..::Preface::..

Lying back on a dentist chair, I glanced over and saw the 24-year-old man opening up a new package of a 5 inch needle of about 12 gauges.  Dips the needle and the air-brush-look-alike gun into the pigment, he begins scaring out a bloody looking pattern onto my skin.  I clenched and gasped slightly, then realizing that I just paid nearly a hundred dollars for this man to scar me. 

I, amongst millions of others spend thousands of dollars a year performing a reinvented cultural phenomenon, body modification.  These modifications, also known as mutilations, includes piercing, tattoos, branding, and in precise definition, plastic surgery as well.  Historically, in the Western society, body modification insinuates the notion of deviance, poverty and unnecessary pain.  These concepts have been accepted as norms since early medieval period, when punishments for crime include piercing hooks through the back of a prisoner, so they could be hung by chains.  In the Bible, Jesus Christ was hung on the cross by piercing through the palm (or wrist) and the feet as the ultimate punishment.  The question now is why and how has an element of cruel retribution become popular in the modern Western culture?  And that 36% of Americans aged 25-29 have at least one tattoo? (Wong, 2003) There are many more historical and sociological grounds to why and how this has come to be.  In modern Western society, body modification has developed from an element of folk culture, to an important aspect of popular culture.