Why Your Daughter Wants Her Navel Pierced

Not too long ago, CNN news explored a new sort of beauty treatment. I watched as a blonde young woman, her hair fashionably frizzed, submitted her bare midriff to a branding knife.

A branding knife! The usually unflappable CNN reporter could not repress a gasp at the hiss of searing flesh.

I was suddenly reminded of a similar scene caught by the camera in Central Africa some thirty years ago. It was featured in a documentary film which my anthropology students used to watch. Entitled Bakuba, the film described life among a people imbued, as the narrator put it, with "a passion for decoration." Their unique geometric designs, related to their sacred king, were applied to wooden sculpture, to beadwork, to raffia mats, and to the human skin.

Riveted with horror, my students watched the Kuba artist (whose services were not cheap) cut typical designs on her client's bare back, stanching the blood flow with ordinary dirt. Some shuddered involuntarily. Some squealed. Not a few refused outright to watch. Never mind that the woman being beautified neither flinched nor cried out. Never mind that the results of countless previous operations marched in elegant, bumpy scars over her body from neck to pubic region. "Barbaric!" was invariably the verdict of the class. "How could a person do something like that?" they demanded.

But here on my television screen were young women not unlike my students, children of today's affluent, up-to-date, technologically with-it culture, submitting to beauty treatments no less disfiguring, no less "barbaric" than those of the Kuba. And, in a society so afraid of pain that dentists routinely offer tranquilizers to patients fearful of an ordinary cleaning, here were pain seekers courting the sensations of a severe burn -- and paying for the privilege.

Well, why not? That has to be the response of anyone who takes the long view of human experience. The urge to re- design, retool, complete what nature has bestowed, to advertise on the body the wishes of the soul or the conventions of society has been as much a marker of our species as the urge to speak.

The use of paint by early humans can be traced in archaeological sites dating back 400,000 years or more. And since the paints in question often appear as roughly shaped "crayons," much rubbed on one end, we can assume that they were probably applied to the only surface readily available at the time: the human skin. No painted rocks of similar antiquity exist to tell us otherwise.

What prompted those ancient ancestors of ours to paint themselves? Who can explain the origin of their body art? One might begin by imagining the sort of world they inhabited. It was a world dominated by animals larger and more powerful than the puny, scurrying humans who feasted on the kills of great beasts. Would not these clever, watchful beings seek to distinguish themselves from -- elevate themselves over -- their predators and sometime prey?

Life at the bare edge of survival is everywhere illumined by valiant attempts to achieve symbolic separation from nature. How? By making rules. Rules about relationships and worship. Rules about eating, sleeping, and sex. Animals cannot choose to abstain when the season of rut draws near, but humans can. They can command the body. They can deny the body. They can decorate the body with colors and markings holding sacred significance. Humans at the simplest levels of existence can separate themselves from nature through renunciation, religion, and art.

Most tattoo enthusiasts have prescribed distinctions between the tattoos borne by the two sexes. For Ainu women of the northernmost Japanese island, the tattoo was once like a wedding band, applied after marriage to hands, brow, and lips. The dutiful woman, so the markings seemed to proclaim, worked only for her husband, thought only of him, spoke only to him. The last injunction required lip markings absolutely unique in the annals of tattoo. A sort of larger mouth, curled in a permanent smile, was made to surround the woman's natural lips.

It may be that the Japanese, who were not aboriginal on these islands, picked up tattooing from the Caucasoid and very hirsute Ainu, native to the region. Despising the Ainu, they used the tattoo to brand a traitor with shame. By the sixteenth century, however, meanings had changed. Japanese prostitutes were
tattooing the names of favored clients on their thighs. And when sumptuary laws went into effect, forbidding expensive clothing to the business classes, the ardent social climber could hide under his somber tradesman's gear a tattooed body as elegant and costly as a brocaded gown. Until recently the tattoo has been an occupational emblem for Japanese firemen, carpenters, and gangsters. And always an exquisite art form.

The art form, together with its occupational connections, has been adopted in this country by motorcycle clubs whose members display their illustrated bodies in the pages of their own magazines. Some cycling "mamas" go the Ainu woman one better, tattooing on the inner membrane of their lower lips the obscenity currently in vogue. In any altercation, the woman so tattooed can deliver the ultimate insult by simply flashing a lip.

