As I said, all my time is spent on the book until it's done. There's sooo much content in this book. I'd say something like five to ten times as many photos as the first book easily, plus about fifty thousand words of text. It's a fairly “heavy” document!
Here's the current draft of page 79…
Two modern forefathers |
On History
As a publisher and writer, I am often asked to provide some historical context for these body modifications. Most people make the assumption that these things are some sort of a modern trend — in fact, I made the same assumption. Even though I'd seen photographs as early as the 1920's of healed piercings of all kinds, including tongue piercings and even neck piercings, I wrote it off as simply sideshow culture without a “real” context as far as the average person was concerned.
With the exception of moments in time where piercing was popular among the aristocracy (most notably in the late 1800s) and when it was incidentally depicted in crowd scenese in paintings (such as the work of Hieronymus Bosch in the early 1500's), body modification, especially erotic body modification, is largely undocumented… So I started asking the older people I knew with piercings how they got into them.
Of course the majority of people told me that theyd come up with the idea themselves, and it was only recently that theyd even known there were others into the same subject. This was what I was expecting, so it came as a shock when more and more people started telling me about the “piercing club” that their parents had been involved with, or about the “gay uncle” they'd met when they were a teen, who'd been pierced since the early 1900's.
Yes, you're probably seeing these things a lot more… but that is a byproduct of changing media attitude to the subject than anything else. This community has always existed quietly, and always will. The only thing that's changed is that because people are now able to learn about the entire modification world in one night of reading is that it's taken body modification out of its slow growth and self-discovery mode.
I believe that the expression is “he who is not a radical at age twenty has no heart, but he who is still a radical at forty has no sense.” I worry sometimes that the young people involved in heavy modification are rushing ahead with a bit too much heart and a bit too little sense.
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