“A word to the wise ain’t necessary, it’s the stupid ones who need the advice.”

– Bill Cosby

In one of her most recent Dear Abby letters, Jeanne Philips (aka “Abby”) received a letter from a certified operating-room nurse regarding the risks of tongue piercing. Philips, adding a better safe than sorry response posted the letter to her column which ran with a large headline proclaiming “tongue rings can lead to heart surgery”.

Dear Abby is syndicated in over 1,200 papers and has a readership of approximately 95 million people, who all just got collectively stupider because of her largely unquestioning parroting of this misleading nurse’s claims.

According to the nurse, Karen Murphy from Morten Plant Hospital in Florida, “tongue studs can lead to endocarditis” in “otherwise healthy young people”. Saying that tongue piercing can lead to heart disease is like saying that having a dog can lead to fatal allergic response — yes, it’s true, but you have to have a pre-existing medical condition. In my example, you have to have a pet dander-type allergy, and in Murphy’s tongue piercing example, you have to have already have a valvular heart disease. It is extremely rare for endocarditis to affect someone who doesn’t already suffer from heart disease, and those that are tend to be older with already failing health.

Endocarditis is usually caused by a staph or strep infection, which admittedly are the types of bacteria common with body piercing infections. If an infection from a piercing has these bacteria enter the bloodstream (which is certainly possible from tongue piercing), those bacteria can lodge in the heart’s lining or valves. If the person has congenital heart defects, problems with the heart musculature such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, valve damage from diseases such as rhematic fever, or artificial heart valves, they are at risk of these infections. Anything that can cause oral injury — even teeth cleaning — requires the individual to first take a course of antibiotics to reduce their risk level. Other injuries (even papercuts) can lead to endocarditis in these individuals. Luckily, according to the American Heart Association (americanheart.org), endocarditis is extremely rare in people who do not suffer from the heart conditions I’ve just mentioned.

To be very clear, telling normal people that they shouldn’t get tongue piercings because of the risk of heart surgery is like telling them they should stop going to the dentist for the same reason! While it is important to point out that the Dear Abby column did disclaim in their response that they’d been informed by the AHA that only “certain individuals, people with a medical history of rheumatic fever or rheumatic valve disease — or any heart valve disease” are at risk, Jeanne still concluded that all her readers are “better to be safe than sorry”. Given the screaming headline and the page real-estate given to the misleading nurse, it is safe to assume that this will be yet another thing that will make educators, legislators, and parents behave even more ignorantly toward body piercing.

Estimating from body jewelry sales (straight ¾” and ½” barbells are almost all used for tongue piercing), there are millions of people with tongue piercings, and only a handful of those have had this complication, whereas the rate of infective endocarditis in the general public is between 1.7 and 4 per 100,000 — meaning there is no statistical evidence that tongue piercing leads to health complications in any meaningful numbers.

I have a letter I think I need to mail in.

Dear Abby,

Should I go outside? Every year, approximately one thousand people in the United States are struck by lightning, and about a hundred of them are actually killed! You recently said that “otherwise healthy” people might be “better safe than sorry” and should avoid tongue piercing because of the risk. Given that going outdoors — or using the telephone while it’s raining out — is far, far, far more dangerous, surely you must agree that it would be best if I didn’t go to work today.

Frank O’Derby

PS. I’m a little concerned that three hundred people have died from bee stings over the past couple decades. Do you think it would be a good idea to ask my Senator to ban honey?

There’s one thing the world desperately needs more of, and that’s common sense. It’s one thing to expect without fulfillment that Ms. Dear Abby had the “uncommon common sense and youthful perspective” she claims to have, but entirely another thing to wish that the OR nurses had it as well. If they can’t think clearly about tongue piercing, can we really trust nurses like Karen Murphy to think clearly about our emergency health care?

Note to self: don’t get hurt in Clearwater, Florida.

Shannon Larratt
BME.com

“We mostly operate as Absent Bodies. That’s because a body is designed to interface with its environment — its sensors are open-to-the-world (compared to its inadequate internal surveillance system). The body’s mobility and navigation in the world require this outward orientation. Its absence is augmented by the fact that the body functions habitually and automatically. Awareness is often that which occurs when the body malfunctions.”

– Stelarc

Australian performance artist Stelarc has been doing public suspensions since the 1970s. He is literally the first face many people who are now “elders” in the suspension movement came in contact with, although his use of suspension is very different than the standard we seem to have settled on more recently.

In 1987, two years before RE/search released Modern Primitives, Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture hit the shelves. My father bought me a copy, highlighted the opening quote — “There is nothing more terrifying than stupidity – Werner Herzog” — and that now beat up copy still rests on my bookshelf. Amid articles on eugenics, nuclear war, modern fascist movments, schizophrenia, and child molestation, was an interview with Fakir Musafar somewhat derisively discussing Stelarc.

While they’d later find a common ground for discussion, at the time Fakir was none-too-kind, writing,

“He has a tremendous amount of guts, but I think his civilization varnish has not been scrubbed enough. He is capable of enduring things longer than he does. If he hung for a longer length of time, he’d have a mystical experience. I can’t help to think that he may have had one or been on the border and it scared the hell out of him. So he limits the length and calls it art. What he’s dabbling in is magic technology.”

But it was enough to get a generation desperate to find literature on something that was calling to them seeking out Stelarc. A few years earlier (1984) Stelarc had released Obsolete Body: Suspensions, a book of writing and photos on flesh hook suspension, using the body as a sculptural installation in various art spaces (and public spaces as well). As much as Fakir expressed dismay at Stelarc’s refusal to embrace the spiritual application of suspension, Stelarc had become — without even knowing it at the time — one of the modern suspension movement’s godfathers. Back then, only he and Fakir were out there doing it publicly and sharing their experiences.

TOKYO – 11 MAY 1980. PHOTO: KENJI NOZAWA

“The insertions were done with the body laying on the floor, below a halo of rocks which had been suspended from eye-bolts in the ceiling with slip-knots. When everything was connected the cords were tugged, releasing the rocks. As the rocks came down, the body went up. The body started to gently sway from side to side, triggering random oscillations of the ring of rocks. Everything was in motion, balanced and buoyant. Everything was connected and and contained. Thoughts of obsolescence flickering in and out of the silence. The telephone rings. Murmurs. Distractions. Sitting, suspended and anxious.”

MUNICH – 8 AUGUST 1977 PHOTO: HAROLD RUMPF

TOKYO – 12 MARCH 1978
PHOTO: TONY FIGALLO

TOKYO – 2 MARCH 1980
PHOTO: NINA KUO

MIURA – 30 MAY 1981

PHOTO: ICHIRO YAMANA

YOKOHAMA – 29 MAY 1988
PHOTO: SIMON HUNTER
STELARC’S FINAL SUSPENSION

I finally had a chance to meet with Stelarc in person at TransVision 2004 in Toronto (click here for part one of our TransVision coverage) where he was giving a presentation on his work. Stelarc is friendly and approachable, and most of all down to earth with an easy boisterous laugh. At his talk he covered everything from his early suspension work (which ended in 1988, a decade before the suspension mainstream would boom) and “third hand” experiments (a fully functional third hand, controlled by nerves in other parts of his body).