True body sculpture, however, requires use of the knife -- for incision or excision -- and often the removal of body parts. Never those essential to the business of life, of course, but the few expendables that can be comfortably sacrificed. Sacrificed for what? For mourning, usually, or for rituals of puberty. On the death of close male relatives, young girls of the New Guinea highlands once were forced to give up fingers. A traditional woman of the North American Plains -- a Cheyenne or Dakota -- might do likewise so that the Powers might spare her warrior brother in battle.

So ancient and widespread is the practice of circumcision (only Eurasians appear to have been exempt and not all of them) that one would be hard pressed to speculate about origins. Some Arabian tribes were said to elaborate circumcision into a supreme test of courage, one through which not all would live. Deferred until the young man was about to marry, the Arabian operation involved a partial flaying alive, the skin being peeled away from the stomach, pelvis, penis, scrotum, and inner legs. The prospective bride was invited to witness the ordeal and was privileged to refuse the match if her intended so much as flinched. Such rites were later forbidden by the code of Islam, which nevertheless insisted, "Circumcision is an ordinance for men and honorable for women."

Female circumcision requires, at minimum, the removal of the clitoris, sometimes the labia as well. "If this organ is not removed," say the Dogon, a hill people of modern Mali, "a woman will forever be partly male, just as the man with prepuce intact will be partly female." Surgical intervention is thought necessary to resolve the sexual ambivalence which a thoughtless nature has failed to edit.

Traditional Somali of the African Horn are less concerned with ambivalence than with defense. They seek in clitoridectomy to achieve the padlock a neglectful nature has failed to provide. How else can a girl's virginity be safeguarded? Not so long ago it was customary (and perhaps still is) to force a little girl of six or seven to undergo an operation during which the clitoris and portions of her exter-nal genitalia were removed. What remained was then neatly stitched with thorns until the vaginal opening was welded nearly shut. At marriage a second operation partially reopened the channel, which was again partially closed after the birth of a baby.

The practice of clitoridectomy has sparked a global controversy, one which surfaced quite recently in Egypt, now the most modern of Islamic societies. An article in a March, 1995, issue of the Wall Street Journal described the flap that ensued after the film of a clitoridectomy performed at home was shown on CNN. Upholders of the practice see it as the ultimate protection of women from the dangerous stimulations of the modern world. All that riding around in buses, they say, all that working in offices is surely enough to lead astray young women who are uncircumcised and therefore vulnerable.

We decry the practice, understandably. Surgical alterations in the Western world are designed to enhance and emphasize sexuality -- not to restrain it. But they also resemble ancient practices in some ways. Since face lifts, breast implants, and liposuction are expensive procedures requiring medical professionals and sterile environments, they are available only to the well-off and thus constitute beauty markers of class.

Among less exalted clients, the needle, not the knife, is the surgical instrument of choice. And the practitioner? Anyone who hangs out a shingle and has the nerve to do the job. Like the knife, the needle can be used to enhance sexual attractiveness. Many a woman has found in the strategically placed tattoo a wonderful come-on. The needle is also a puncturing device, providing holes from which to hang trinkets of various sizes, shapes, and degrees of sparkle. Those meant primarily for sexual titillation are normally hidden from public view. The devotee of X-rated films, however, is familiar with the beringed nipples, navels, and penises of reigning porn stars.

Ordinary citizens going about their everyday business have become accustomed to seeing other sorts of ornaments on the faces of passersby, dangling conspicuously from noses, lips, eyebrows, and ears, where they sometimes march all around the rim.

Similar trinkets have traditionally marked the faces of people living in simple settings, isolated from the modern world. Is it solidarity with the primitive that today's decorated dandies seek to proclaim by way of their disfigurements? Is it imitation of tribal custom they have in mind? If so, it is the look they have achieved, not the meanings that impelled the look. For none of the following scenarios of body alteration carry resonance today:

• "Let's have a baby-blacking," say the nomadic Caingang of southeastern Brazil. "Let's make a child." This means blackening the father and piercing baby's lower lip.

• "If we don't pierce baby's ear," say the Bella Coola of the north Pacific Coast, "he won't live long."

• "With pierced ears the baby will be proof against lightning," say the Arapaho.

• "The girl with a pierced lip is ready for marriage," say the Jivaro who once hunted heads.

• "The girl with a pierced left nostril is married," says the Hindu and goes on to prove it with a nose ring of such heavy gold, so encrusted with gems, that it must be anchored to the ear with a golden chain.

• "Piercing our nasal septums makes us look fierce," say the Fijians - or did when war was still a favorite sport.

• "Piercing our noses makes us men," say old-time warriors of New Guinea who still ply their arrows from time to time.