement which most people who start at 12 ga won’t place them properly. Let’s assume they get good placement what happens is, because it’s thinner, you’re creating a much denser area of scar tissue. It’s much harder to stretch. The denser area of scar tissue is much less sensitive. So they just desensitized their dick. Why had they, did you use, get desensitized, a piercing for sensation and do it in such a way that it desensitizes the area that you put it in. That’s pretty stupid.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Okay, that’s what it does. You, you will lose anywhere from 30-100% of your sensation from starting from small in that given area.

SL: Well I don’t think that’s true for everyone though.

TB: For 80% of the people.

SL: Well I don’t know if I’d agree with that number but…

TB: That’s going, based upon statistical average based upon my 12 years of experience from what I’ve seen. Who’ve I pierced and who I’ve come in contact with.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: To give you an example, I, now I didn’t have sex with these two people, I took them at their word. I’ve talked to two girls who swear up and down that prior to getting their nipples pierced at 14 ga they became breast orgasmic. Prior to getting their nipples pierced they weren’t.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Okay? At 6 or 4 ga, you’re dealing in 80% or better are going to be able to have breast orgasms from those piercings done and healed properly at that time. But you’re not going to get that when you pierce at a 14 ga and stretch it out.

SL: [affirmative noise] Well I will tell you I’ve got a few e-mails in the last month of girls writing me you know asking whether it was normal for you know their nipple piercings to eliminate feeling in their nipples. These are regular 14 ga nipples.

TB: It’s very very common.

SL: So I…

TB: Especially over time, especially over a couple of years.

SL: You know we can…

TB: Because the scar tissue continually builds up because it’s continually expanding and contracting and cutting that and I would say somewhere between 30-50% lose partial to complete sensation in a piercing done thinner than 8 ga in the nipples.

SL: Yeah, I think we could…

TB: Conservatively.

SL: Yeah I think we could argue about those percentages but I’ll say even if it’s one in fifty there’s, it’s a, even that one in fifty is a solid argument for why not do it bigger.

TB: In my opinion even if it’s one in a thousand, it’s too much.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Too many.

SL: [affirmative noise] Because…yeah, you know you’re right, even you know obviously a whole different set of play is available in an 8 ga or larger piercing than in a, you know…

TB: Yeah, I mean why…

SL: Even if you’re into light, you know just light play, it’s really easy to accidentally give that piercing a solid tug you know and you can do damage.

TB: Yeah, real easily. Look at it this way. If the girl doesn’t like to have, or the guy like to have a dull knife stuck inside them and get off that way, then why are they putting a dull knife in their nipple why are they putting a dull knife inside of their penis or labia. Because that’s what it is.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: It’s the same thickness.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Don’t you want something that feels good like a finger? You gotta go thicker then.

SL: That’s a good point. That’s a good point. Do you want a dull knife or do you want a finger.

TB: [affirmative noise] Yeah, what feels good to your body?

SL: [affirmative noise] Anyway I want to take another break…

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: When we come back Todd I want to talk about some of the heavier procedures that you’re, that you advocate being female circumcision, sub, and a number of other things. Anyway, this is Creature of Habit by Swearing at Motorist.

(song plays)

SL: Alright we’re back. Todd, one of the, let’s start with female circumcision, let me ask you first, what is that?

TB: Female circumcision is one of several things. The circumcise literally means to remove around, but it doesn’t say around what. That’s the actual meaning of the word. In the female it could be remove around the vulva, anything in the vulva area you can remove partial or complete the hood, the inner labia, the outer labia if you wanted to, generally it means anything to do with the hood or the inner labia in most contexts. Some people will include the removal of the clitoris itself in that context, but that’s incorrect, that’s a clitorodectomy.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: The anti-female circumcision groups try to persuade the gullible that female circumcision is truly labial occlusion which is actually really rare but what labial occlusion is they remove the inner labia, the hood, the external clitoris and almost all of the outer labia and sew up the remainder leaving a very small menstrual and urinary opening.

SL: Essentially it’s a total genital amputation.

TB: Essentially yeah, external genital amputation. And they try to call it female circumcision and that’s not true at all. Female circumcision in it’s true sense like I said is partial or complete removal of the hood and or the inner labia or any portion thereof.

