Dig?
/Hijack
Well I have to agree that it’s certainly not pain free. All 13 of the piercings in my ears pinched quite a bit.
But your tattoos didn’t hurt as much as your ears?? Colour me flabbergasted! All 3 of my tats were a damn sight more painful than the ear piercings. Real grind-your-teeth-and-want-to-smack-the-guy pain, that the ear-piercing pain couldn’t wave a stick at!
We are such diverse creatures! 
/End Hijack
And I too think babies look ever so cute with little studs but I still cannot imagine having my (as yet un-conceived) baby’s ears pierced.
My parents put their foot down till I left primary school (11 years old). On my final day of Year 6, after we’d all signed each other’s school shirts, wept and pledged to remain bestest ever friends for ever, my dad finally allowed me to get my ears pierced. It really marked the rite of passage to secondary school. Absolutely a coming-of-age ritual.
I still look back very fondly and think my parent made the right decision.
This is one of the only reasons that I can semi-agree with getting a small childs ear pierced. Sort of like making the decision to have my son circumcised. He’s not going to remember that pain when he’s grown up. Just like a small child won’t remember the pain of getting their ears pierced. I had one of mine done years ago, and it hurt like hell. Of course the guy just basically grabbed my ear and shoved it through, but still. Not a fun time.
All the same…no way is my daugher having hers done until she’s old enough to ask, know what it involves, and can take care of them properly.
Because it makes pronouns easier to use, for one thing. I hate not knowing how to refer to a baby—“it” seems rude.
I got my ears pierced as a baby, in the mall. I don’t remember it, and I couldn’t care less. I pierced my ears 4 more times as a kid/teenager and didn’t have a lot of significant pain. It’s less of a big deal than circumcision, IMO…if your daughter gets a little older and decides she doesn’t want her ears pierced, she can always take them out.
I don’t know about the rest of the world, my only experience with babies comes from Cuba, but in Cuba girl babies have their ears pierced in the hospital almost as soon as they’re born. I never stopped to wonder if this was abusive or not, I mean newborn babies are poked in many ways, and it makes sense that a doctor or nurse would have a better idea on how to safely pierce ears than someone else.
For goodness’ sake, how is piercing a permanent procedure? My ears were pierced as a baby (as a new born by the Italian-American doctor at my Italian-American mother’s request-- every girl in my Italian family had her ears pierced as an infant) but as I grew older, I didn’t like them so my mom took them out (older = a toddler/younger child). By the time I was 13, I want earrings again but, lo and behold, the holes had COMPLETELY closed. I took a needle and some ice and reopened the holes myself.
The human body is amazing in its ability to heal. Even now that I wear earrings semi regularly, the holes will often close themselves up, leading to me stabbing myself in the ear to open them back up.
For what it’s worth, I don’t remember the doctor stabbing my little infant ears, so I’m certainly not traumatized from it. I got two more sets of piercings when I was 13 or 14 and those didn’t hurt at all. The only piercing I ever got that more than stung for a second was my cartilage which never healed right.
But again, this whole idea that piercings are permanent is flat out silly.
[hijack, continued]
Diverse, indeed. The worst part of my worst tattoo was the one on my stomach which simultaneously itched and TICKLED the worst I’ve ever been tickled and I had to lie so still! The ankle was intense, but not bad, and the one on my sternum was psychologically horrific (half-way through I really grokked for the first time that this was going to be very visible to everyone for ever, not something I could cover up without planning and effort - since I was getting it for spiritual reasons relating to my visibility in the community, this was so, so appropriate. Hard, but appropriate.). But the physical pain wasn’t bad, and afterward nothing felt worse than a scraped knee while healing.
I am thinking about trying again with my ears though. The news that (generally) a needle hurts less has me reconsidering my determination to never let another hole be made in my ears!
