Here’s how to split your tongue in two. One: have it pierced. Two: put a piece of fishing line through the hole. Three: pull.
That, at least, is how 20-year-old Dustin Allor of Menlo Park, California, did it in 1997, when tongue splitting was becoming popular. Nowadays it’s more usual to find a dentist or surgeon to do it for you. The results, though, are the same – a forked tongue with tips you can move independently.
As extreme as it sounds, tongue splitting is just one of dozens of types of body modification practised in the west today. The spectrum runs from the commonplace tattooing and piercing to savage “heavy mods” such as nipple removal, genital mutilation and amputation, often self-inflicted. Think of any part of the human body that can be stretched, pierced, mutilated or removed altogether, and someone, somewhere has done it.
Last year Shannon Larratt, founder and editor of the respected online fanzine BMEzine, posted an exhaustive questionnaire about body modification on a members-only section. Of more than 4700 people who responded, most were only pierced or tattooed, but 870 of the respondents reported having had some form of heavy modification.
The most common heavy mods revealed in the survey were genital modifications ranging from circumcision – female as well as male – to scrotal and labial stretching, glans splitting and relocation of the urethra. Decorative implants of various sorts are also popular, including some which are inserted under the skin. Branding, scarification and tongue splitting…
