HAMBURG (dpa) – Burns, scales, ear stretchings, nipple piercing and objects implanted under the skin – welcome to the bizarre world of “Body Modification”, a phenomenon that shocks many and can have dangerous repercussions for its adherents.
The provocative practice began in the United States but according to Cologne criminal biologist Mark Benecke, there are growing signs that this “modern primitivism” is spreading to central Europe.
“Observations in several large German cities indicate that the trend is establishing itself here,” said Benecke. The “bod mods”, as fans like to call themselves, seem undaunted by the potential dangers involved in achieving their desired appearance.
Benecke tells of “bod mods” who hang themselves up on meat hooks, tear sheets of skin from their bodies, jab 150 needles into their skin or (in extreme cases) drill holes into their own skulls. The disfigurement is carried out under either local anaesthetic or none at all.
It’s difficult to put a figure on the number of clients although Internet websites like the Body Modification E-zine claim to receive up to two million “hits” or visitors a month.
A flag bearer for the “bod mods” is America’s “lizard man” Eric Sprague, a philosophy student who had his tongue surgically forked, his teeth sharpened and green scales tattoed all over his body.
Germany’s Association for Plastic and Restorative Surgery is bitterly opposed to such extreme “bod mod” practice which it describes as a “unnatural and perverse contemporary phenomenon”.
The association’s general secretary Hans Rudolph displays photographs of botched piercings at the organization’s regular seminars – “people just turn away in disgust” – and talking to the surgeon interviewers hardly dare ask about stretching and branding – two of the other popular “bod mod” methods.
British psychologist Dorothy Horne holds the same view. She regards the justification of some adherents that “Body Modification” is a kind of personal advertising, which makes people more interesting to others, as “debilitating drivel”, and was recently quoted as saying so in Germany’s Spiegel news magazine.Benecke explains that some adherents regard their body as a work or art or an expression of personal freedom.
The German adds that in everyday life people like “lizard man” Sprague act “perfectly normally”. The young man was a model student at the University of Albany and a scholarship finalist.
Anthropologist Steve Mizrach regards “Body Modification” as part of the “modern primitives” movement whose members – to put it simply – seek “feelings and experiences no longer available in the industrialized world”.
For Time Magazine though the world these strange people occupy is one that would make even cult filmmaker Quentin Tarantino of “Pulp Fiction” fame shudder.
Well are “bod mods” mentally ill? This is almost certainly an oversimplification since the same would have to apply to many genuinely primitive peoples such as the Massai tribe in Africa, or to the grossly distended lips of the Sara women in Central Africa and the well documented penis perforation of the Maya.
The Encyclopedia Britannica defines “Body Modification” as operations such as circumcision and the silicon breast implants accepted in the western world, most of which are carried out by surgeons.
Such “acceptable” operations include the cheek scar gained by some German students in ritual fencing matches.
Doctors agree that “Body Modification” can make people ill. The cutting and branding procedure can lead to hazardous infection while implanting objects under the skin often triggers allergies or skin reactions.
“Piercing can give rise to highly dangerous, multi-resistent infections which do not respond to antibiotics, or can pass on life- threatening hepatitis or AIDS infections,” warned Rudolph.
In Germany, where it is now perfectly normal for someone to wear a tattoo, “Body Modification” is practiced by only a tiny subculture. A Frankfurt tattoo studio owner said he’s had only one branding customer in the last six months.