[/hijack]
As for this furor about “trashy” and “stupid”, I think y’all are being a little hard on some folks here. The fact is, SOMEONE has to be at the bottom of the sociological heap. At this moment, in most places in the US, that group of someones tends to be correlated with the same group(s) of someones that practices routine ear piercing of infants. They’re not “trashy” because they pierce their baby’s ears. They’re “trashy” for whatever fucked up reasons groups of people get labeled trashy - lower income, poor quality schools, higher crime rates, whatever. But the flip side of that cultural identity thing is…well, cultural identity. And if you do something that identifies your baby as a member of a sociologically low-ranked group, it shouldn’t be surprising that people outside that group think of her as sociologically low-ranking. Or, in layman’s terms, “trashy”.
In other words, you’re not just identifying her as part of your group to people within the group, but to people outside the group. And with that identification comes all the baggage of that group.
If I put my daughter in tie-dyed t-shirts and long skirts, people are going to associate that with patchoulli and pot and jam bands. Doesn’t matter if she’s personally into any of that or not - the society with which such things are associated are also associated with tie-dyed t-shirts and long skirts. If you consider hippies “trashy”, even subconsiously, then she’ll look “trashy” to you.
Yes, we’re talking about cultural differences here. I had my ears pierced at 18–at the doctor’s office. (Back in the 60’s.) From playing dress-up with my Mom’s clip-back or screw-back earrings, I knew they hurt. And I wanted to be Bohemian!
My Grandmother (raised Presbyterian Scots Irish) thought the custom was barbaric. An earlier post mentioned Irish nuns piercing ears in the hospital. Yup–the practice makes WASP’s nervous!
The doctor had many Mexican-American patients. He said the grandmas usually pierced the babies’ ears. And he’d never seen any problems.
When my dad first taught me the definition of the word ‘class’…he had to use many metaphors and such…because it is a hard concept to grasp.
But he did manage to get the meaning across to me, and to instill me with some semblance of it.
The moment the true meaning of the word dawned on me…I could see straight through “sociological classes”. I could see that some of the people on the top of that heap, sorely lacked the very characteristic they coveted so much. They really didn’t know what it meant. They didn’t have a daddy to take the time to break it down with metaphors and examples…or maybe they had no one to set an example.
I think it is a good idea for those of us that do participate in practices that the majority of the people in this country find “trashy” get the information out that it is not trashy at all. This way, we may shed light on certain individuals that do want to emerge from the sludgy lot of people that find low-income people, people from lower quality schools, etc, to be ‘trashy’.
There is a chance that they may open their eyes, exhibit a modicum of class and say, “who the hell were we to judge them for something as harmless as ear piercing or as irrelevant as income?”
I didn’t mean to quote your entire post, Whynot, but I am at work and am sneaking and rushing. Sorry.
Well, I AM quoting your whole post, because I think it should be posted twice! It’s a great post, and your dad was obviously a classy dude.
Yes, I agree. What we’re taught and what I’m trying to become are not the same thing. While I can understand the bestial desire for a pecking order (which is present in any social mammal), that doesn’t mean I think we as civilized thinking humans need to put up with it. Knowing it’s there, we should fight it, and fight that urge within ourselves and educate one another so that someday our base bestial instincts in this area are overcome as thoroughly as our base instincts to kill or to have sex in public or fling our poo.
I was trying to hypothesize the (unconscious) origin of the “trashy” opinion, not defend it. I hope that was clear. And I hope one day to truly have the class you do, Nzinga, Seated.
Whynot, your post was well worded and clear, which is why I used it as a foundation for my post. But I assure you, I still have lots of room to improve upon my classiness. I can still wallow in the muck with the best of them. Hence the following:
Eleanorigby, in response to this:
I submit this:
So when you stressed YOUR culture in all caps, I assumed you were indicating a contrast of some sort. I am learning not to glean any indications at all from some on this board. I should assume that you stressed YOUR culture out of the clear blue, with no contrast at all to MY culture.
I had my ears pierced when I was about 6 months old, and I’d rather I didn’t.
Maybe because I was struggling, or they misjudged or something the holes are in totally different places. One in right in the middle in the lobe, the other is on the edge. With certain earings you would not really notice, but years later I wanted second holes. They could only do them on one side because there was not enough room on the other.
I never really wear earings anymore, but the holes have never healed because I had earings for most of my younger life. I wish I never had them pierced, now.