It's no mistake that virtually every culture in our history has used body modification and body ritual (or as Fakir puts it, body play) as an integral element of an individual's development, either as a part of childhood growth, or as a coming of age ceremony. Only this small and recent amoral Western culture has forgotten that.
Many of the exceptional qualities attributed as uniquely human are not. Animals also build and use tools. Animals also communicate using language, teach ethics to their children, use first and family names, and some animals may even be more intelligent than we are. But they don't practise body modification or body ritual… It's that single thing that differentiates us.
Body play makes the fundamental statement that we — the individual — have the moral power to control our biology; that we are MORE than it. Even a rose tattoo on an ankle or a navel piercing makes that statement. Even the extremes of athletics do. I've said it before, and I'll say it again now: A person who has never modified their body is nothing more than an animal.
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