ABSTRACT
The days when body piercers could draw stares by wearing multiple earrings and a nose stud are long gone. We are now in the late baroque phase of self-penetration. Metal rings and bars hang from eyebrows, noses, nipples, lips, chins, cheeks, navels, and from the side of the neck. The nasty, aggressive edge of piercing is still there, but now it is coated in happy talk and a New Age-y rationale. The current issue of Spin magazine features a hair-raising photo of a woman carving little rivers of blood into another woman's back. Musafar, who has corseted his waist down to 19 inches and mortified his flesh with all kinds of blades, hooks, and pins, calls the mostly twentyish people in the body modification movement "the modern primitives". Two sympathetic analysts say this about the body modification movement: Cultural crisis can't really be dealt with by letting loose our personal obsessions and marking up our bodies.