SL: And I think that you know people especially in this scene don’t realize how incredibly common it is. Last week, Mc, not last week about a month ago, McLean’s which is Canada’s equivalent to Time magazine had a cover article on female circumcision as done by plastic surgeons here on women in the west and spoke very positively about it.

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: I think Cosmo has done the same as have any number of other magazines I mean this isn’t, you know this isn’t a far out thing, I mean a lot of people, even a lot of real legitimate doctors have stood behind this.

TB: There are very legitimate reasons to have it done. First off you’re, why does a girl get a boob job or a breast reduction? Enhancement or reduction, because they’re not comfortable with how their body’s are shaped, they want to be shaped like this. They like it. Why shouldn’t someone have power over how their genitals look or respond. We’re under the illusion that because it’s down there on a woman’s body it automatically feels good. Well this is simply not true. Inner labia or hood can actually feel better than the clitoris but they can also feel very bad to touch. Or they could actually feel nothing at all. So if something is feeling bad to touch down there or doesn’t feel a thing why do you want it on your body, you don’t. And you’re better off to remove it or if you don’t like the way it looks, it grosses you out, everyone has a different shape of what they want to look like, and we as adults should have the right to choose that and in the United States there are some places that do offer it as labiaplasty, most of them are not very good even plastic surgeons they absolutely suck, they’re horrible. They’re very expensive and most of them won’t touch you for fear of medical malpractice lawsuits. They are afraid they’ll lose their medical license. It’s a very very touchy subject here in the US, it’s really really scary because some, then I’ve known girls who’ve actually taken matters into their own hands and cut it off with scissors and stuff like this and have tremendous problems from it. But done right it can be a very very enhancing procedure, and can actually cause tremendous increase in sexual sensation.

SL: [affirmative noise] Now the footage that I’ve seen it’s a very bloody procedure when you’re talking about the deeper removals that are fairly complete.

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: Is it a dangerous procedure?

TB: Anytime you’re dealing with a loss of blood you’re dealing with a potential shock. And when you’re dealing with potential shock you’re dealing with potential death. What most people don’t understand I, while we’re speaking of this it boggles my mind I do not know of, personally, any place I’ve ever been that does piercings, that does tattoos that has a refrigerator with some orange juice and some cookies and some bananas on hand for when people have a blood sugar reaction. They didn’t even ask them if they’ve eaten. They don’t. It goes right over their head. And then people pass out on the floor and think, “Oh gee it was so painful.” It had nothing to do with the pain, they didn’t eat and they didn’t take care of their self and they think it’s like when they get their haircut and have a blood sugar reaction and pass out. It has nothing to do with pain, it has to do with blood sugar reaction and if you I mean you could go into epileptic shock and seizure and death from this and people just don’t, don’t take care of business, and it’s really really sad. But shock is very very easy to prevent it’s a matter of having enough blood sugar in your systems when the brain reacts to this injury it reaches for its food which is blood sugar. So it can assimilate the new reactions that it’s having, “Oh my god somebody’s’ cutting my pussy. Oh my god somebody’s cutting my dick. Oh my god this is happening to me.” And you don’t go into shock. It’s quite simple.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: You have enough blankets on hand, if you’re doing something major you really want to have an IV drip on hand, depending on what you’re doing but anybody that does any type of body mod that doesn’t have something as simple as orange juice and bananas on hand shouldn’t be in the business.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: And that’s almost everybody out there.

SL: [affirmative noise] Like we mentioned before, most piercers work in a pretty clinical and impersonal environment if I remember the, some of the photos of the procedures that we’re talking about here, you know there’s a couple naked girls, there’s a bed, there’s some ropes, um what sort of situation are these procedures done in?

TB: They’re done in a home studio. Right in a bed.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: What’s the difference in a hospital bed or the bed in your house? It’s a bed…

SL: Yeah.

TB: A bed’s a bed’s a bed.

SL: What I’m asking too is it, is it a scene? Is it, what, you know what relationship is there? I mean is it?

TB: Most people come here because they don’t want to be in a clinical environment where they’re seeking, they have enough intelligence to realize, see there’s more to piercing than what the average piercing store is offering and they travel from all over the world for this different type of feature.

SL: Yeah, it’s true.

TB: They spend thousands of dollars to get here for a hundred dollar piercing.

