I was watching "Humanimals: Wild Makeovers" on Discovery Health over the weekend. This is a show about extreme body modification. Things like facial tattoos, implants, split tongues and other such things. They profiled several people who've gone to various levels of body modification. Two were relatively minor - the reptile man has the tattoo of lizard scales all over his body (face and head included) plus a split tongue. The cat girl was similarly adorned with tiger stripe tattoos.

The other two were quite a bit more severe. Cat man had the tattoos as well as a surgically cleft lip (yeah, the thing that people pay money to fix in their kids so they can talk normally), sharpened teeth, whisker implants, cheek implants, 4 inch long finger nails and cat eye contacts. Enigma has the tattoo of a jigsaw puzzle over his entire body with blue tattooed over his face and hands. Oh, he has horns implanted too. Now I don't care one bit if people want to mess with themselves. It's not for me but it's not going to bother me when other people do it. Some of it is pretty cool. I mean, back when I was a teenager and playing Dungeons and Dragons it would have been cool to have a pair of horns. Then again, Enigma is in his late twenties and has other issues besides a juvenile imagination. Whatever...

The point is that the first thing I thought of while watching this is that people who go for such extreme modification, even just the ones with the full body tattoos, are relegating themselves to a career as either a circus freak or a phone sex operator. When you can't speak normally because you had your lip cleft or your tongue split then phone sex operator is probably not going to happen either.

The second thought came about during a segment when the shy and reclusive cat man (he says he's a tiger, what's this shit about shy and reclusive?) journeys to visit his sister who he hasn't seen in many years. The narrative laments that he gets all of this attention because of his appearance and its very stressful for his shy reclusive self. As you may imagine, the 'second thought' I am talking about was a big mental "BULLSHIT!" If you intentionally turn yourself into a freak then you don't get to whine about being seen as a freak, okay? I don't mean freak in a mean way either. But if your belief is that you aren't really human inside so you want the outside to represent that, don't bitch and cry when humans react to you like maybe just maybe you aren't quite right. It's because you aren't. You need to either live with that (or find a way not to live with it) but there is no pity party for you. This isn't a birth defect or a disease or something else out of your control. You're not disfigured, you're refigured, and you've done it yourself. People react to you like you're a freak because you are a freak.

The show ended with cat man at the train/bus station all alone and wearing a novelty cat tail. You may have seen these before as part of somebody's costume. This one was a tiger tail about four feet long and maybe five inches in diameter and it looked exactly like a plush stuffed tiger tail from somebody's very large stuffed animal. It was wagging slowly back and forth as the narrator said something like "...but sadly, for Cat, he will have to use this battery operated remote controlled tail until medical science advances to the point where he can have one implanted" and that led me to my third thought. It is not sad that this guy has to wait to get a surgically implanted tail (if that'll ever happen). What's sad is that a fully grown man is standing on a loading dock wearing a stuffed cat tail and thinking it makes him a cat.

Posted by: Jim at 10:54 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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