Faku-Puncture. (Patreon)

A few years ago, our friends at Yellow Beak Press gifted Sacred Debris with a Kodachrome slide of Fakir Musafar performing a navel piercing. There was no information to go along with it save that it came from photographer Bob Hanson.

A year or so later, we were gifted with a copy of a 1980s adult magazine, PARTNER, that had a photoshoot with Fakir, by Bobby Hanson, that contained photos taken during the shoot the slide came from.

Dian Bailey is a maso! I can hear you all saying it, just as my horrified sister did when she saw my swollen, three day fresh navel piercing. As I endeavored to reassure her, I will you, I did not get my flesh pierced or lie on that bed of nails or that couch of meat cleavers, for that matter, for a love of carbon steel penetration. Some pain did accompany all three performances, despite his holiness, The Fakir Musafar’s, denials. But pain is just a weewee stop on the road to knowledge, as his holiness might put it, and I was anesthetized for my piercing by the vision of my perfect navel sporting a jewel that would never get lost when the Crazy Glue failed. As for the nails and cleavers, the Fakir’s to blame for making it look so easy. Fakir is a noted mystic and PARTNER’s Religion Editor, so it is easy for him. Those spikes were sharp, but I could never pass on a double-dare. Musafar claims it’s necessary to lie at least six hours on the spikes to reach nirvana, a state of unconscious bliss. I know for sure you don’t reach that state after two minutes, though the cleavers’ll make you pray for it. The true answer to maso or not, I fell, is whether, having experienced it once, you’ll climb on again. I’ll stick to old-fashioned penetrants, flesh and blood pokers and lots of spit, please.”

At the time of publication, the navel piercing was considered risky- a "surface to surface" piercing that wasn't generally recommended under Doug Malloy's credo of I.I.P.P.I- If it protrudes, pierce it.  It would another twelve years before navel piercing found  a global audience, when actress Reese Witherspoon's protagonist character in the 1993 music video for Aerosmith's  Cryin' (featuring tattoo artist Gil Montie and body piercer Paul King) had her navel pierced on a video that MTV was showing to it's worldwide audience once or twice an hour, 24 hours a day, for an entire Summer, which saw shops getting their first huge swell of teenage clientele and cementing the transition from piercing as a sexually charged subset of leather/bdsm to a youth fashion trend. 

1.Image from Aerosmith: Cryin' 1993. Dir. Marty Callner.