Tatoos, etc.
CONTRARY TO PREVAILING MEDICAL views, body modification such as genital piercing, branding, and cutting is performed by people who are informed, educated, and employed-not by deeply disturbed, self-mutilating deviants. Today's tattooers and body-modifiers are linear descendants of the style setters of earlier times who defied society's strictures on body alteration by wearing lipstick, earrings, and radical hairstyles, says California State University anthropologist James Myers, Ph.D. "A growing number of people in American culture believe that the penis and clitoris are just as deserving of gilding as are earlobes." Body modification is "possibly as old as genus Homo," says Myers, who interviewed hundreds of participants over a two-year period in cities along the West Coast. Many body modifiers claim that adornment rituals, besides enhancing their sexuality and beauty, act as a rite of passage and as a symbolic language for communicating to others. Ouch!
