Wither lies the line between trauma and ecstasy?
Slightly provoked by two very interesting posts on my friendslist about two controversial artistic acts, both of which are theoretical rather than actual: one was letting a dog starve to death, the other inducing multiple abortions. Information on these topics can be got from other people, I'm not here to blah blah at length about them, just to mention them as the jumping-off point for what I actually wanted to say. Fanfare.
Asked last Sunday (in a thankfully disinterested and unemotional way - if you're watching, folks, this is the way to ask) what had brought on the latest bout of relatively fresh scabbed-up cuts on my inner arm, I replied with a shrug because I genuinely couldn't remember. I do wish I could have little roll-over tags for real-life things sometimes. People could eyeball my arms and depending on where they were looking, little pop-ups would appear to say things like, "this cluster of old scars relates back to me being a drunken depressive maniac who was freaking out over lack of control and feeling unwanted" or "this one derives from a situation where I was demonstrating that actually it doesn't hurt as much as you'd think" or even, "this was here because I had a burning need to see someone bleeding for aesthetic and/or sexual purposes and you really shouldn't feel too worried about it". Not being a very nurturing person (OH HAI THAR UNDERSTATEMENT FROM THE ATTACKY-KILL GIRL REP OF FIGHTY BITCH LAND), I find my response to other people's evidence of self-harm is either voyeuristic, appreciative, or occasionally wincing nausea (because I am a hypocrite, and anorexia fills me with disgust); I do have limits to how much of other people's self-mutilatory self-expression I can fathom/endure - finding said limits on BMEzine generally occurs somewhere around the point where people start doing irreversible things to their genitals, or amputating their hands/fingers. Again the line is probably quite arbitrary to people who appreciate that as an art - I have a screaming terror of being deprived of my hands in the practical sense, whereas I think losing an ear or a foot or my breasts would be much less of an issue for me, and so is consequently much less of an issue when other people take it upon themselves to amputate these for aesthetic reasons. I don't prefer people in that state of being but nor do I find ugly either the end result or the act itself.
Frankly when I look at myself I find my tastes reasonably conservative, but Glorious Middle England probably doesn't agree. I've been told by one charming gentleman that facial piercings are "hideously ugly" and "disfiguring" - while I can agree that there are folk who pierce so much that they no longer look like the person they started out as, which I'd consider to be a literal interpretation of "disfiguring", it's apparently okay to have cosmetic surgery to achieve precisely that end - and numerous newspaper pundits have waxed lyrical about how dreadful it is that women get tattooed. Personally, I fucking love tattoos. I love individual, unselfconscious personal expression indelibly on the human skin - when people have quotes tattooed in typewriter fonts on the name of their neck, when someone tattoos a secret message on their instep in some code or other, or a favourite piece of artwork on their forearm so they can see it while they work - I love people marking themselves out as their own. A tattoo is usually saying, "I belong to me", even if it's a picture of the logo of your favourite football team (after all, supporting that team is one of the things that makes you YOU) or a little squiggle you drew on a notepad while on the phone when you first found out that your mother's cancer was inoperable. I especially love tattoos with mystery, with stories behind them. Symbols with meanings to the person who has them and perhaps to no one else. I love my Universal Serial tattoo for this reason, even though Dave got SO SO SO angry with me because I wouldn't/couldn't tell him what it meant. AS THOUGH THE MEANING WAS ANY OF HIS FUCKING BUSINESS.
My adoration of piercing is a little harder to express, since it's just a gut feeling, and I couldn't care less if other people have them or not. I just ... feel better for having bits of metal stuck through me. They belong there. I don't want to have to take them out, and no, they're not for the purpose of making people look at me - this is why all the immediately visible ones are so small - they're not "for display purposes" any more than my tattoos or scars are. They're there because that's where they're supposed to be and I don't feel at all comfortable without them. Including the infected swollen ones in the top of my ear that hurt whenever anything brushes them, yes. I could clear them up by sticking different earrings in, and I will do when I'm interested in having them back to a healthy state (hurrah for silver, hurrah for titanium). To the sciency, allergic, or just health-conscious types freaking out about the fact that I'm deliberately not clearing up an infection ... relax. I've been living in this body for 25 years and I know it well enough to know that it's not going to fall apart on me over something so minor. You will never be able to comprehend just how monstrously, mutantly good my immune system really is.