TOKYO – 8 MAY 1981 PHOTO: JUN MORIOKA

TOKYO – 22 MAY 1982 PHOTO: AKIRO OKADA

“Whilst the body activates its extra manipulator, the real left arm is remote-controlled and jerked into action by two muscle stimulators. Electrodes positioned on the flexor muscles and biceps curl the fingers inwards, bend the wrist and thrust the arm upwards. The triggerings of the arm motions pace the performance and the stimulator signals are used as sound sources, as is the motor sound of the Third Hand mechanism itself.”

Stelarc also discussed his exoskeletons and robot appendages, and his work with electric muscle stimulation, including pulling “volunteers” out of the audience, wiring them to his control box, and forcing them to dance — any attempt to resist his commands were met with pain, increased voltage, and eventually failure as they involuntarily moved exactly as he choreographed. In previous performances Stelarc has wired himself with these devices and been controlled by both audiences and other factors like Internet ping times.

“During the Ping Body performances, what is being considered is a body moving not to the promptings of another body in another place, but rather to Internet activity itself — the body’s proprioception and musculature stimulated not by its internal nervous system but by the external ebb and flow of data. Ping values from 0-2000 milliseconds (indicative of both distance and density levels of Internet activity) are used to activate a multiple muscle stimulator directing 0-60 volts to the body. Thus ping values that indicate spatial and time parameters of the Internet choreograph and compose the performances. A graphical interface of limb motions simulates and initiates the physical body’s movements. This, in turn, generates sounds mapped to proximity, positioning and bending of the arms and legs.”

Stelarc also showed some of the work he’s been doing on his “third ear” project, in which a replica of his own ear will be implanted into another part of his body — instead of listening though, this ear may talk instead. Helped by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of Tissue Culture & Art, Stelarc has been “growing” these replica ears inside biotumblers as his own cells permeate a polymer latice. Finally, Stelarc also showed his avatar projects (an Alice-based communication system coupled with a very creepy animation of his head), allowing computers to speak on his behalf as him.

After TransVision, Stelarc and I were able to sit down for an interview to talk both about his suspension work and his other art. I’d like to present that video now. It’s 45 minutes long so the file sizes are quite large. Please save it to your computer, rather than trying to view it in your browser!

That’s actually the first real video I’ve edited using Avid, so I apologize for any errors. While you’re waiting for it to download, I’d like to strongly urge you to go and browse Stelarc’s website at www.stelarc.va.com.au, as the interview assumes a basic knowledge of his work. Not only is Stelarc one of the seeds of the suspension movement, but he’s also an important seed in cyborg culture, distributed intelligence, technoethics, and other fields he likely never knew he was even performing for.

Edit/Update (October 2012) – I’ve posted this to YouTube here:

Thanks to Stelarc of course, and to Philip Barbosa for videotaping the interview and presentation, and thanks to Bo De Duyen for allowing us to film there. Thank you as well to everyone from BetterHumans and the WTA for inviting us in the first place.

“Transhumanism is a way of thinking about the future that is based on the premise that the human species in its current form does not represent the end of our development but rather a comparatively early phase.”

– Prof. Nick Bostrom, Oxford University

Steve Mann (wearcam.org) speaking about wearable computing, glogging, and sousveillance. I really urge you to visit his websites to learn more about how he’s augmenting and mediating the human experience using a cyborg body.

João Pedro de Magalhães of Harvard Medical School talking about his work in trying to find — and one day cure — the genetic causes of aging. You can see in this picture how unfortunately empty the event was.

Dr. Rafal Smigrodski (Gencia Corporation) talking about his work on mtDNA replacement which could cure diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimers, and diabetes, as well as dramatically extending lifespans.

Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey talking about life extension by “cleaning” our cells of the toxic aggregates that our bodies are currently unable to deal with. Great beard, great mind.

Allen Randall’s talk on “Quantum Miracles and Immortality” included discussion of a number of amusing thought experiments. In simple terms, quantum theory suggests that all possible states exist at once (ie. there are multiple worlds, like in that show Quantum Leap). Therefore, if you try to kill yourself in a way that has an (impossibly high) high chance of success in every one of these worlds, only the immortals survive — thus creating a quantum state that favors your immortality. I’m not really sure if this talk was supposed to be serious or just really funny, but I enjoyed it and I’ve always been a sucker for philosopher mathematicians.

Torsten Nahm from Bonn, Germany talking about aging, and arguing that being biological (wetware) sucks because of that aging. By moving into a digital form, we can become immortal, make backups of ourselves, experiment with different lives, and anything else we’d like. However, we need to decide whether the transition from one form of being to another involves not only rebirth, but death.

Ben Hyink’s talk on preserving network integrity during the process of uploading. That is, how do you keep an entity alive and conscious as it transitions into a new body? Unfortunately like many of the plenary talks, Ben was not able to fit all of his interesting ideas into the allotted time.

Anders Sandberg introducing Nick Bostrom’s closing talk. I first interviewed Anders for BME back in I think 1996. Anders’s enthusiastic online promotion of transhumanism has introduced thousands and thousands of people to a more forward-leaning way of thinking. I really liked Anders, although I only got to speak to him briefly. Super nice guy… actually, everyone I met at the event was really nice.

Nick Bostrom of Oxford University and the WTA puts transhumanism — and our need to embrace it — in simple and convincing terms in his closing talk. Nick is also the author of the transhumanism FAQ which is an excellent introduction to the subject along with Anders’s pages.

With George Dvorsky of Betterhumans, one of my hosts (Simon had already slipped out; I’d hoped to include both of them). As well as his work with Betterhumans, you may also want to check out his personal site and blog.

With Rudi Hoffman, “Cryonics Insurance Specialist”. I really got a kick out of Rudi — as much as he’s a real cliché of a salesman, he’s a a lot of fun and an incredibly enthusiastic spokesman for jumping into the future by jumping into a vat of liquid nitrogen. Contact Rudi if you’re trying to find an affordable way to have your brain — or entire body — frozen Futurama-style.

A group photo taken near the end of the event. Shannon Bell is on the far left (when I mentioned that Shannon had joined us to friends, they were extremely excited — she has a reputation for being one of the best professors you can have at York University, as well as being a distinguished author and researcher). In the middle of the front row is Stelarc who you’ll meet in more detail in part two of this article, and between them is José Luis Cordeiro who will be hosting TransVision 2004 in Caracas, Venezuela.

“If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

– Abigail Adams

Every woman I know that’s been to a tattoo convention knows what most of the photographers can be like — dodgy old men trying to convince you to come to their hotel room. You can easily recognize their sleazy work in the magazines; they’re the guys that think you have to be nude to “properly show off” that little star on your wrist.

“Want a picture of your sleeve in the magazine? Let’s get you out of that shirt and bra, sweetie. It’ll look better that way. Trust me, I’m a photographer. Now push your breasts together for me. Look sexy, baby. Why don’t you take off those pants as well? Don’t worry, honey, all the other chicks are doing it too. Don’t you want to be famous?”

Ever wonder why some tattoo magazines are full of women whose only shared characteristics are bad tattoos and bared breasts? It’s because the men taking the photos don’t care about the tattoos — they only care about getting girls naked. If you’re a regular at tattoo conventions, I’m sure you know the photographers I’m talking about. We’ve all been harassed by them. After turning them down, I have had these old men sneak back about twenty feet and take my picture with a zoom lens, only to end up with nothing but a shot of me holding up my middle finger.

