My mother always felt strongly that you should do nothing purely aesthetic to a child's body until they were old enough to not only give their consent but to actively request it in the first place. My hair wasn't cut, not even once, until I was 11 years old when one summer day I asked to have it hacked off above my shoulders. She asked me just once if I was sure before fetching some scissors and cutting off over two feet of ponytail. Just a few months later I asked if I could put red streaks in it, she told me to go a head and that night I dyed my own hair without any help. I remember that several teachers, parents, and even a few students, questioning my mother wanting to know why she allowed it. For the most part she just shrugged it off and said it should be my decision.
At A Glance Author Uberkitty IAM Uberkitty When N/A Back then I didn't quite understand it. Cutting my hair had been far more drastic to me than dying it ever could be, but while everyone complemented the new look after it was cut I could hear people mumbling behind my back once it was dyed saying I was "too young" to have done that. What was more, many of the people questioning this had modified their own children against their will. In the second grade a friend of mine came to school with one pierced ear. The night before her mom wanted to pierce them but the first one hurt her so bad she screamed and cried until she didn't have to get the second one done. The next school day it was done anyway. Years went by and I forgot the hypocrisy. After all it seemed the world was more accepting, when my mom signed to get my navel pierced when I was 17 no one batted an eyelash.
But I'm 20 now. Just a couple months ago I got braces and the questioning started again. Nearly everyone asked why I didn't get them when I was younger and when I simply said "I didn't want them until now" they almost always then ask "why didn't you parents make you get them then?" At the same time people were saying I should be have been forced to get braces when I was a child many others recounted the stories of when they were little and had braces. They told me about pulled teeth, broken pallets, and months of pain. Nearly all of them told me it wasn't something they asked for, but something that was done to them, and many also said they wouldn't be willing to go through it again and would rather have just had less than perfect teeth. My own braces aren't as bad, no teeth needed to be pulled, there were no spacers or headgear and still this is the most intense (and painful) modification I've ever been through. I could never imagine forcing this on a child.
It's been stated over and over that truly tribal modifications aren't expressions of the self but are instead compulsory: a way to control the people and make them a unit by taking their options away. We too are stuck in this system. In America infant boys are circumcised, young girls have their ears pierced, and adolescences have their teeth straighten all for the sake of meeting a standard of beauty held my the majority, often regardless of whether or not the individual undergoing the modification approves. All the while American society looks down on similar practices elsewhere; from female circumcision (even in the cases the clitoris is preserved) to the scarification of children in some African tribes. "It's barbaric" they quickly cry, and say the children should have a choice even though they deny it to their own. It's fine to force ear piercing on a 7 year old girl or cut pieces from a newborn sons genitals, so long as WE are the ones doing it and not foreigners. We even lie to ourselves and say we don't do such things and that the cases are completely different, that our children either don't care or would select these things on their own. But if this were true and society acknowledged my right to chose what to do to my body no one would have had an issue with my dyed hair when I was 11, or now with my getting braces "late." For me to deviate in this way, first by doing something before I was old enough, then doing something else when I was "too old" was a sign that I had a voice even at a young age in which I should be controlled by my parents, in which ritual modifications should have been forced on me to become a part of the American cultural.