| 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 as mainstream as the Miss America Pageant, as one of the contestants displayed a pierced navel during the contest. |
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| | The Body Piercing Folklore | | The marketing of modern body piercing products and services has emphasized their connection to longstanding cultural practices, even as the image of body piercing is often one of indifference or even radicalism regarding cultural norms. Musafar connected modern body-piercing culture to longstanding practices in non-Western cultures. Retrospective and imaginary though these links may be, they have succeeded in making body piercing a central practice of modern primitivism.
Malloy took a different route, marketing contemporary body piercing by giving it the patina of a Western history. His pamphlet, Body & Genital Piercing in Brief, concocted fanciful histories of genital piercings in particular. These ersatz, and often homoerotic tales---which include the notion that Prince Albert invented the piercing that shares his name in order to tame the appearance of his large penis in tight trousers, and that Roman centurions attached their capes to nipple piercings---are widely circulated as urban legends, and Malloy's pamphlet is sometimes cited as evidence of their historical veracity.
The notion of an aristocratic European past of body piercing enjoys widespread appeal. Hans Peter Duerr argues in Dreamtime that nipple piercing became popular in fourteenth century Europe. There is evidence, both anecdotal and photographic, that nipple piercing was practiced in Europe during the late nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century, but it was not a common practice. |
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