This is a tradition that I want to stop.

Earlier this summer, after spending an hour at the Toronto convention and being completely disappointed in the atmosphere, I left. While I’d already told everyone I was going, I began to question my upcoming plans for the Montreal convention. Should I go? Should I spend the money on a booth? Will people be just as grumpy? After all, the French, especially the Quebecois, do have a reputation for being rude to us Anglophones.

Spending one minute at the Montreal Tattoo Convention completely shatters those stereotypes. Friendly people had come from all over the world, and it was clear that they were there to have a good time. There was no posturing or attitude, and it just felt like everyone was there to meet the top international tattoo artists and to simply enjoy the art.

Even though many of the people attending the convention spoke only French, the language barrier never hurt us at our booth. I made my way through the day with a lot of smiling and body motions to show people what I wanted them to do. I had my lovely assistant Jen translate whenever I couldn’t get my intentions through, and Phil Barbosa (who you know as the photographer who shot the ModCon book and other BME events) helped me keep the lighting and technical aspects in check.

I started off taking pictures of the few people there that I knew and then started tackling the crowds. No pressure and no sexualization. I stuck with “may I take your picture?” and people seemed to liked that. Now let me share some of those pictures with you.

I’d love to continue shooting conventions all over the world. I really had a great time taking portraits of both old friends and total strangers. Thank you to my assistants for the help, to the organizers of the convention, and especially thank you to everyone who let us shoot them. It was wonderful getting to meet all of you (and to see some of you again). I hope you enjoyed the photos, and finally let me also thank that small minority of photographers out there that understand that women with tattoos are still women deserving of respect and courtesy.

   
     Rachel Larratt
     BMEzine.com

Copyright © 2004 BME.com Requests to republish complete, edited or shortened versions must be confirmed in writing. For bibliographical purposes this article was first published July 13th, 2004 by BME.com in Toronto, Ontario, Canada..

“The goal of all civilization, all religious thought, and all that sort of thing is simply to have a good time. But man gets so solemn over the process that he forgets the end.”

– Don Marquis

As you probably know, BMEfest 2004 took place this past Friday (July 2, 2004) here in Toronto (a giant thank you to everyone who helped put it on, especially to Blake and Badur who did almost all of the hard work in setting up the event). We had approaching 600 attendees, four bands (Monroe, Defence Mechanism, The Matadors, and The Legendary Klopeks), a second run at The Pain Olympics, as well as performances by The Lizardman and Orbax’s Circo Loco. Because of the size this year we had to hold it at a different venue than the traditional “back yard” environment, so we went with Lamport Stadium (literally a football stadium) which was the only space available downtown.

Left: Windows Media, Right: Apple Quicktime (same movie, different file format)
Both videos are 320×240, 7 minutes long, and about a 21 meg download

The video above was shot by my sister (iam:hellisfum), although she’s asked me to emphasize that it’s just something that she patched together in an afternoon for me and shouldn’t reflect on her as an editor!

While the overwhelming response was extremely positive (more), I heard a few others opining for years gone by and I as well missed some of the freedom and laid-back atmosphere we were able to get at last year’s rural party. Because we get so many legal threats to attack the event, we had to make sure that we did everything by the book, which meant permits, security staff, restrictions on bloodplay and suspension, control of smoking, fireworks, and alcohol, and other similar annoyances. There were also some big mistakes made in terms of the way things were laid out (why oh why didn’t we put the beer tent and the bands closer together), and although everyone involved worked hard to try and minimize these issues, the fact is that given our constraints they weren’t something we could entirely eliminate.

Just some of the photos from BMEFEST 2004.
Lots more are in the BBQ gallery.

Photos:equal, mufkin, draider02, dawnie, lilfunky1, hotdogcore.

So what should we do next year?

BMEfest is an event for the community on BME. So I’m asking you for your feedback and your desires for next year. First of all, I should mention that we do have a few constraints in our planning:

• We have to be able to handle four or five hundred attendees (or concede that not everyone who wants to can come).
• We have to be able to handle all ages, both because some people are underage, and others come with their children.
• It is likely that fake complaints will be called in about the event to the authorities, so we do have to be “mostly legal”.

As I see it, there were a few main problems this year:

• The security (which we needed) made some people feel unwelcome.
• Organizationally everyone was running blind and it was the first time any of us had tackled anything like this. Given that, an excellent job was done, but there were areas where experience would have paid off.
• Some of our legal restrictions took away from the vibe of the event. Personally I think people should be able to bring their own booze in and stuff like that.
• The space was not ideal in that it was too large (although there wasn’t anything half way in between), and this was made worse by a few decisions that turned out not to be the right ones in terms of layout.
• As much as everyone wanted to take a break from it this year, it would have been nice to use some of the space for flesh pulling, suspension, and other things like that. The Astroturf also meant no fire play which has always been a staple of BME events.

There were little issues too like not having any shade so people were literally bursting into flames, but those are mistakes that are easy to make and easy to correct the next time around. Anyway, here are a few options for next year:

Go rural

Have the event out on a farm again, and skip the law — out of sight, out of mind. This is basically what BMEfest 2003 (more) was. It’s a very relaxed and friendly way to do it. Some of the costs on rentals go up, but other costs go down. The only (giant) negative to this option is that it means the event isn’t on transit in a big city, so people either have to drive or we have to arrange travel.

Get smaller

Bring the event back into the backyard. Unfortunately this simply isn’t that legal — it’s actually quite miraculous that earlier years where we did this were not shut down. However, if we could get a series of backyard BBQs in Toronto, we could run shuttle buses between them all day long, and have a “distributed” event. However, I’m not sure that we wouldn’t just have “clumping” at single locations and many people wouldn’t meet each other like in a single space. It might however allow us to bypass many of the legal requirements, and it would be small and friendly… but an organizational nightmare.

Cancel BMEfest altogether

I’m not sure this is a very good option, but I could “get out of the BBQ game” and leave those events up to others. Rachel and I could instead focus on smaller specialized events like ModCon and ModProm and so on.

Keep growing bigger

Do another stadium or other downtown large-venue event, address the problems that we had at this one (which wouldn’t be hard to do), and make it big big big big. (This would be the obvious choice of course).

Go exotic

Because most people travel to come to BMEfest it wouldn’t cost any more to have the event in the Caribbean. We could even charter a big jet for everyone from Miami and back at the end. It sounds nutty but I really think it could work, and we could give people both an amazing BMEfest and a Caribbean vacation for the same price as one in Toronto. If you’ve seen my pictures from there, you know where my vote could fall. Toronto is nice, but imagine staying on a Caribbean beach with all your friends from BME, going snorkeling, swimming, or just enjoying a lot of rum.

I have some ideas about what I think the best option is, but this isn’t entirely “my” event. It’s your event. So I need to know what you’d like to see for next year. Feel free to say what you liked and didn’t like about this year, and what you’d like to see added or changed next year. Let me know if any of the above options strike you, how you think they should be implemented, or if you have totally different ideas altogether.

Shannon Larratt
BME.com

“Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.”

