MEMORIES:

Now a currently popular fashion statement, body piercing had more spiritual beginnings. It started as a form of tribal art, a way to enhance spirituality through body modification, in much the same way as tattooing and scarification. Fakir Musafar, America's preeminent scholar and practitioner of modern primitivism, introduced primal body art to the masses with his own body modification. While that movement still exists, most people today get piercings for much less spiritual reasons.

 

Body piercing first caught on with the sado-masochistic movement, and maintained an aura of sexual deviancy for some time. But when piercing became mainstream, people’s reasons for getting it done were as varied as they were, from spirituality to shock value. It was also just cool. The look became far more accepted and mainstream as the media fed the craze by showing people with piercings in movies, TV, and music. The iconic look of a thirteen-year-old with a nosering represented the angst-ridden, yet hip, teenager.

 

It used to be that one hole in your ear was cutting edge. Especially when men pierced their ears, it demonstrated their homosexuality and thumbed their nose at society. It took only a few years for the shock factor to wear off, and for it to become common not only to see one hole in each ear, but several.

 

Holes in ears quickly became tame, and holes in other parts of the body started to become popular. People went out to get their lips, tongues, eyebrows, navels, genitals and nipples pierced. And when simple holes could no longer shock, earlobes were stretched out in the style of African tribal tradition, and people picked up the technique of pocketing - attaching flesh via metal rods pierced into the skin. 

 

No one blinks anymore at a pierced ear, nose ring or eyebrow ring. And when moms book joint piercing sessions with their teenage daughters, you know that piercing has gotten as mainstream as they come.