Piercings as Cultural Indicators and Personal Catylists

Original Post February 2007

I've been reading up on the cultural history behind body piercings and it's absolutely fascinating. While in the past I was more concerned about body piercing from a medical perspective, and still am in many ways, the cultural curiosities of this history is much more compelling to me. The popularity of certain piercings during certain eras in European History, for example, gives a unique insight into high societies. For example, in the Victorian era, nipple and genital piercings were a huge craze. So much for that repressed society, right?
I'm becoming especially interested in how certain types of image stereotypes really refer to deeply ingrained cultural or social beliefs about certain types of people. For example, "pirates" are the stereotypical figure for the gold earring. This comes from the early belief among sailors that a pierced ear lobe improved sight (which ties in closely to my interest of how certain parts of the body are oddly connected to each other) and it was also thought that a shipwrecked sailor's body could wash ashore and offer the gold ring in exchange for a proper burial. It makes sense that such a defined aspect of the typical "pirate" or "sailor" image includes something that was perhaps the most important part of their beliefs and were probably the one adornment they felt the need to pay such strong (and expensive) attention to.
Other stereotypes like this exist, such as the primitive man and the septum piercing, for various reasons. I find it not only odd but tragic in many ways that with all these culturally and medically interesting piercings, the ones in fashion today are not only perhaps the worst procedures and risky ones available, but also just the most profoundly boring and meaningless adornments I've come across. Indeed, the "history" of navel piercing, aside from a few pharoahs that used them for status (and not in any significant way), starts with Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell.

Perhaps my first assumption is right and that this trend does indeed tell us a lot about our contemporary culture.

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It's starting to become apparant that I've been going about this whole lifestyle change all wrong. In some ways at least. The all-or-nothing is helpful for now but can't be permanant. Eventually, once I feel I have control over my addictions and desires again, I can start figuring out which parts of that lifestyle are okay, and can have in healthy moderation. Eventually.
I'm becoming excited about the idea of really settling down into New Haven for at lest a couple of years. I'm finally getting a small sense of permanancy and rooting that I haven't been able to feel for a while. Even for the past four years, it felt fleeting. Now I realize that I can stay as long as I wouls like. And that things matter and are mine in this city. This is what I need.
So now I'm reclaiming everything in my life. I'm repainting my room so and continuing to make things feel permanant and lived in and, well, me. I'm also slowly balancing out my lifestyle to involve both, or all, of my worlds rather than one intensly at a time. Slowly but surely.
For now, I'm getting my nipples pierced this week, and completely getting into their history. Putting one's piercings into context makes them so much more interesting and meaninful because it connects one to that legacy. Nipple piercings themselves are really the perfect thing for me at the moment. Mostly recorded in European history throughout the Renaissance and Victorian eras, they were initially a response to men adorning themselves with earrings and later in the Victorian era were still part of the high class culture and often had a connecting chair or string of pearls as a left-over fad from the Elizabethian era of plunging necklines and creative adornment. However, what's most interesting to me is that even in such a "repressed era" of Western culture, genital and nipple piercings were extremely popular. So I'm going to keep pursuing this and try to figure out why it was so popular at that exact and try to figure out the mentality of this combination of repression and sexual adornment in such an extreme way. This may answer a lot of questions for me or at least help me get ideas about how to address the different needs in my lifestyle. At the very least, I'll have two new piercings to care for and keep me happy.