Back in the early 1980s, I was a young teenaged girl, and had no knowledge of any type of "community" of body modification people. Tattoos were something our fathers or grandfathers who had been in a war came home with, and everybody had one set of ear holes if they were " cool", with many girls not having any.
At A Glance Author Tabby Contact Tabby@bme.anon When Ten years ago or more I wanted two sets.
I'd seen it in New York City, the first time... I was a kid, fresh of the farm, so to speak, still living in my mother's house. I went to school in the daytime and worked evenings and weekends in a high end department store, selling clothes to rich Main Line women. (Think Katherine Hepburn). My mother had only recently let me get one set. I was shocked at myself on certain levels.. I was so " different".. I'd rather have lunch with the gay guys at the store than my own peers... I was developing a love for punk rock, something " good girls" didn't do... even though I dressed like a prep for work, and I was definitely "dark".
So, one night, all on my own, I decided to honor that and take the step from what was normal back then to what was NOT normal; 2 sets of ear lobe piercings. I don't know if this was a bad idea or not.. it was whispered all through high school that, for those of us who could not get parental consent, that we could pierce our own ears with a potato and an ice pick. With the options available today, I'd say a kid should go to a professional.
To you guys, now, this must seem quaint. To me back then, it was a definition of something... a dividing line; like your first lay or your first beer... your first time realizing you are a submissive or a dominant ; you get the idea.
So.. One rainy night, in my upstairs bedroom and bathroom of my mothers house, with the back of my name plate for the store (I always thought that was symbolic.. the very mark of my " respectability" used to take the first visible step to being "different". I did my second holes.
I numbed my ear lobes with ice. sat on the toilet seat, naked, so as to not get blood on any clothing and alert my Anabaptist born mother to what I'd done ( she snorted, when I got the first set, that I might as well have pierced my nose.. had she had a teenager in later years, she would not have been so cavalier!) and began to push the needle-back of the name tag through my ear lobe. It hurt, but less than I had thought it would. I can remember encountering more resistance in my flesh than I had anticipated... I had thought it would be like sticking a pin into a steak.. no. it was somehow harder than that.. could it have been my own reticence to scar myself? I don't' know. I just remember the almost crispy feeling, the feeling that this was LIVE flesh, not a hamburger.. and how that somehow made the moment more sacred, yet some how darker, closer to the place where the essence of life and death live than a 16 year old girl in the suburbs usually got.
At one point, I looked in the mirror at myself, with a little blood trickling, and my name tag hanging in my earlobe in the mirror. I stared into my eyes in the glass, long and hard, and realized. " You are different". It did sting, for sure. The stinging sensation turned to heat.. when I concentrated on the heat, I could imagine it radiating outward into my brain, my body and my soul. Yet, it took me years to learn and define what I was, what that moment truly meant in the span of my existence. While I had no one to support me, no internet to find a site like this on, no magazines available where I could find them... (while "Rock Star" shows the heavy metal wannabe lead getting his nipple pierced, before like 87 chances are that would have been a pretty rare thing, if at all, to have happened, at least in the musical communities I ran in as a fledgling singer – that is NOT to say some of you weren't doing it, I'm sure you were! ) I just felt like I was marking myself a s a "not-foofoo", the only word I had then for the vanilla.
I finished up by putting my old starter earrings in from my first holes, put big dangle earrings with swords on them in the first set, and got a comment from the boss the next day at work " aren't you getting a little racy?" (remember, this is about 1983) I agreed to keep smaller, more "tasteful" earrings in both holes for the future, but I was secretly pleased that someone was recognizing that I was not "like them".
Perhaps this is not what it's about for all who engage in body modification, and I must confess, by the time Body Mods became more known and widespread, I was enmeshed in parenting and not really paying attention to that side of me. Recently, I have been reawakened, and am planning more. Mild, mild stuff I am sure, for this crowd. hardly worth mentioning but,it's not the act itself that I expect would interest any of you, but the emotions and right of passage that went with it.