Why The World Needs A Freak

Before body modification I was pretty average and I like to say reasonably good-looking. (laughs) There was nothing particularly notable about me; I was just a face in the crowd.

Body modification starts with an unexplainable base instinct to play with your body. I always had a very natural interest in tattooing and piercing. Some kids draw on the walls; I was a draw-on-my-arm kind of kid. It was just a matter of taking that drive, putting conscious thought into it and finding a way to do it.

It used to be if a guy got his ears pierced, he was gay. There was a turning point, when I was in junior high school, when a lot of guys started getting their ears pierced and the popular opinion started to shift. It was no longer seen as a homosexual thing. The fact is body modification has been around forever in some form.

As a species, human beings modify our bodies. I take a very broad, anthropological view of it. In my opinion, body modification includes things like clipping your nails and getting a haircut. People do unnecessary things to their bodies for reasons besides hygiene. It’s one of the few things you can say exists in every single culture and society. It’s just a matter of the lengths different people go to.

People often say to me, “Oh my God, how can you do that?” What I say to those people is that what I do to my body is not unlike what they do to theirs; it’s a spectrum, and we’re just on different ends. They may be styling their hair, while I’m radically altering my outward appearance.

The first thing I did was pierce my ear in my freshman year at college.