I’m curious what the motivation is for stretching the hole in a piercing using larger and larger gauge items.
This isn’t a ‘get outta my lawn you crazy kids’, kinda thing, I’m really curious what it represents…and how permanent is it? from some light research I see the some sized holed will shrink afterwards, but I can’t imagine a 3/4 hole would close up.
Is this just this generation’s stab at non-conformity? (smoking, then log hair, then tatoos, piercing, now earholes?)
I think they’re mainly used to carry rolled documents.
It’s been around a while, and near as I can make out, those who do it do it for the same reason our grandmothers pierced their ears and our mothers wore girdles - they like the way it looks. It also, as any fashion does, identifies them as members of a subculture - they get positive reinforcement from their peers who like it, and negative reinforcement from people they don’t like and desire the disapproval of who don’t like it.
Like homing pigeons?
Would that make them E-mail?
It makes ear sex much more comfortable for the recipient.
What?
Is log hair something practiced by the outdoorsy types who wish to carry campfire supplies on their heads? Or is it the result of excess geometric indulgence? 
As Cap’n Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp wore a shin bone in his hair. I guess a vegetarian would wear a log, instead.
Blurring the distinction between “fir” and “fur”
Mine are not stretched anywhere near 3/4" (mine are 2g, a bit bigger than a quarter of an inch). For me, I just find it aesthetically pleasing. The jewelry you can find at smaller sizes are so boring! I ordered some new jewelry a while back, that I’m still waiting to come in, but there’s some really neat rainbow tunnels and some other neat things. Right now, I’m wearing some wood triangular spirals that are really pretty. (Like these, but dark brown wood).
For other people, it may be about fitting into a subculture. I’m about as boring as you can get, though, and I don’t really hang out with a lot of other people with piercings. Healing varies from person to person. The person with 3/4" lobes probably won’t have hir holes go back to nothing, but they will shrink noticeably. Mine may or may not close up totally, but I’m OK with having holes in my ears.
My kingdom for an ‘n’. That’s what I get for making a post on the train from a phone with on of those itty bitty slide out keyboards.
It’s not generational. It’s been going on for centuries, apparently, although in the USA it’s more recent. I’ll be 47 years old this year. I’m stretched to 0 gauge (>5/16 inch, according to the chart on this page http://organicjewelry.com/generalinfo.html). I like the way it looks. The plugs in larger gauges are big enough for some really attactive designs to be etched into the surface. At 0 gauge, my plugs don’t have any really intricate on them. I do have a huge set of horn spirals. They are >5/16 inch at the thickest portion of the wearing surface, but the diamter of the actual spiral is maybe 2 inches.
This site http://www.infinitebody.com/ warns potential customers not to assume that all modifications are reversible, and my understanding is that this is very true of large gauge piercings.
I don’t tend to be very judgmental of people, fashion and the things they choose to stick into themselves or permanently do to themselves… people can do what they want, as long as it doesn’t affect me!
That said…
This fashion nauseates me! I just get so creeped out by being able to see through someone’s ear!
Doesn’t it hurt? Once you get to a really large size, does it ever get in the way or cause problems? I wonder what it will look like when these people are 90? 
See, I’m the other way. The only body mod I’ve got is a tattoo and of all the stuff I’ve seen, the ear openings (what IS the proper term for this?) doesn’t bug me much. As people say about tattoos: “What will it look like when you’re 80?” the answer being “About as good as the REST of my skin - old, blotchy and wrinkly”.
I also have 2g piercings. I only wear solid plugs, no looking through my ears or dangly things. I love them–unless you know, they just look like large regular studs. I have a bunch of pretty earrings–gold dichro, puau shells, mirror back plugs, amber/purple glass, steel with CZ bling. They’re just a little bit hardcore, and the rest of me is kind of conservative. I like having a little secret.
ETA: Smaller holes like mine are likely to close up if the earrings are removed and the lobes are massaged to increase bloodflow.
How long and often would you have to massage them?
Do you simply mean that some (primitive) cultures have been doing it for a long time or do you mean that there is some continuity between an older practice and what I see today in Western youth’s ears. If the former, btw, then I think it certainly is fair to call it ‘generational’. Or is your argument that being 47, you’re a generation removed from *most * stretchers?
There is a young man who works at the Subway sandwich shop near my office who has a large piercing in one of his ears… and I mean large, at least 1.5" Big enough to pass something like a cardboard tube from a toilet paper roll through.
When I first saw him, he had a large plastic disc in the whole, and I couldn’t stop staring at it. I thought for sure that the hole wasn’t as big as the disk - I figured the disk was just attached to a pin in the back – but I could still see the bottom of his earlobe as far as the bottom of this large disk. The next time I saw him, the disk was out, and his earlobe hung down like a rope attached to the front and back of he ear. It kind of ruined my appetite.
I haven’t seen him in there since.
Ear tunnels, which I believe is the proper term, creep me out.
I believe that ear/flesh tunnels refer to the (hole-in-the-middle) jewelry, not the piercing hole itself