Blodwyn Pig, piercings & tattoos and FGM

I remarked a few posts ago about a chance viewing of a programme about the blues which had included a band which was included in the line up for a 3 band gig from my youth, Ten Years, Blodwyn Pig and Stone the Crows (The post is here). Well, would you believe it? I was watching a documentary about 'Are you being served', a hoary old sit-com about a department store, starring amongst others the very camp and effete and now late John Inman. Towards the end of the programme, there was a brief explanation of the colourising software they had used to turn a recording of the pilot episode, which was shot in colour, but the recording was only in black and white, into full colour. They demonstrated part of the process with a group of musicians, probably 'Top of the Pops'; the band was Blodwyn Pig in what was possibly their only TV appearance. How weird is that!

Having got that little coincidence out of the way, humanity never seems to be satisfied with the the body it has been given.

Tattooing has a long history and has recently undergone a genuine renaissance in the past twenty years or so. Why this should be so escapes me. Make up or war paint serves much the same function, if you wish to adorn your body with designs; I do not understand why anybody would wish to 'paint' their bodies with something so permanent. Whilst I do not have a particular aversion to tattoos per se, or to tattooists, I just find difficult to comprehend why someone would do something so permanent, or at least damned difficult to eradicate completely in the future, something that you had better get used to because it is going to be staring back at you in the mirror for the next fifty or sixty years.It is difficult to know where this new found craze, once the province of seamen and prison inmates, emanated from, although it perhaps stems from the 'gangsta' culture which built up in eigthties and through the nineties and influenced all manner of fashions.

Hand in hand with the rise in tattoos, came the rise in body piercings, as if in search of some mystical desire to a more 'primitive' culture. Whilst the craze for pierced ears had shown no sign of abating; they are the only option if you want to wear some kinds of earring. During my irregular forays into dressing up in drag, I can assure you that the alternative, 'clip-ons', hurt like hell after a while. However I do not yet fully understand the notion of placing rings or studs on any available piece of cartilage, although in the case of piercings, at least the holes will heal by and large if you grow tired of looking like the back of a biker's leather jacket. And please do not get me started on the more personal items of 'jewelery', lidocaine or no lidocaine (and I do not care if Prince Albert had one or not).

Of course, marching lock-step is the growth of elective cosmetic surgery amongst the 'developed' nations. Plastic surgery has come on in leaps and bounds since the early work on burns victims during the second world war and much valuable work is done in the areas such as reconstruction after surgery, in genetic disorders such as pectus excavatum or Marfan's syndrome or in cases of deformity, whether skeletal or dermal. However, a huge amount of work is undertaken which is surely unnecessary. You can get just about any part of your body enlarged (except THAT bit :), reduced, straightened, pulled, stretched, 'undimpled'; you name it and there is a surgeon out there who is willing do it for a fee. Women can even get their labia remodelled (and their anus bleached but that it perhaps a different kettle of fish)!

I find it hard to put this all down to modern society's obsession with 'image'; how women, and to a large extent men, must conform to some nebulous 'ideal' which is neither clearly defined nor, for that matter, necessarily desirable. Western societies had largely dispensed with permanent 'mutilation' of body parts, the binding of children's feet, the elongation of the neck, the distension of the lower lip, circumcision, and replaced it with that most throwaway of notions, fashion clothing. From the alarmingly pointed shoes of the medieval period, the cod-piece, the ruff, the whalebone corset, the bustle, the wonderbra, clothes took on the semblance of who you wanted, or were coerced into believing you wanted, to be.  

Societies have always considered some 'forms' to be more desirable than others and it has been to western society's credit that we no longer exhibit children or adults in travelling 'freak shows' for the normal to gawp at, no longer lock them away* but in the last twenty years or so, it appears that we want to forget how we often change our minds during the course of a life and so we strike out for permanence when it is seldom other than a whim, a fancy, which would be much better served by something more transitory.

It would go against all my principles to actually tell people that they could not exercise their freedom of choice and have a pair of 54DD hooters, courtesy of the great God silicone, or that I would deny a seventy year old the option of ironing out their wrinkles with a nip and a tuck and a gather of the excess skin at the nape of the neck with an elastic band any more than I wish to deny the right of the woman to choose to terminate a pregnancy (although I would hope that she would at least canvass the father's views). I just think it is sad that some people do not seem to be able to come to terms with who they are and wish to be a different person.

I was sometimes asked when I was younger, people do not seem to care any more, about why I never got my face 'fixed' since it would have been easy to convince the medical profession of the lasting psychological damage which my appearance would endow me with and, as a result, I would get it all done for free on the National Health Service :) There were three reasons; plastic surgery around the eyes is tricky because there is no skin on your body that matches the thin skin around the eyes**; I felt uncomfortable about lying with regard to my psychological state of mind, which was OK, thank you very much but most importantly, who I am, the person that I became, have become, is inextricably tied up with what I look like. If you took that away, 'fixed' it, how would I ever justify to myself or to somebody else, why I am me, not somebody else.

I had every intention of writing a diatribe today about FGM (female genital mutilation, or female circumcision) following a drama production over the last couple of weeks about the subject. I decided against it not because I do not have anything to say but it is difficult for someone who believes that male circumcision is fundamentally immoral, babies are in no position to offer reasoned and informed consent over the 'briss', that how do you begin to put a reasoned and sober argument against the kind of butchery visited upon young women in certain parts of Africa and Asia.

The people responsible do not listen to reasoned and sober arguments and merely hide behind the thinnest of patinas of cultural identity and tradition..


* I believe that there was a permanent 'freak show' at 'Dreamland' on Coney Island, NYC until about 1910. It appears to have been taken over in the eighties or nineties by those who pastiche the kind of performances which could be seen there at the turn of the century.

** Anybody who 'knows' Simon Weston, the sailor dragged off the burning ship during the Falklands War will know what I mean. He, of course, had no choice in the matter; his eyelids had been burnt off in the fire.