SL: [affirmative noise] No, it’s true as much as…

TB: Which has a lot to do with what everybody else is doing, if I’m getting all these people from all over the world spending thousands of dollars to come here to get a hundred dollar piercing…

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: I mean that’s pretty pathetic on everybody else’s end. Cause they’re so primitive. But good for me bad for them I guess. But…

SL: Yeah, no its…

TB: Piercings as mentioned to me are sexual. Do I want to have sex in a doctor’s office? Well probably not unless you’re really into the medical aspect and that turns you on. You’re probably not going to get turned on by this real clinical thing. Most people want to have their piercings, in my experience, be a very intimate memorable and sexual experience to them. It has nothing to do with whether they’re having sex with me, I’m just the mode of how they achieve this inner sexual experience.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: Okay? I’m just the, the doctor of the moment that allows it to happen for them. And they’d much rather be in that type of environment. I’ve been requested to do many types of SM scenes with piercings and that sort of thing with ropes and flogging and all that and it’s really not that uncommon. As we mentioned earlier, this is where piercings came from. The leather gay SM movement. It’s where it came from, what it’s all about.

SL: Let me ask you, do you think it’s healthier to do a piercing in that type of environment. Healthier on a psychological level?

TB: Absolutely, tremendously, it’s tremendously freeing. It means you appreciate what you’re doing.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: It means that you are doing it for yourself for your innermost gain, not because my buddy got it and I thought it was cool.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: It’s, it’s important to you.

SL: Right.

TB: It’s real.

SL: Right. Alright, I’ll ask you next about subincision. Subincision I guess is sort of a, certainly a male…

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: Anlagen to circumcision, or splitting of the hood.

TB: In some aspects yeah.

SL: Now, first you did that on yourself and we’ve all read the various experiences on BME and in the PFIQ article.

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: Now, when I’ve seen the footage that you, of yours that you’ve done, it doesn’t look like they’re marked it’s just a quick cut it and they seem to turn out perfectly, is, what’s the procedure like? Is it simple? Is it you know, or is there more to it that I’m not seeing?

TB: Well, it’s simple for me but it’s, if you have an 8 year old who’s a musical prodigy, she or he will sit down and go, “Well it’s really easy why can’t you do it?” It’s simple for me but that doesn’t mean it’s simple for someone else.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: As you mentioned on the answer page of BME, there’s a line that go down the body, that separates everything, all you’ve got to do is follow the line. It’s either on center or off center, but it gives you a line.

SL: So you don’t have to draw a line cause it’s already there.

TB: Bingo.

SL: [laugh] Good enough.

TB: [laugh]

SL: Yeah, I guess that’s true. I want to ask you, you’ve had a couple funny procedures come to you. One of them is this strip circumcision.

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: Tell me about, what was that and why did the guy want it done?

TB: Well, he was very erotisized, it took me forever to get this guy to tell me this, but he was very erotisized about the concept of having a scar on his penis from his first sexual experience, cause the girl was licking his newly circumcised penis as a teenager and orgasming from it. And that was, he was almost 70 years old and evidently this had stuck in his mind as the best or one of the best sexual experiences he’d had and he wanted to recreate this by having the scar on his penis. And that was his whole concept, literally scarification of the penis.

SL: And…

TB: It was quite interesting I thought.

SL: [affirmative noise] And he was an older guy.

TB: He was almost 70 years old, he was like 67 years old when he came here.

SL: [affirmative noise] And you’ve had, well I don’t even know how much I want to talk about her cause it will just result in this slew of e-mails to both me and you but some of your, you know this I think that 70 year old guy was you know real solid and sane, but not all your clients have been quite so easy to deal with.

TB: No. I’ve had a few people be rather on the very definite end of insane, to where you wonder how they were even let out of the funny farm. And that particular person you’re alluding to actually hasn’t been the only one. That one just got very deep under my skin shall we say. But there’s, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a very significant amount of people which the medical professionals have only seen the very worse end of this that are into modification of the body that aren’t quite all there in their head. Which is really scary, to me, or really sad. And yeah, I certainly got a loo loo for one of those.

SL: [affirmative noise] Now you had, you were fairly deeply involved with at least this one.

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: Do you think that sort of your eagerness to do these procedures, and maybe, maybe because of your own sexual excitement attached to them sort of sometimes makes you miss some of the other person’s problems and maybe blinds you to a reason why maybe you shouldn’t be working on them?

