STH Body Jewelry Blog

When she was 17, Diana Mango really wanted to get a body piercing, but she feared that no professional would do it because of her age.

So one day at school, Mango’s friend took a sewing needle — disinfecting it first in mouthwash — and pierced her tongue, the Stony Point resident recalled.

“I was naive back then,” said the 21-year-old piercing aficionado, who has since taken her business to Tattoo FX in Stony Point. “But I really wanted a piercing.”

She didn’t get sick from the do-it-yourself tongue piercing, but Mango thinks it’s wise to put more rules in effect to promote safety.

As body piercing moves more into the mainstream, some medical professionals and public health officials think the practice needs to be regulated.

Rockland is considering joining a growing number of communities around the country that regulate body piercing.

“This is a semi-surgical procedure that flies below anyone’s radar,” Dr. Jeffrey Oppenheim, a neurosurgeon, said at last month’s meeting of the Rockland County Board of Health. “You need all kind of licenses and training to remove a bunion from someone’s foot, but you don’t need anything to pierce highly vascular parts of the body. There’s something wrong with that.”

Some body-piercing artists agree that it’s time for regulations.

“It would make the piercer’s job a lot easier,” said Draygon Xandoval, who does piercings at In Your Skin in White Plains. “It would be excellent if there was a law we could point to when we tell a kid that we won’t pierce anyone under 18.”

Most tattoo parlors already do some type of self-regulation of body piercing. Xandoval, for example, refuses to pierce anyone under 18, even with parental permission.

At Modern Age Tattoo, which has locations in Nanuet and Haverstraw, owner Rob Balter requires everyone getting a piercing to sign a consent form. For teens under 18, he requires that a parent be present while the procedure is done. And he won’t do piercings of anyone under the age of 14, even with parental consent.

“I could pierce a 12-year-old’s belly button,” Balter said. “But I don’t. Morally, I don’t believe a kid that age should get one.”

Most of the equipment he uses to pierce the body is disposable. The items that are reused are sterilized between uses.

“I’ve been doing this for 22 years,” he said. “I know what I’m doing. I really don’t think new regulations are necessary.”

New City resident Concetta Passariello, 20, who got her eyebrow pierced at Modern Age in Nanuet in September, said she filled out consent forms, provided identification and answered a lot of questions before her piercing.

By contrast, she said, the shop in New York City where she had her lip pierced this month didn’t ask any questions.

Mike De Luca, owner of Tattoo FX in Stony Point, said regulations wouldn’t change the way he does business. He already requires consent forms and parental approval, and he won’t pierce anyone under the age of 15 “even though I get mothers bringing in girls as young as 11,” he said.

De Luca said he isn’t opposed to the idea of some kind of rules governing body piercings.

“If they want to have regulations on it, go ahead,” he said. “I’m not for it or against it. It would make the public feel better to know there is some kind of regulation.”

Regulations on body piercing are becoming more common, said Jim Weber, spokesman for the Association of Professional Piercers, a group based in Albuquerque, N.M.

“It’s because piercing has become so mainstream,” he said. “It used to be a fringe practice, and the thinking was that if you did something like that, you deserved what you got.”

Weber said he was in favor of “well-informed” legislation governing body piercing.

“Good legislation sets out … minimum standards — what the piercer has to do to maintain a certain level of safety for the client and the operator,” he said.

In 2002, New York state added a requirement to its public health law requiring establishments that perform body piercings to get a permit from the state Department of Health.

But the funding to regulate and issue licenses to such establishments was never provided in the state budget.

Claire Pospisil, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health, said the state was “in the process of developing regulations to comply with the law.”

Counties currently have the ability to investigate complaints regarding body piercings and tattoos, she said.

The state Senate proposed a law that would make branding or piercing the body of a person under 18 a crime. The proposal, co-sponsored by state Sen. Thomas Morahan, R-New City, passed the Senate but never made it out of the Assembly.

Few local health departments have considered regulating body piercing.

Dr. Michael Fiorillo, a Pearl River plastic surgeon and president of the Rockland County Medical Society, said he had seen numerous cases of infections arising from body piercing.

“It should be regulated,” he said. “It can lead to serious infections.”

Dr. Joan Facelle, Rockland County’s commissioner of health, said no specific guidelines had been proposed. The county Board of Health will discuss the issue again at its monthly meeting on Wednesday.

There already are regulations on tattoo parlors, most of which also offer body piercing. Any new county rule probably would target those same businesses, Facelle said.

“It’s an invasive procedure,” she said. “It has the potential to cause problems.”

Even some people who have gotten body piercings think it’s time to regulate the process.

Jessica Hudgens, an 18-year-old Rockland Community College student, said she got her belly button pierced at a tattoo parlor in Middletown, N.Y., when she was 15.

