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Sunday, August 13, 2006
Sunstar essay: The world modifying
By Erma M. Cuizon
Sun.star essay
We came across an AP story on body alteration that would be, in our part of the world and in some other places, an underground activity. The legality of it would have to be debated on. We don’t know if it’s illegal even with the consent of the “victim” but in some American States, yes. Or it’s a secret of sort because a greater part of the population would be shocked at what body modification is turning the youth into.
There was a time when a mother, on being shown a tattoo on the back of her daughter, must have fainted. But body modification is more than tattoos or pierced ears. You have piercing, all right, but also what are called “scarification” and “subincision,” words you hardly find in the dictionary.
There’s even a suggestion of a man’s SSS number implanted under his skin, and “technologized” so that the number is easily available, perhaps with a sound? Or you have simple (but outrageous, according to Grandma) branding the way farmers in the US brand cattle in the farms. But while it’s “single strike branding” for cattle, in humans it’s multiple strike branding. This means your son will be struck with a burning iron stick so that a desired design would be etched in his body. The multiple branding, of course, means he will receive a series of “small strikes!”
And there may already be chips injected under the skin that would carry medical records of a man, making it easy for doctors to access medical data of patients! The US Food and Drug Administration is said to have approved this.
And people fantasize what else they could do to modify their body. There already was an international conference on body modification, “Changing bodies, Changing selves,” in Sydney some three years ago.
Yes, tattoos in young girls and pierced ears in males are now “mainstream,” they say. But that depends on who’s talking. You might still faint if urged to touch two earrings on one ear of your son, or in his nostril, or how about in the lid?
In the AP story, there’s a picture of a man showing his cleft tongue that looks like two snakes coming out from his mouth. And the title of the very short news feature has the word “body modification” in it, referring to the “art” as a “growing trend.”
Since people change slowly, body modification has been done underground for years while the world stayed comfortable with cosmetic surgery. And yet, there have been people who “get horns implanted” on their heads for fun. Others have implanted magnets into the hand, like one for the circus in an act of sweeping into their open hand a cluster of small iron pieces.
Perhaps like in the Peter Pan movie, some young fellows have made their ears pointed.
Still, the news on body modification, calling it almost mainstream, is actually not so. There was probably only one guy who had his head modified with horns, one or two with elf ears, perhaps. Certainly not mainstream. And yet it has all the appearances of it becoming mainstream not so far from now.
Some village people in Africa and other places in the world hundreds of years ago were practical. Perhaps before the discovery of paper, the tribes went into “cuttings” in marks on the skin that showed tribe identification, even marital status and age. But also for beauty’s sake in the designs desired. The art of cutting has taken up modern designs.
Young ones who are body modifiers would later hide their body art when they grow up and become professionals. And perhaps the elf ears would be coming only from an actor or a showman in “suspension.”
For hooks and suspension, imagine a lot of hooks embedded in the body of someone hanging with the use of a rope from, say, a tripod.
To ancient tribes, the alteration of the body was like a form of sacrifice to the gods, an offering from their own selves. So, to modern body modifiers, there hasn’t been much change throughout the centuries, except the agenda, which today is glamour and merriment. As Reuters put it in the headline of a news item on suspension, “Kids dangle from meat hooks for fun.”
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (August 13, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
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