Kiss My Split Tongue
Are radical, underground body mods really mutilation? Or just beauty in a blender?
by Mark Morford

Oh right. Like this is anything shocking or appalling or new.

Like having a professional piercer and bod-mod expert who is not really a doctor heat up a scalpel with a blowtorch and carefully slice through the tip of your tongue to give you that serpentine lisping goth lizard demon look is something we should right now be all appalled and disgusted and icked out by. Apparently, some lawmakers are. Should we be?

We who know that right this minute, clusters of heavily shellacked overly pampered women are gathering in peach-colored Ethan Allen living rooms to pay 500 bucks a pop to have their faces injected with botulinum toxin and have the nerves in their foreheads paralyzed and their lips fattened up with collagen?

We who know that right this minute, thousands of long clear plastic tubes are being jammed into 10,000 guts and 1 million flabby thighs per year to suck out 10 million gallons of gelatinous human fat? Fat that is apparently just too damn difficult to eliminate by eating healthy and exercising and caring about your body so what the hell, just slice it open and crank up the vacuum?

Penis extensions and butt implants and pec implants and calf implants and chin implants and cheek implants and eyelid slicings and nose smashings and chemical peels and enough silicone pumped into enough pneumatic boobs to fill Lake Michigan, and tongue splitting might be considered what, mutilation? Hmm.
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