No one asked her how old she was or if her parents approved, recalled Hudgens, whose mother certainly did not approve. She said she hid her pierced belly button from her mother — as well as the infection that she got in her navel soon after.

BOSTON –The 13-year-old girl, once a thin but healthy 115 pounds, weighed just 75 by the time she was admitted to the hospital. She couldn’t get off the couch, was wearing a diaper and had fluid oozing from her navel.

The emergency medical technicians who first arrived at her mother’s Boston apartment said the girl looked like a famine victim. Her mother, Deborah Robinson, told them she hadn’t sought medical attention for her daughter sooner because she was suspicious of doctors and thought she was doing all she could to care for her at home.

The girl was suffering from a massive infection that had spread through her abdomen after she pierced her own belly button.

Authorities say her mother allowed her to waste away and suffer in pain for weeks before finally calling 911 on Aug. 3.

Robinson, 38, pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges of child endangerment and wantonly and recklessly permitting substantial bodily injury to a child under 14. Bail was set at $10,000 cash and Robinson was ordered to stay away from her daughter and a 15-year-old son.

Prosecutor David Deakin, in arguing unsuccessfully for higher bail, told Magistrate Gary Wilson the girl was close to death by the time she arrived at the hospital.

“The defendant is, frankly, quite fortunate that she doesn’t face a charge of involuntary manslaughter at this point,” Deakin said. “It was that close.”

Robinson’s court-appointed attorney, Janet Macnab, said Robinson is “borderline mentally retarded” and has other mental health issues.

“Although this is an extremely sad situation, this is not a situation where there was any animosity, there was no assault and battery,” she said.

Macnab said the girl told her grandmother she was surprised when she was told how serious her condition was because “she wasn’t really feeling any pain.”

But Deakin said a doctor who testified before the grand jury that indicted Robinson said judging by the severity of her infection and damage to her organs when she entered the hospital, the girl would have been in intense pain and would not have been able to eat anything for several weeks before that.

Deakin said the state Department of Social Services had investigated four complaints about Robinson, the first in 1995, and most recently in 2003. He would not disclose details of the earlier investigations, but Denise Monteiro, a spokeswoman for DSS, said the earlier complaints were nothing that approached the level of neglect alleged in the recent case.

DSS now has temporary custody of the girl and her brother. Macnab said the boy is in foster care and the girl is recovering at a rehabilitation hospital.

“She has expressed a great deal of concern about her children,” Macnab said of Robinson.

Deakin said the girl is recovering, but still faces a long rehabilitation and at least one more surgery to repair damage to her intestines.

Monteiro said the girl has told her friends and teachers that she can’t wait to get back to school. The girl attended the Rogers Middle School, where her teachers said she had the highest raw score on the state’s standardized test, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System. She was also on the school’s track team.

“If there is anyone who is a fighter, it’s this girl,” Monteiro said. “She is a walking, talking miracle.

“She still has a long road, but she is doing well.”

BOSTON (AP) – A Hyde Park woman accused of allowing her 13-year-old daughter to waste away in pain for weeks from a body-piercing infection was indicted by a Suffolk County grand jury Thursday.

Deborah Robinson, 38, was charged with wantonly and recklessly permitting substantial bodily injury to a child under 14, a felony, and child endangerment, a misdemeanor. She was arraigned last month on the same charges in West Roxbury District Court. The grand jury indictment moves the case to Superior Court.

Prosecutors say Robinson failed to seek medical attention for her daughter even after the girl’s condition had become life-threatening.

The girl had perforated her intestine in June when she attempted to pierce her belly button. Infection spread through her abdomen, and when she arrived at the hospital on Aug. 3, she had pneumonia, fluid had pooled around her heart, and doctors did not think that she would survive.

The girl remained at a rehabilitation hospital in the Boston area on Thursday, said David Procopio, a spokesman for District Attorney Daniel Conley.

Titled “Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformations,” the event will include five panels featuring presentations from 11 UCSC professors, six professors from other campuses, and four community members: a surgical nurse, a transsexual author and actress, a photographer, and a psychoanalyst.

“Our purpose is not to medicalize, pathologize, or moralize,” noted IAFR director Helene Moglen, who holds a UC Presidential Chair in Literature and who is coordinating the conference with Nancy Chen, UCSC professor of anthropology, and Katharine Norwood, the IAFR’s assistant director. “We will be considering the personal and social meanings of practices that, while extremely varied, are also intriguingly related.”

“The conference is for academics and nonacademics,” Moglen added. “The papers presented will be relatively short and designed for a general audience. We expect there to be lots of discussion and disagreement. This is an open event and we hope that community members will attend.”