– William Hazlitt

After a quite some time of people suggesting it, I’ve finally done my own Q&A column. All of these questions were submitted by IAM members, and I hope I’ve done an acceptable job answering them. Before you read this, please understand that these are just my personal views. The site is made up of a wide range of people with an incredibly diverse set of beliefs, and this is just one of many of them. So please don’t be terribly offended if you don’t agree with one of my views.

Please excuse the pretentiousness of some of the answers.

shawn.spc: Do you remember what you did four days ago? No, I don’t. My memory lasts between five minutes and a few hours most of the time, although I do of course have a dotty memory of events, but it’s unclear, muddled, and not in chronological order. While I’ve done my best to structure my life in a way that makes this unimportant, it is very damaging to my social relationships. It makes it hard for me to know who I know, who I can trust, who I shouldn’t trust, and who is lying to me or telling the truth. I have to rely on notes, automated assistance, and of course Rachel to get by. It also makes it extremely difficult for me to write longer essays because when I’m writing them and proof-reading them I can’t remember more than a few paragraphs at a time, so I tend to repeat myself a lot. To combat that I try and write an outline and just expand it gradually, writing a sentence at a time and “filling in the blanks” as I go. I program the same way at this point — one of the good things is this all has forced me to start properly documenting my code!

Yes, absolutely. I don’t think people who don’t know me personally understand just how non-functional I am. While parts of me are totally supercharged and far outperform the average person, other parts of my life and persona are extremely troubled and hard for me to control. I think that part of the reason that I’ve worked so hard to have success in an independent lifestyle is that it’s put me in a position where these shortcomings are less relevant. Even still, they’ve progressed to the point now to where it is difficult for me to run my own life, and without her help I would probably fall apart. She’s incredibly intelligent and competent (it’s not as if she’s just “the girlfriend” — she’s an equal partner and probably does more day-to-day in running the site than I do) and her skills perfectly complement mine and I think vice-versa as well. (As an interesting side note, I’ve seen this same sort of partnership in both other programmers and in many body artists that I respect).

And yes, she really is that beautiful in person.

Sometimes the amount of time I have to spend working depresses me, because I often get up at 6:30 AM and work late into the night. At this point I have very little time for anything of my own and it’s starting to wear on me. Sometimes I think as well about how much more money I’d have if I spent more time on work and less time on BME, but I’ve never regretted launching BME. I also think it’s important to note that I’m really just a facilitator or catalyst — I help direct where BME is going, but BME is an expression of thousands and thousands of people, not of me.

Not that I don’t enjoy being me, but I’m not sure that anything makes me say “it’s good to be me” in the sense of “rather than someone else”. Every one of us should be able to say that they enjoy being alive. Unfortunately many of us are imprisoned by society and are unable to fully be ourselves and express the things we need to, and thus become miserable.

That said, I did go yacht shopping today, and until we moved back to the city Rachel and I did have matching “his and hers” Porsches. We’re both very hard workers and have always been financially rewarded for doing so. This has allowed us to do things for our friends and community that make us happy, and it lets us raise our daughter without a financial spectre always over our heads. I am very grateful for this.

I highly recommend “The Good Life” by Scott and Helen Nearing. If any single book influenced major change in my life that is probably it. His other books are brilliant as well. I also think everyone needs to read “War is a Racket” by Major General Smedley Butler (which you can read for free online), an anti-war essay written between the first and the second world war. People hear it so much that it must read like a cliché, but those who don’t learn from history really are doomed to repeat it. So more so than focusing on individual authors, I think it’s essential that people read classics, especially those that touch on the issues we believe are “new” or politically relevant today.

I’m not sure if there’s such a thing as success or failure in the way that most people use it. Sure, sometimes a task works the way you wanted it to, and sometimes it doesn’t. But I’m not entirely convinced that the purpose of life is to “win” — I think the purpose of life is more to discover, accept, and experience being alive (and I think body modification is a tool in achieving that for some people). Failure is a part of that, and while I don’t seek out failure, I do my best to appreciate it when it occurs. The only real failure is not appreciating being alive, and there are of course days where I have that failure.

I don’t want followers. Followers are not interesting travel partners in life. I hope that if people back-peddle on their statements because of something I say it’s because they’ve considered what I said, debated it for themselves, and come to a similar conclusion as I did — just believing something “because Shannon said so” is foolhardy. I’m sure I say stupid stuff all the time and I hope that people respect themselves enough to be able to decide on their own which of my words are right for their life and which are not. I have no desire to lead anyone anywhere, although I’m thrilled when people decide to follow a parallel path, and if something I’ve said or done has helped them find it, I’m honored to have been able to do so.

If people understand themselves, then they will understand me as well. The key to understanding what makes other people work is understanding what makes oneself work. While I can try and help others learn about themselves, when it comes right down to it, they have to do it on their own. The people in my family who understand me are the ones that understand themselves.

When I first read this question I interpreted it as a swords into plowshares question. So my first answer is one to an imaginary question.

Well, that did of course happen in Japan in 1588 when Hidéyoshi and his samurai banned the ownership of swords and firearms by all but the noble classes. They scoured the country telling the people that the swords were going to be melted down and turned into a giant statue of Buddha. Of course, once the swords and guns were all in the hands of Hidéyoshi, they were instead turned into a giant statue of him, and Japan has been a police state ever since.

Sometimes freedom and liberty have to be defended, and I don’t believe that will ever change. Giving up our ability — and our fundamental right — to do so is suicidal.

But in terms of the question that you actually asked, history hasn’t shown us that forcing soldiers to kill each other in hand to hand combat versus from afar reduces the amount of death or increases the “personal responsibility” the soldiers feel for that death. If anything, it makes it worse. So no, I don’t believe such a transformation would be positive

Failure is not enjoying the game of life. Any time I get depressed and let my fears get the best of me, that’s when I’m failing. An interview bombing, a car accident, a poorly written article: none of those are failures. The only failure is when you don’t enjoy failing (not that one shouldn’t try and “win” every time). If I’m understanding him correctly, my father’s core lesson to my siblings and I was that life is the ultimate game, and victory comes first from enjoying it and second from coming out in first place (and that if you have to kill a hobgoblin, you must make sure he can scream his death scream on the battlefield to open the doors to hobgoblin heaven).

I believe running for political office is an honorable aspiration, and I considered running for the office of mayor in Toronto on a secessionist platform to make Toronto a partially independent city-state. I still think it’s the right thing for both Toronto and Canada, and I’m starting to see more mainstream political groups making noise along the same lines. However, my extreme views on many subjects coupled with my appearance would make it very difficult for me to run for office. There are better ways for me to independently facilitate political change in the world.

What was the first concert you ever saw? The best one?

The best concert I ever saw was during Mojave 3’s first tour (although their final concert in Toronto as Slowdive was incredibly emotionally moving). Not including stuff I saw as a kid, I think the first concert I ever went to was the Sonic Youth tour promoting Goo.

What do you think the next major evolutionary change that the human race will experience will be?

Humans have remained largely unchanged through catastrophes of immense magnitude such as the most recent Ice Age. Humans are successful because we’re smart, but also because we’re incredibly adaptable. So I think it’s unlikely that we’ll see any natural evolution occurring. However, I do think it’s very likely that we’ll tinker with ourselves genetically more and more. It’ll start with gradual improvements — smarter, stronger, healthier, and able to survive in more hostile environments. Whether that eventually takes us into a form other than human, I don’t know. I hope I get to see some of it in my lifetime.