TB: That hits very close to the truth. Let me give an analogy in your own life. Let’s go back to where you got your first computer and were first getting into mods and now today you’ve got zillions of subscriptions you’re it as far as on the Internet if anybody wants to do anything with piercings your it. You are it Shannon.

SL: [affirmative noise] Yeah.

TB: And have been it for a long time. But let’s just say back then when you had this inkling of an idea, okay someone spelled out, “Gee if you do this for me I can do that for you and make you do that tomorrow.”

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: You’d want that to happen.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: And you’d believe their story. If it sounded reasonable. And that’s exactly what happened with this girl.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: She gave me a story that I wanted to believe in, that sounded reasonable to me and because I’m open to other types of cultural things and other types of sexuality I gave her the benefit of the, of the doubt.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: And it didn’t occur to me that someone would invent literally their entire life story, their friends, their family everything in detail.

SL: Yeah, I’m hoping that at least a few of the people who are listening to this know who we are talking about or else this is just a big in joke, so we won’t get, I don’t think we’ll go into it anymore.

TB: Right.

SL: Anyway I’m going to play one more song, and when we come back I want to talk to Todd about some of his new plans which are for some of you, will hopefully be very exciting and maybe you can do some fun stuff with Todd. Anyway this is Fred Lane, this just got re-released on CD, this is absolute insanity, this is The Man with The Fold Back Ears.

(song plays)

SL: Alright that was some crazy stuff we just listened to. Anyway, you know there are porn stars with nipple piercings there are porn stars with a hood piercing, but there’s not really, there’s not really much of a pierced porn market. There’s O-Pearl and that whole Creative Art Collective or something like that.

TB: In Germany, near Frankfurt.

SL: Somewhere in Europe you know but that’s a very specific type of fetishy pornography.

TB: [affirmative noise]

SL: Now Todd you’ve invested a lot of money in a new sort of both business and personal venture. You want to tell us a bit about that and maybe how some of the people listening if they’re so inclined can get involved in it?

TB: [affirmative noise] Well I have had the idea for quite a few years now to start doing pierced pornos. Which the pornography market first off they don’t want their girls pierced that much. They’ll put up with a couple of little things and it takes under normal techniques, years to obtain any type of amount of and gauge and thousands and thousands of dollars, because most people don’t have it, and in fact I was trying to do this earlier and it finally dawned on me that the only way I’m going to be able to do this is to literally do the modifications free and bring girls out and let them live in my estate that I just bought, I just bought a 3 acre estate with a very very large house and pool and whatnot and we’ll be remodeling it making it extremely large but so I’m going to be bringing girls from all over the world at my expense to stay for three months at my estate with free mods, but they have to have sex with me and other girls and other guys on film.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: And we’ll be videoing this and hopefully marketing this which it will take some time to get out but I think that’s the only way to get really intense mods, I don’t know of anybody else who can literally sit and do 20-30-40 pussy rings or dick rings at one sitting and heal them in fuckable in three weeks besides myself.

SL: [affirmative noise]

TB: They don’t have the techniques, and people I tell them that and they can’t even believe I’m doing one 6 ga ring in three weeks and healing it. But that’s what I can do. And so if you’re cute and you’re female, or if you’re a guy let me know.

SL: They can contact you through www.toddbertrang.com there’ll be a link obviously with this as well so they can just click over onto it. And I guess what they should, what should e-mail you a picture of themselves.

TB: Yup e-mail me tell me their interests, it’s going to be extreme, I don’t want one or two piercings, you want a hood piercing that’s not enough.

SL: This is a lifestyle change you better be into it and…

TB: Yeah you better be into it you’re going to walk away with 20-50 piercings or a circumcision some radical stuff.

SL: [affirmative noise] And if you’re into it it’d be a lot of fun.

TB: And if you’re female, you’ll be living on my estate for three months and you better be ready to prove to me that you’re not a nut like the one I got [laugh].

SL: [laugh]

TB: Before, I don’t need that again.

SL: Alright well Todd, I want to thank you for talking to us today, I want to thank you for sort of bravely standing forward and saying what you know piercing is really about to you and I think to an awful lot of other people and I hope the movie project goes well and I wish you the best of luck on Todd and thanks for talking to us.

TB: Thanks I hope to be back again one day.

SL: Excellent

(song plays)