For Steve Haworth, body modification artist and the inventor of subdermal and transdermal implants, accessing body modification is as necessary to private alternative as having the liberty to style your individual hair. Yet, modifications corresponding to sensory magnet implants, ear pointing, shaped punches, and extreme plastic surgeries corresponding to having ribs removed, all have various degrees of mental and physical health risks that the patient is willingly undertaking.
Earlier this 12 months, Brendan McCarthy, a tattooist referred to as Dr Evil, was sentenced to 40 months in jail for performing consensual body modifications, including ear removal, nipple removal, and the splitting of a tongue. Then there’s Robert Smith, a former surgeon who performed voluntary amputations on patients that were later found to be affected by a body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), a mental illness involving an obsessive deal with a perceived flaw in appearance, referred to as apotemnophilia.
With the legal punishment of surgeons and body modifiers performing consensual procedures, the query becomes who really might be held accountable for an individual’s desire for modification, even at the chance of bodily harm? While many view body modification as a tool for self-expression, psychological disorders corresponding to body dysmorphic disorder bring into query the problems with consent when coming from someone with a mental illness.
While body modification artists corresponding to Steve Haworth actively advocate for the correct to self-expression through modification and perform ‘extreme’ procedures, the moral line for modifiers and surgeons varies from individual to individual. Dr Barry Eppley, a cosmetic and reconstructive surgeon in Indiana, told The Cut earlier this 12 months that if his practice had a slogan, it could be “We don’t care why you would like it.” Haworth, then again, takes requests on a case-by-case basis and does deny asks through his skilled ‘black line’.
This, he says, is often when someone who has no visible tattoos or piercings and is asking for something like horn implants or when it’s a request to make the body appear more ‘normal’. “I even have been asked to effectively perform nose jobs or tummy tucks, I even have been asked to take a stretched lobe and shut it back to normal. All of these items modify the person to what society considers normal,” he explains. “I’ll modify a stretched earlobe to a smaller size but I is not going to close it down completely. My art form is all about modifying the person away from what society considers normal or pleasing. It at all times has been and it at all times will probably be.”
Dr Ira D. Papel, a professor within the division of facial plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins University and the medical director on the Aesthetic Center at Woodholme, navigates whether or to not perform a surgery using the alternative mentality. “To make someone comfortable a couple of fad, which can come and go together with a everlasting procedure and which there really isn’t any going back to ’normal’, that is not an excellent thing,” he says. “We should always be advising patients not to try this type of thing.”
Through first-hand experience of acting on patients that he was unaware were untreated for BDD and thru his research into the connection between cosmetic surgery and BDD, Dr Papel says he’s currently saying no to ‘extreme’ requests every week. “Increasingly, people are available with strange ideas, like wanting their eyebrows raised so high that they are in the course of their brow or a rhinoplasty done to make their nose so small that it could not only look funny but hard to breathe as well.” While he doesn’t think this must be imposed by national standards or regulations, he believes each surgeon should navigate every patient’s request with quite a lot of physical and psychiatric indicators in mind.
“Are they asking for reasonable things? Occasionally, someone is available in and so they want something way out of the conventional, which it’s never going to serve them well in the long term and it’s our job to speak them out of it,” he says. “Then there may be if you happen to feel that there’s an underlying psychological pathology corresponding to body dysmorphic disorder. It is advisable then get them help.” He’s aware which means that they might go on to a different surgeon, but views the argument for freedom of complete self-expression as “type of a cop-out” and as a substitute makes his decisions using his own moral compass.
Amber Breeana Luke, a 24-year-old body modification enthusiast from Brisbane, Australia, appears far different than what surgeons corresponding to Dr Papel would consider ‘normal’. Tattooing 90 per cent of her body, including her eyeballs, and having breast augmentation surgery, her tongue split twice, and ears pointed twice, she’s never been told ‘no’ by any body modification artist or doctor and sees it as something that’s “ultimately your decision”. “I suffer from severe clinical depression and BPD with schizophrenic traits. I see tattoos like I see life, super painful sometimes, but if you happen to stick through it you’re left with a gorgeous reminder that you simply did it,” she says. ”It’s an outlet for me to release negative energy and emotions I’ve built up inside, it appears like that negative energy gets drained each time I get tattooed.”
For Grace Neutral, television presenter, model, and hand-poke tattoo artist, every modification she has had – including getting her eyeballs tattooed, scarification, tongue split, ears pointed, and belly button removed – has been an “integral part” of her personal growth. “It has helped me gain a deeper understanding of myself,” she explains. “The physical pain I went through helped me change into mentally stronger and in addition understand my body, and it’s own personal limits and the way far I needed to push them to realize a better vibration.”
“You must have the ability to do whatever you prefer to your individual body. Risk is something you could have to weigh up in your head whether the reward will probably be greater than the chance of going blind or getting blood poisoning” – Grace Neutral
Neutral believes that so long as someone is of “sound body and mind” and the procedure is just not life-threatening, “it’s best to have the ability to do whatever you prefer to your individual body”. As for extreme procedures, she believes a big part is finding the correct person to do it. “For me, personally, it took me some time to seek out someone who could understand my artistic vision and will perform the procedure with the very best precision,” she says. “Risk is something you could have to weigh up in your head whether the reward will probably be greater than the chance of going blind or getting blood poisoning.”
This 12 months, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) released data that shows there was almost 1 / 4 of one million more cosmetic procedures in 2018 than in 2017 within the US, with almost 18 million people undergoing cosmetic procedures last 12 months. We’re also just starting to see the start impact of social media filters on cosmetic surgery requests, dubbed as “Snapchat Dysmorphia” by a 2018 study.
As technology evolves, we’re also starting to see an increase within the concept of ‘transhumanism’, meaning future surgical asks and body modifications are still yet to be determined. This too implies that each individual line of the modifier is consistently in flux. Nonetheless, with people affected by disorders corresponding to BDD needing medical screening and protection, body modifiers and plastic surgeons are accountable for accessing what state the person is in when making the request and if the procedure will probably be a tool for self-expression or self-destruction.
