Body Piercing For Everyone

Body piercing

The modern body piercing culture emerged from the gay leather and BDSM subcultures. In 1967, New York jewelry maker Jim Ward joined the New York Motorbike Club, a gay S&M group, and experimented with nipple piercing. Ward then moved to Colorado, where he and other members of the Rocky Mountaineer Motorcycle Club experimented more broadly, with genital piercing in particular. In 1973, Ward moved to West Hollywood (a gay village of Los Angeles) where he met Doug Malloy and Fakir Musafar. Together these men developed the basic techniques and equipment of modern body piercing. Malloy introduced the use of the autoclave and hypodermic needle; Ward developed the fixed bead ring and internally threaded barbells. With funding from Malloy (derived from his work with the Muzak corporation), Ward began using his home as a private piercing studio in 1975. Dubbing his studio the Gauntlet, he drew an initial clientèle by running classified ads in local gay and fetish publications. After three years of continued refinement with techniques and equipment, Ward opened the Gauntlet as a commercial storefront operation in West Hollywood on November 17, 1978.

In the mid to late 1980s, a wave of body piercing studios modeled after the Gauntlet opened throughout the US, Europe, and cosmopolitan centers. The display of body piercing by celebrities like Madonna and Axl Rose helped to grow the market for these studios’ products and services. The decisive migration of body piercing from sexual fetishism to commodity fetishism came with the Lollapalooza traveling festival of music performances, which began in 1991. These events greatly popularized body piercing by enlisting piercing studios as on-site vendors. At this point body piercing became a rite of passage for college-age, middle-class Westerners. By 1997 body piercing had become mainstream as the Miss America Pageant, as one of the contestants displayed a pierced navel during the contest.

Personal attitudes

Attitudes towards piercing vary. Some regard the practice of piercing or of being pierced as spiritual, sometimes embracing the term “modern primitive”, while others deride this view as insulting, as cultural appropriation, or as trendy. Some see the practice as a form of artistic or self-expression. Others choose to be pierced as a form of sexual expression, or to increase sexual sensitivity. For some people, piercing is part of their practices of S&M. In many countries, some people find forms of body piercing distasteful and/or refuse to permit employees to display their piercings on the job as part of the dress code.

Some people choose to be pierced for symbolic reasons. For example, some survivors of sexual abuse have said that they experience piercing as allowing them to retake control over their own bodies.