I think the changes facing humanity are more likely to come from our escalating technology. We’re on the cusp of entering space, and cities in orbit, on the moon, and on neighboring planets will very likely come in our lifetimes. We are also facing the risk of increasingly versatile, adaptable, and extremely intelligent machines who could potentially replace us inside the same time period. The Japanese are making terrifying progress in this, and I don’t believe they have the technological checks in place to keep it from snowballing out of control. It’s a very dangerous game, and I think we are making a terrible mistake in barreling forward so recklessly. Whether they are our children (and thus the next step in “human” evolution), or if they’re a science experiment gone horribly wrong is a question for the robot philosophers of the 22nd century to debate.

I did briefly tattoo, which I enjoyed, but to be perfectly honest I’m very introverted and fairly sociopathic. I like seeing my friends, but only for short periods, and I do not enjoy being around strangers. As a piercer, tattoo artist, or other body modification practitioner, you have to be extremely comfortable working with all sorts of people to give them the experience they need. I do not believe that I have the ability to do that.

My father was always involved in computing and telephony projects as far back as I can remember, and from about the time I was five years old, worked mostly at home. Because of that I got to be around some amazing minds at a very young age, and had hands-on and relatively unrestricted access to new technology. My parents were very careful not to let me or my brother fall into the trap of television, so programming became my entertainment. I was encouraged to learn and loved doing it. I did later spend some time at the University of Toronto in cognitive and computer science, which helped make me less of a “sloppy” programmer, but I think it’s still fair to say that I’m exclusively self taught.

I couldn’t care less whether people think I’m a rock star or not (anyone who’s met me in person knows I’m not), although it makes me a little sad when people revere me — they really should be revering themselves instead. There’s nothing in me that isn’t in them as well. That said, having some level of popularity has been useful in spreading the messages I try and get out into the public mindset.

I had no idea. I wrote the IAM software because I wanted a tool to maintain my own online journal. I really wasn’t expecting it to be so popular when I opened it up to everyone else as well, but I’m very happy that it was. So many unexpected blessings and life-changing events have come for so many different people thanks to the community that has formed on IAM.

There are some organizational things that I might have done differently, and technologies that evolved differently than I’d expected at the time. I’ve made alliances with people from time to time that have betrayed me or ripped me off, but really, I think all of us could list endless things like that. Other than correcting things like that, I don’t think I’d change anything. The sites’ missions have stayed the same since day one.

I didn’t put any thought into it at the time because it was who I was, if that makes any sense. I don’t have to justify my modifications to myself because they make sense and they feel right. The only time I’ve had to “make excuses” for my physical appearance is for periods where others have tried to convince me that the modifications were a mistake.

I’m sure there are many people out there who choose modification for fashion or social reasons, and that’s cool and I don’t have a problem with that, but I didn’t choose it. It’s how I was born and it’s who I am, and nothing can or will change that.

That said, I think that people should know themselves pretty well before they go making decisions that could have a harsh impact on the rest of their life. If the modifications they’re making are going to affect their ability to find employment or even fit into the social mainstream, they need to very seriously consider whether they want to make such an immense sacrifice.

At its simplest, I believe that we (on this planet) are all part of a single entity, and that we are as interconnected and as dependent on each other as the cells in our own bodies. I believe that this superbeing is what most religions call God, and I believe that we are all God and a part of God. I think most religions try and express this in their own way, but they err in taking the metaphors used to explain this phenomenon too literally and thereby cloud the true nature of the universe.

Not at all. I believe in what I’m saying, and I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t think it was the truth, so I have no problem with it influencing anyone, no matter what their age is. I also believe that young people are the future (duh!) and that they’re a lot smarter than adults give them credit for. If that’s who I have an influence over, great!

I pretty much just try and keep it as simple as possible. I don’t think that any of my sites really stand out as graphic design masterpieces, but I hope they’re easy to use. In terms of what I do online, my goal is to get the content to as many people as possible, so that’s what influences the design decisions.

Hey, I’d love to live in a fortified compound in northern Ontario, but I fell in love with and married an American girl who’s spent her adult life living in places like Phoenix, Miami, and New Orleans. While I grew up in a wood-heated house in Canada and love the winter, she’s not quite the fan of it that I am.

BME is a part of who I am, and a part of the thousands of people who’ve helped create it. Justice is absolute. You either have it, or you don’t. You can’t have “a little justice”. Thus I don’t believe that you can give up one freedom in exchange for another.

I believe that BME stays fully inside the law and is a responsible publication. However, there are hateful people out there that have such a problem with who they are themselves that they choose to attack BME to distract themselves from the things they need to fix inside themselves. Because BME is totally above-board, they are constantly fabricating and calling in fake charges to various authorities.

The only other pitfall is extremely long hours which to be honest is burning me out and I have to figure out a way to reduce that workload if I want to keep maintaining the entire site. That said, it’s far more of a positive experience than a negative one. I have some concerns about how the community is changing as time goes by, and whether some of what BME does is relevant or desired, but, for now at least, I’m staying on course and sticking with the plan!

I just wish people were nicer to another. It’s pretty pathetic to watch people who could be friends getting off on tormenting each other for no apparent reason other than enjoying seeing someone else in pain. That’s about the only thing that really bugs me, when people think that rather than curing their own pain, they’ll instead invalidate it somehow by making everyone around them hurt as well.

I don’t believe that there is something larger in terms of heaven or anything like that. It’s already here and we’re already living in it… we just have to open ourselves to it. Joseph Campbell put it perfectly when he wrote, “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

I became vegan first for environmental reasons, kept with it for health reasons, and then stayed vegan long term for spiritual reasons. At the point I wrote that I was just transitioning to a fully vegan diet. Ethically, my primary problem was with factory farming and the truly brutal (and environmentally foolhardy) practices they employ, and morally I had real concerns that people were “hiding” the fact that a sentient living creature was giving up its life for our pleasure. I believe that if someone is going to eat meat that they need to embrace the death of that animal and on some level thank it for what it has given them. In the modern context, I don’t believe we can gain that awareness unless we are either raising our own animals for consumption and slaughtering them, or by hunting our own food. While I would not do it myself, I believe that by understanding the life-death-life cycles and taking an active and compassionate role in them one can perhaps justify eating meat, but at this point in my life I would not be able to bring myself to do so.

I’d like to think I appreciate good art from all eras, but I’m most partial to impressionists like Gauguin and Van Gogh, and as well to fauvism which of course grew from them. I like impressionist works quite simply because they’re beautiful and appeal to me aesthetically, and fauvism appeals to me emotionally.

Do you think a wider more in depth knowledge of not only body art but fine art is valuable for professionals in this industry?

I think an in depth knowledge of fine art and especially art history is valuable for people in all professions. Understanding the art that a culture produces is essential to understanding the context in which the events of the time happened — just knowing the time line is not enough. You have to be able to feel what the people living through it were feeling, and art is one of the only ways we have to transmit that information across time.

