Word: musafar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Branding is, well, a hot trend largely due to Fakir Musafar, 69, a former ad executive who calls himself a shaman and devotes his life to bod-mod, along with other more fantastic practices like O-Kee-Pa, a mystical Native American body-suspension ceremony. Musafar started a California state-licensed branding school in 1992 and has spread his philosophy through a website and a quarterly magazine called Body Play. He claims that branding is now administered by some 50 people in the Western world and could hit the mainstream in the way piercing did a few years...
...Whether you're a teenager or a 60-year-old executive, there appears to be a need for body rituals that aren't provided for in our society," says Musafar. Yet Armando Favazza, a University of Missouri psychiatry professor and author of Bodies Under Siege, thinks it's rare when people find deep meanings in branding: "It's a faddish sort of thing, meant to shock or provide a sexual turn-on." In a few cases it may be therapeutic: Favazza says abused children may later undergo alterations "to reclaim control over their bodies" and forge "a mark of distinction...
...Musafar is scornful of such "show-biz" decoration. "These people have gone way overboard with hotel-room surgery," he says. Doctors warn of possible infection and other dangers of such procedures. "From a medical point of view, none of these things have a justification," says Glenn Kane, an emergency-medicine specialist at L.A.'s Century City Hospital, "though they may from a social point of view." Daren Gardner regards his brand--a large infinity symbol--as a sign of everlasting devotion to his wife Amanda. "What I'm looking for is an emotional experience that goes beyond where...
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