Culturally, there are different reasons why a person would choose to pierce his body. Consistently throughout history, ear lobe piercing has been seen as a mark of feminine beauty(10). It was not until the 1970s, however, that men began to pierce their bodies as well, as a mark of their occupation or their sexual orientation. Today, Western cultures have seen the art of body jewelry piercing explode into the mainstream.

According to Joan Jacobs Brumberg in her book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, “body jewelry piercing, once regarded as characteristic of “primitive” people, has emerged in the 1990’s as the latest form of self-expression among American adolescents” (Brumberg 130). Instead of having only the

option of piercing one’s ears, women (and men) today now can spend hours deciding which body part they would like pierced (eyebrow, lip, nipple, navel, etc) and which piece of jewelry they would like to wear (hoop or post). Brumberg argues that both the homosexual subculture as well as cultural icons like Madonna introduced piercing into the mainstream culture.

In her book Sex, written in the 1980s, Madonna features photographs of both men and women pierced in multiple places on their bodies. She also showed off her navel ring in public, and stated that she adopted the look after she saw some members of her homosexual entourage wearing the same piercing. MTV showed teens wide varieties of body jewelry piercing: they made popular bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana, as well as their piercings. The 1994 Paris runways showed supermodels like Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington with pierced navels. Because of the overwhelming popularity of such stars in the 1980's and early 1990's, body piercing became the newest fad. But is it rhetorical?

Brumberg argues that “piercing proves, in a public way, that your body is your own” (134). She argues that piercing in the 1990s represented “provocative symbols of a powerful revolution in sexual mores and behavior” (132). Piercing one’s body signals one’s “personal politics” and it becomes a symbol of both “sexual liberation (because piercing symbolizes opposition to conventional sexual norms) and cultural relativism (because it evokes the primitive and the exotic)” (134). Piercing provides easy ways for young people to differentiate themselves from the mainstream adolescent culture, while still being a part of a mainstream subculture.