I suppose one can take anything too seriously, but no, assuming the person is being honest with themselves, I don’t think you can ever take anything too seriously. “Transformative spiritual experiences” are often found in everyday events, and I would never question someone’s right to find value in that. If they’re wrong, their lie to themselves is far worse than their lie to me or you (since it’s really none of our business anyway). Clearly if someone is willing to ostracize themselves from their family and from society over their modifications they perceive them as extremely essential, and while I think it’s important to know oneself well enough to decide when something is healthy or unhealthy, cutting off someone’s medicine like that is rarely going to have a positive outcome. If someone needs modifications, I think they should be supported in that.

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

– Erich Fromm

Cutting and self-injury is all over the media lately, but because of its graphic nature, few who haven’t struggled with it themselves are able to think about it objectively, understand its roots, what makes it such an attractive path for some people, and how to turn it into something less destructive.

The most important thing to know about cutting is that cutting is not the problem. Cutting is a symptom of an underlying issue, as well as an attempt to survive that issue. It could be active abuse by a parent or partner. It could be work or school related stress. It could be unhappiness from not being socially better accepted or low-self esteem because a single stranger told them they were ugly when they were five years old. It could be as simple as they feel like they have no control over their lives and desperately want something to be inside their power. There are a million terrible things that can happen to a person, and from them a million reasons for cutting. Many cutters have built up such internal walls that they may not even be able to consciously face or name the things that make them cut. But, as murder victims scrawl out the name of the killer in their own blood, so do cutters inscribe the sins of their abusers in their flesh.

Song lyrics or accusation?

Below is a message I recently received about BME’s ritual cutting gallery.

hi, my names nicko, im 23, i just stumbled onto your sight and it’s cool, i really dig it, i’ve got 2 tats (traditional) and have always been into disturbing things so to speak, ever since that kid in 3rd grade eat ants i’ve been addicted to that OH MY GOD! feeling in your stomach where you think SICK! but some of the stories and images on your sight rub me the wrong way, dont get me wrong as horrified as i am by hanging by fish hooks, chemical burns,and scarification i understand that in a sterile professional enviroment it’s cool

but dont capitalise on the stories and pics of the cuttings and burnings that are from extreme abuse i read a story of a girl who burned im sorry into her leg, and pics of slicing a star in a leg that was obviously done at home, i didnt come to the site to get teary eyed and give a hug, you see where im getting at, dont go for the low blow, other than that great job.

and do you feel that posting these entries in the free area make it all the more dangerous for old cutters aswell as possible new ones waiting for the social exceptance that they need making the site, for a few, a place to show off there new so called pieces of art, im not a member and that is the reason, so here is where i tred into murky waters, dont you feel that your aiding destructive behavior? i knew a girl in high school who carved, and deep an (f-) f minus about 4 inches long and 2 inches wide above her fist to about her elbow, these are the ones that we have to protect as a society, and not give them a place to display there pain.

nicko k.

I get emails like this fairly regularly. I tried to ignore the generally insulting introduction and replied, “I totally understand where you’re coming from on this. I struggled with whether I should post these sorts of things for a long time. These people are already using cutting and ritual to somehow try and heal themselves. My hope is that by welcoming them into BME and by allowing them to talk about what they’re going through and what they do that they discover ways to channel those energies more positively.”

The worry that the images on BME could “trigger” people is a fairly common one. To that I replied, “it’s definitely a worry, and I know it must trigger some people. However, they’re being triggered because there’s something there boiling under the surface. Suppressing it and trying to hide it doesn’t make it go away — it lets it fester until it erupts, sometimes suicidally.”

I concluded by pointing out that “Stopping someone from talking about their pain doesn’t make it go away… That’s the most important thing to remember.”

The conversation then ended fairly typically, with threats and condemnation, and the clear message that the person I was talking to was utterly ignorant to everything I was saying. Below is their (or their mother’s) final message to me. I get several emails threatening me like this a week on various subjects, so I wasn’t that surprised:

Dear Heart,

Let me let you in on a little secret, before you were speaking to my son. Now you speaking to his MOTHER.

I just took the liberty of sending your website, and your e mails to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the FBI, and every police center, and child abuse center I could find.

You sick witch. How dare you cover your sorry excuse for a human being self by saying you are helping children, or that you are not liable.

You are an opportunist. A exploiter of children. You hide yourself behind some ignorant wall of superiority, trying to rationalize what you are. Allow me to help you, you are the scum of the earth. A person who participates in exploiting children.

We’ll see what comes of my letters, and phone calls. You just met yourself a real woman, and a good mom.

I hope you spend a long time in jail.

Jane

Unfortunately it’s unempathic attitudes like these that underlie the causes of cutting in the first place, and when persisted in can drive young people to acts far worse than cutting: suicide or even Columbine-type shootings as desperate attempts to end the real source of the pain.

SILENCED

Now, I’m not a doctor, nor am I a therapist. Keep that in mind as you read this — it is not medical advice. I have however faced (and I think bested) cutting myself, and I have corresponded with thousands of people who’ve gone through the same.

To put it very clearly: most people cut because they are being abused mentally or physically and the cutting helps them survive by making them feel alive and by allowing them to be the one controlling the pain. This abuse can be current, past, or sometimes just day-to-day stresses piled up past the breaking point. The people arguing most strongly to silence cutters by attacking the act of cutting are often the abusers themselves — making it an act not unlike a Mob boss killing a witness — and because of the stigmas attached to cutting, self-righteous parents like “Ms. Cobra McThunders” end up further abusing battered young people — and protecting and enabling those that brought out their need to cut in the first place.

When animals are taken from their natural environment and imprisoned in small cages or otherwise have their normal lives stolen from them, they develop obsessive and self-harming behavior. They walk over and over in circles, they tear out their own hair, they chew their feet until they bleed, they stop eating, or they become violent. It should be patently obvious in these cases that their self-harming behavior is a direct result of their captors not meeting their basic needs. Humans are no different, and many cutters feel imprisoned, abused, and misunderstood by their parents and others in positions of power over them.

CAGE: “15 bars for 15 years”

If a person is cutting themselves, you can bet there’s something wrong in their life, either actively or as an unhealed wound from the past. Their cutting is both a desperate attempt to communicate this to anyone who can hear them, as well as an attempt to seize some control over a life that they feel little connection to or power over. It is better to hurt yourself than to have someone else hurt you — if you’re the one doing it, it’s under your control, and it’s your decision.

It is absolutely true that some people cut themselves after seeing the photos of other cuttings on BME. I’ve even received pictures of people cutting with their computer visible in the background, tuned to the cutting gallery. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of them cut for the first time after seeing those galleries. However, those galleries are never the cause itself.

If a person is cutting it means that they are trying to find a solution and they are trying to find a way to cope. It also means that they’re trying to find that solution inside themselves rather than the far more common solution of turning to drugs or external validation like abusive or promiscuous sex. You know what? I think it’s a good sign if a person chooses to cut themselves before turning to drugs. It’s not a permanent solution, but it’s a lot better than many of the darker options.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think it’s a good idea to cut. It’s dangerous, and it can leave you with marks that are extremely socially stigmatizing. It can also mask the real problem, give your abusers the excuse they need to compound the pain they already level at you, and even result in your psychiatric commitment or worse. Cutting is not a long term solution — but it is a warning that should be listened to, not silenced.

Imagine if people calling suicide hot-lines were hung up on because the operator sensed that they were in tears!