The conference will begin at 2:30 p.m. on Friday, October 14, at the Porter Sesnon Gallery with presentations about the photographs and performance art of Hannah Wilke, whose work will be exhibited. From the 1970s until 1993, Wilke produced art that examined the body and its representation–culminating with a stark, moving series of photographs of her face and body during her struggle and eventual death from cancer.

CUNY sociology professor Virginia Pitts will deliver the keynote address, “Beauty, Body Image and Psychosocial Power” on Friday evening at 7:30 p.m. at the Stevenson College Event Center. Pitts will draw on insights from her forthcoming book, Surgery Junkies: The Cultural Boundaries of Cosmetic Surgery, as well as her previous work, In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003).

Moglen said that the conference emerged from the recognition that in the 21st century, the body is experienced less as a fixed entity than as a changeable product and a project of technological, medical, and artistic invention. “There is a paradox at the heart of these body modification practices,” Moglen noted. “On one hand, they are experienced as self-expressive and liberating; on the other, they can be seen as socially determined, economically driven, and culturally enmeshed.”

The conference will include a panel on cosmetic surgery and the culture of tattooing. University of Kentucky professor Virginia Blum, the author of Flesh Wounds, will present a paper on cosmetic surgery in extreme-makeover reality shows. Richard Roullard, a local surgical nurse, will discuss his volunteer work in Asia with the organization Interplast, which serves clients who have no other access to plastic surgery. Aleshia Brevard, a local transsexual author and actress, will describe her production of her own transgender identity through surgery and tattooing, and Santa Cruz photographer Kelly Richardson will show and discuss her photographs, which document tattoo culture in Santa Cruz.

A second panel will explore the relation of body and mind from cultural and historical perspectives. UCSC sociology professor Gabriela Sandoval will analyze the practice of self-cutting among Latina youth, while University of Washington anthropology professor Lorna Rhodes will consider the implications of self-cutting among men in maximum security prisons. Psychoanalyst Sheila Namir will address issues of bodily integrity and subjectivity from both sides of the psychoanalytic couch, and UCSC anthropology graduate student John Marlovits will draw on his research in Seattle to explore the cultural politics of public psychiatry and psychopharmacology.

During a panel on Saturday afternoon, Sharon Kaufman, professor of anthropology at UC San Francisco, will speak about organ transplants and life-extending medical practices; UCSC history of consciousness professor Donna Haraway will analyze the constitutive ties between human and animal bodies; Moglen will reflect on the processes of aging and trans-aging; and Maria Frangos, a UCSC graduate student in literature, will examine televised narratives of body modification and the quest for identity in reality TV.

Participants in the final panel on Sunday will explore intentional and unintentional body modification practices that are the result of war, torture, organ transplantation, and prosthetic technology. San Francisco anthropologist Steve Kurzman will examine armaments, bodies, and prostheses in the context of the war in Iraq, suggesting how that war affects our concept of bodies at home. UCSC anthropology professor Nancy Chen will also trace the circulation of cadaver bodies from prisons to plastination factories to exhibits such as the “Universe Within,” a display of actual human bodies that has been touring the country to record crowds.

“Body modification is a phenomenon that spans generations,” Moglen observed. “We are looking at these issues through a cross-generational lens and we expect to have a large cross-generational audience. It is clear that people of all ages have a lot to teach–and learn from–one another.”

Labenske stretches them himself, with a tapered steel rod that helps enlarge the holes. “It’s easy,” he says.

Unless, of course, you have a blowout. To most, the phrase connotes worn tires, or a party with copious alcohol. But for a growing group of people, many in their 20s, it’s what happens to an earlobe that has been stretched too far, too fast. The pierced skin, unable to sustain the pressure of larger jewelry, “rolls” to accommodate the tunnel with more surface area.

The result, says Jared Karnes, who sells carved tunnels from OneTribe.nu in Richmond, Va., is a “lip” of skin around the jewelry.

“Sometimes it’s not the most wonderful looking thing ever,” he says. Blowouts can be avoided with careful, methodical stretching.

OK, so what’s the appeal of the plugs?

“They’re just cool,” says Labenske, 24, who works at Videorama on Northeast Alberta Street.

No one knows for sure how the trend took hold, but societies in Indonesia, Mexico and parts of Africa have long practiced the custom, placing bones, carved wood or precious stones in their earlobes or septums. In some societies, the tradition is a status symbol, as only those in the warrior class, or elders, may wear them.

Aubrey Birdwell, 21, is no elder. Birdwell, an artist, accordion player and student, passes ebony plugs he has carved through his lobes with the nonchalance of a teenager popping gum.

When he took them out on a sunny day, you could see through the holes to the clear blue sky.

What about the obvious: How do you think you’ll feel about those 2-inch holes when you’re undeniably middle-aged?

Birdwell laughs. “I’m trying to enjoy my life. If I walk around hating the scars my body has when I’m 45, I’ve got big problems,” he says.