Scars, as far as I am concerned, are simply another marker on the list of "interesting stories you can write on someone's body", whether they're there because of self-abuse, fighting, accidents, surgery, or all of the above. I can appreciate self-injury as an art form as well as an expression of inner pain and ... I wish people, other people, could make and understand the distinction. Then again, I wish other people would understand rather than simply condemn the urge to self-harm in the first place.
Asked last Sunday (in a thankfully disinterested and unemotional way - if you're watching, folks, this is the way to ask) what had brought on the latest bout of relatively fresh scabbed-up cuts on my inner arm, I replied with a shrug because I genuinely couldn't remember. I do wish I could have little roll-over tags for real-life things sometimes. People could eyeball my arms and depending on where they were looking, little pop-ups would appear to say things like, "this cluster of old scars relates back to me being a drunken depressive maniac who was freaking out over lack of control and feeling unwanted" or "this one derives from a situation where I was demonstrating that actually it doesn't hurt as much as you'd think" or even, "this was here because I had a burning need to see someone bleeding for aesthetic and/or sexual purposes and you really shouldn't feel too worried about it". Not being a very nurturing person (OH HAI THAR UNDERSTATEMENT FROM THE ATTACKY-KILL GIRL REP OF FIGHTY BITCH LAND), I find my response to other people's evidence of self-harm is either voyeuristic, appreciative, or occasionally wincing nausea (because I am a hypocrite, and anorexia fills me with disgust); I do have limits to how much of other people's self-mutilatory self-expression I can fathom/endure - finding said limits on BMEzine generally occurs somewhere around the point where people start doing irreversible things to their genitals, or amputating their hands/fingers. Again the line is probably quite arbitrary to people who appreciate that as an art - I have a screaming terror of being deprived of my hands in the practical sense, whereas I think losing an ear or a foot or my breasts would be much less of an issue for me, and so is consequently much less of an issue when other people take it upon themselves to amputate these for aesthetic reasons. I don't prefer people in that state of being but nor do I find ugly either the end result or the act itself.
Frankly when I look at myself I find my tastes reasonably conservative, but Glorious Middle England probably doesn't agree. I've been told by one charming gentleman that facial piercings are "hideously ugly" and "disfiguring" - while I can agree that there are folk who pierce so much that they no longer look like the person they started out as, which I'd consider to be a literal interpretation of "disfiguring", it's apparently okay to have cosmetic surgery to achieve precisely that end - and numerous newspaper pundits have waxed lyrical about how dreadful it is that women get tattooed. Personally, I fucking love tattoos. I love individual, unselfconscious personal expression indelibly on the human skin - when people have quotes tattooed in typewriter fonts on the name of their neck, when someone tattoos a secret message on their instep in some code or other, or a favourite piece of artwork on their forearm so they can see it while they work - I love people marking themselves out as their own. A tattoo is usually saying, "I belong to me", even if it's a picture of the logo of your favourite football team (after all, supporting that team is one of the things that makes you YOU) or a little squiggle you drew on a notepad while on the phone when you first found out that your mother's cancer was inoperable. I especially love tattoos with mystery, with stories behind them. Symbols with meanings to the person who has them and perhaps to no one else. I love my Universal Serial tattoo for this reason, even though Dave got SO SO SO angry with me because I wouldn't/couldn't tell him what it meant. AS THOUGH THE MEANING WAS ANY OF HIS FUCKING BUSINESS.
My adoration of piercing is a little harder to express, since it's just a gut feeling, and I couldn't care less if other people have them or not. I just ... feel better for having bits of metal stuck through me. They belong there. I don't want to have to take them out, and no, they're not for the purpose of making people look at me - this is why all the immediately visible ones are so small - they're not "for display purposes" any more than my tattoos or scars are. They're there because that's where they're supposed to be and I don't feel at all comfortable without them. Including the infected swollen ones in the top of my ear that hurt whenever anything brushes them, yes. I could clear them up by sticking different earrings in, and I will do when I'm interested in having them back to a healthy state (hurrah for silver, hurrah for titanium). To the sciency, allergic, or just health-conscious types freaking out about the fact that I'm deliberately not clearing up an infection ... relax. I've been living in this body for 25 years and I know it well enough to know that it's not going to fall apart on me over something so minor. You will never be able to comprehend just how monstrously, mutantly good my immune system really is.
Scars, as far as I am concerned, are simply another marker on the list of "interesting stories you can write on someone's body", whether they're there because of self-abuse, fighting, accidents, surgery, or all of the above. I can appreciate self-injury as an art form as well as an expression of inner pain and ... I wish people, other people, could make and understand the distinction. Then again, I wish other people would understand rather than simply condemn the urge to self-harm in the first place.