If only the symptom (the cutting — which also serves as a survival tool) of a real problem is eliminated, then the person will try and resolve the problem in other ways — they may be driven to drugs, promiscuous sex, obsessive compulsive behavior, or even suicide — the third most common cause of death in teens. Under no circumstances is trying to force the cutting to end a solution in and of itself.

ALONE… LIES, PAIN… FEAR

I certainly concede that in most cases cutting is detrimental to a person’s life, but in the short term it is an essential safety net. However, in the long term it is equally essential that the cutter both try and find an alternative to cutting, and that ultimately they address the root cause. If the root cause is not addressed, the problems will escalate. I can not emphasize this enough. As long as the root stress is there (and there may be many different ones, and more may come in the future), the drive to cut will still be there. Thus, not only must the cause be addressed, but a better way to channel those energies must be found so the cutting does not repeat from the inevitable future wounds that all people face in life.

It is very important to understand that cutting is a positive and life-affirming act which makes a person able to cope with their problems, albeit an act that is usually fueled by depression and almost always leads to other problems. However, the instinct to cut to feel, to cut to live, can not be cured any more than homosexuality can be “cured”. It is simply how some people naturally respond to certain kinds of stress. This can not be changed. That said, those of us who are cutters can — and must — learn to transform this symptom from something that potentially compounds the problem into something that not only makes our lives bearable, but actually improves our lives and makes us love being alive… even with the stresses.

Any crutch that is to replace cutting must retain that sense of empowerment and “aliveness”. There are two basic alternatives (I don’t consider medicating a person until they’re too numb to care a “solution”) — continue cutting but in a less stigmatizing form, or replacing the cutting with a totally different but equally satisfying act. The first option is probably more common among BME readers, and that is using guided body modification to channel those impulses into something that leaves an aesthetically pleasing result — scarification, tattoos, body piercings, and so on. With the aid of an experienced artist, the energies inside the cutter can be satiated through a form of cutting that results in subjectively beautiful artwork that helps a person to define themselves in an uplifting and empowering fashion. Many people find that this transition teaches them about the source of the problem, and assuming it isn’t ongoing, can heal the festering wounds that kept them cutting for so long.

This approach can also include cathartic acts such as suspension, play piercing, and flesh pulls to burn through those feelings in a supporting and safe context. However, in both of these cases it is important to keep in mind that the flaming rebirth of a phoenix from dead ashes to glorious life is not the same thing as the grim reaper deciding to wear a white robe instead of a black one. Or to speak less metaphorically, one should be wary about simply re-branding the problem into a more palatable form while leaving the compulsive behavior uncorrected.

In addition, not everyone wants to replace their cutting with another form of mutilatory self-medication. One solution that many people have tried successfully is exercise. Exercise connects a person to their body. Through the pain and effort, they become acutely aware of who they are and how they work, and most importantly, gain the realization that they have the power to transform themselves into anything they want to be. In many cases the resulting health and appearance benefits alone go a long way to solving underlying problems — as much as we inside this community try and distance ourselves from such statements, the fact is that beautiful people with beautiful bodies are not only more successful, but happier. Before you decide that is unfair, realize that every one of us can be beautiful if we just try.

I talked to former cutters who used exercise as a way to get their lives under control in a safer manner, and would like to share their comments here in their own words.

Currently I am studying for exams and the stress of it has exaggerated my tendency to self-injure. I don’t cut, I bite, scratch, and hit myself (but it amounts to the same thing — providing reassurance that I’m real, and giving me a sense of connection to my body). I have noticed that on the few days that I’ve chosen to do even a minimal amount of exercise the urge to self-injure has disappeared. For example, last week on the day before an exam, I walked briskly up and down my hundred foot garden fifty times. Afterwards I felt much more ‘of’ my body if that makes sense, and didn’t self-injure at one of the most high-risk times for self-injury for me.

***

I used to cut, and when I decided to stop whenever I wanted to cut again I started doing push ups and sit ups for as long as I possibly could. It was one of the only things that could get me to calm down. It worked wonders.

***

I have a treadmill that I run on sometimes. The burn of the run and the thrill of the run are enough to satisfy my desires that are usually solved by cutting. Afterwards, I feel better about myself because I am making my body more fit and more attractive. I am becoming stronger.

***

I used to cut and then I got involved in boxing. It slowly weened me off of cutting, although I was coming out of weight rooms with bloody knuckles. But, I was also much more emotionally ‘stable’ afterwards because I had gotten a lot of “numbness” out of me. Eventually I weened myself off of boxing as well, and only use it when I am utterly outraged (once every couple months).

***

I am a cutter and have been for over fifteen years. This last winter was one of the toughest of my life and I reverted to cutting — breaking a solemn vow not to I made to my husband — to try and survive the stress. This spring, I joined a gym. The stresses are all still there; money, work, and postponed dreams. But I’m not cutting. I don’t like going to the gym, and the only thing keeping me going is a deep-seeded self-loathing, but I’m not cutting. And risking a little bit of muscle pull is a hell of a lot safer than risking severing a vein in a moment of distraction while cutting.

While one must be vigilant to avoid falling prey to obsessive exercise, a problem linked to cutting behavior which can be destructive to both health and self-esteem, some have argued that it is the lack of exercise in modern society that is one of the reasons for self-injury becoming more and more common. A person with a fit and maintained body feels alive, and it is far more rare for them to feel the need to seek out other approaches such as cutting.

If the pain that caused a person to cut was in the past, rather than ongoing, the solutions I’ve mentioned above can often heal those wounds due to the self-respect and self-esteem they help bloom. A happy person feels good about who they are and has little motivation to hurt themselves — although there’s still a very good chance that they’ll continue to “hurt” themselves in the process of body modification and ritual for self-improvement… Which is perfectly healthy and usually a sign that the individual is becoming more comfortable with who they are by taking a proactive role in defining their own identity.

INSANE… ERASE ME

Although cutting is something that many wonderful people have gone through, it is not something you want to just let fester and continue. But it’s also not something you should be ashamed of. You can transform the energy that drives you to cut to improve your life, and that is what this article was about, and that is why BME has a cutting gallery.

Under no circumstances should a person ever be made to feel bad or be attacked because of their drive to cut. If a person is cutting, that means that they are trying to solve their problems and trying to open a dialog both internally and externally. The cuts are a signal that the desire and the foundation are there for healing to begin. The last thing we should do if we care about the person’s healing is to destroy that essential survival net.

Shannon Larratt
BME.com

Being a modified person in an unmodified world can really suck, and genuinely brings truth to the expression “life’s not fair.” Most people think we’re a bunch of losers, and few of us work to change that perception.But still, I hear a lot of tattooed people (for the sake of simplicity, when I say “tattooed” in this article, take it to include people with any public mods that visually set them apart from the mundanes) say that they’re “proud to be tattooed”, or they’re proud to be a part of the tattooed community. Common slogans seen on t-shirts sold at tattoo conventions such as “the only difference between people with tattoos and people without is that tattooed people don’t care if you’re tattooed or not” imply not only an us-and-them stance, but the idea that we the modified are somehow “better”. The pages of my editorials here clearly have the same bias.

But what does it mean to have “modified pride” or to be “proud of your tattoos”? I often hear this coming from people with badly done tattoos that show minimal creativity or skill, and from people who do little to excel in life, thereby strengthening these stereotypes the mundanes already have about us. Pride (like respect) can be earned through achievement and dignity, or it can be seized with conceit as empty pride. When you hear someone say that they’re proud to be tattooed, what are they saying, and what exactly are they proud of? Do they have beautiful tattoos? Have they been successful as a tattooed person? Are tattooed people generally an over-achieving lot? Are we “the winning team”? Or are we no better than ignorant unemployed racists proud of our meaningless skin color?

The stereotype of a tattooed person is that of criminals, drug addicts, and chronic underachievers, and there is a statistical truth to that slander. Sadly, when it comes to people who choose to show those tattoos on public skin, the stereotype is often all too true. Not much to be proud of. That’s no surprise though — tattooed people are treated poorly by the majority; those who are not tattooed. The job market is much more difficult, we have to work harder for the same wages, we get poor customer service, we are shunned in mixed social groups, and are effectively a self-made minority and are treated as such. This stereotype remains because too many people with public tattoos and other mods continue to foster it — although we do plenty of whining about it, as if that could somehow change it. To make matters worse, too few who can shatter the stereotype stand behind their tattoos in the real world, choosing instead to hide them more with every promotion, thus reinforcing and giving a stamp of approval (or at least silent concession) to every prejudice they’ve faced themselves.

“If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other cause for prejudice by noon.”

– George Aiken

 

Let’s be honest for a moment about what happens to most people when they get their hands or faces tattooed or pierced, or otherwise set themselves up visually as an outsider. If you do this, you will be harassed in public. People will make fun of you, and it will be the same insults and rude questions every day for the rest of your life. People will try and hurt you just for having chosen to look different than them. You will get poor service at restaurants, banks, and just about everywhere else. You will be turned down for jobs that you are more than qualified for. You will be turned down for loans that you have the credit rating for. If you work in the modification industry, governments will pass laws against your livelihood. If you have children, it will be harder to get them into a good school, and their teachers and other parents will abuse them because they don’t like the way you look. You and your family will have to work twice as hard and be twice as skilled to get the same amount of pay as people who fit the ignorant, ugly, mundane mold of the mainstream.

But these chosen hardships can be a foundation for strength — as Nietzsche put it (and he was far from the first or the last to say so), “that which does not kill me makes me stronger”. In the beginning of the 1960s, to many people, the Soviet Union had a broad lead in the space race. Even though US engineers had far less experience than the Soviets, and were working with the aid of computers no more powerful than a desk calculator, John F. Kennedy proposed that by the end of the decade — only eight years later — Americans would be walking on the surface of the moon, an almost laughably impossible ambitious goal. On September 12th, 1962 at Rice University he explained,

“But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

 

America did achieve this incredible goal*, Americans are still the only people to have achieved it, and their peaceful domination of space went a long way to defining America as a nation that inspired people around the world to shoot for the moon in their own way.

It was the facing of difficult tasks (Herculean challenges might be a better term) and overcoming them that let this greatness bloom, and as well, in our own lives we need to choose the difficult path if we want to be great individuals. Heroes are nothing without challenge. We’re already starting down such a path by choosing to be publicly different than everyone else. The problem is that too few of us are also working to succeed. We’ve ridden off to war, but forgotten our swords at home, dull and rusty (luckily our opponents did as well). Hardship in and of itself does not bring greatness, but besting it can. These hardships of being publicly modified can be turned into successes. By facing challenges, we both avoid stagnation and allow ourselves to reach our potential.

The biggest problem in this world is the unholy trinity of stupidity, laziness, and lack of critical thinking. It’s why the biggest, richest governments in the world, made up of multi-millionaire politicians, can continue to trick their impoverished masses into electing them over and over. The masses have spent the last hundred years being conditioned toward ignorance in order to allow them to be controlled (see my previous column on this subject) — which is why modern elections are popularity contests in which fact-free advertising determines the winner and actual debates on the core issues are rare, let alone voters going out and educating themselves independently. Movies and television sell as fact pop science devoid in reality, and movies like the upcoming King Arthur are called “true stories” and “historical dramas”, fallacies that even the most basic of understanding should shatter… but rarely does.

Seeing this, I’m hardly proud to be a human, if I’m to define myself by the actions of these masses. Luckily, I don’t, and if you’re reading this you probably don’t either. I’ve decided instead that the masses haven’t earned the right to call themselves humans. In their failure I see a playing field optimized for success for those who don’t fall prey to the pitfalls of the easy life of the modern wageslave. The modified have already broken one bond of the mainstream — but only one of many — by crossing that social line. While “safe” tattoos grow in popularity every day, we still have a long way to go before the average person can tattoo their face — and I am not at all convinced that the average drone will ever even want to do something like that…

So how can you succeed when you wear public marks that set you up to fail?

“Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect.”

– Leonardo Da Vinci

 

The answer is simple and found in old-fashioned common sense: work hard and educate yourself. If modified people need to be better than the mundanes just to get the same recognition, we should take it a step farther. Be the best. Win everything. No compromises. That’s really all there is to it. If you’re in school, work hard and get good grades. Excellent grades. If you need help, ask for a tutor, and instead of watching four hours of TV, study and read. Have fun doing it; learn to enjoy it. Go out and exercise. Get fit and build up every skill you possibly can. Learn to weld. Plant a garden. Take Judo. Anything. And do it as a proud tattooed person, and stand up for yourself when you’re challenged.

Take it a step farther and support other modified people who are willing to work hard as well. Seek them out if you’re in a position to hire people, and if you’re in a position to be hired, be so damn good at your job that no one can complain about the fact that you have customized yourself into a more ideal human, and are who you want to be. Be proud, but make sure you can back it up with something worth being proud of. Go out and actively change the world for the better.

If we all work hard to be successful and to break the preconceived notions people have about us, we can change the stereotypes. Maybe we can go even farther, and create a new stereotype. We need to wear our tattoos as war paint for victory, not as the brands of criminals and losers. But don’t forget Kennedy’s words — choose this path willingly because it is hard, not because it is easy. And it will be hard, and it will take a long time before you can reap the rewards of this adventure, but you have already won the first battle by choosing to break the bonds of conformity and becoming publicly modified. You can win the war as well.

Shannon Larratt
BME.com

Free Online Resources

Since one of the ways the mainstream seeks to quash uprisings by those outside both the mundane and outside their elite control castes is financial pressure, you may be saying to yourself “but I can’t afford to even buy books to read.” You may already read the science blogs online and have discovered that they, like television, leave you with nothing but a shallow comprehension of a broad array of subjects, but without any real depth — sure it’ll help you win at Trivial Pursuit, but what good is shallow knowledge if you’re trying to genuinely understand a subject?

One of my favorite online “self improvement” sites that many people may have overlooked is Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.net). When the copyright on a book expires, Project Gutenberg works to make that book available to the public. Think of it as a free online library where you can read the classics — the books that over time we’ve decided were significant cultural contributions. It’s not going to be the same chuckle-factory as getting stoned and watching people making fun of oddballs on the WB Superstar, but are you looking for temporary amusement in life, or are you looking for knowledge, strength, and success?

And what’s stopping you from visiting your local library?

“Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.”

– Carl Sagan