Ads for the little blue pill Viagra are all over television and cluttering e-mail in-boxes everywhere. The erection medicine is in demand, because people are out to improve their sex lives. Zeke is no different.
Only he doesn't have to take Viagra. He just inserts steel into his penis.
"When you buy a brand-new BMW, do you leave it as is or do you put nice rims on it?" the 24-year-old piercer asks with a laugh. "I'm fully customized with deluxe trim."
Zeke is involved in both the local and online body modification communities. Through years of research he discovered ways to "improve" his genitals by an extreme form of body modification.
Hardcore body modification can include cutting, implanting jewelry and bification -- the splitting of body parts such as the tongue.
Zeke currently has a partial subinsicion, a surgical modification where the underside of the penis is filleted open from the urethra to the base of the glans. Basically, this means he has a slit a little over an inch long on the tip of his penis.
He also elected to have 12 genital beads (the equivalent of ball bearings made out of surgical grade steel) implanted under the skin of the shaft of his penis. Some say they look like genital warts, but they serve the same function as vibrators with rotating pearls inside them.
He also has one non-surgical modification to his nether region, a horizontal scrotal piercing where the base of the shaft meets the testicles. This area is known as the lorum.
This piercing is mostly aesthetic and Zeke has stretched it to a shiny stainless steel 2 gauge captive bead ring on the front of his scrotum. Gauges are used to measure the size of jewelry in a piercing. The size of the gauge gets bigger as the number gets smaller.
Over the years, he's tried a myriad of modifications "down there" to achieve a balance between what he feels looks cool and what is functional.
Are pickles sexy?
Zeke wasn't always drawn to erotic modifications. He literally woke up one morning and decided he wanted to get his genitals pierced. An odd choice since Zeke didn't have a single pierced hole anywhere on his body -- not even his ears.
When he made it to the piercing shop he was given options and encouraged to go home and do some research. With procedures this drastic, any reputable piercer will encourage their client to do extensive research on the subject. After a bit of reading, he determined that a Prince Albert was what he wanted. A Prince Albert is the most common male genital piercing. It enters the urethra at the tip of the penis and exits right below the head on the underside. He found he could improve his sex life through body modifications, and he began down the path to genital modification.
"Genital modification is the big thing that got me into body modification," Zeke says, "I always wanted to get more and bigger stuff and when I had kind of exhausted that, I decided that I wanted surgical modifications, which is where the beading came in."
Zeke read up on genital beading before having steel balls implanted under his skin two years ago. He says the practice started among Chinese inmates, "They'd take sharpened chopsticks and make a little incision and push a pearl inside." Each bead represented a year spent behind bars.
Zeke also notes that while the beads look like they are moving around, they are not. Once inserted, scar tissue forms and holds the bead in place, giving the penis a pickle-like appearance. The loose and elastic skin in the area can make it appear that the beads are rolling all over the place.
Zeke views the surgical modifications as a step above piercing. He explains that a motivating factor in choosing to implant beads was that it makes intercourse more comfortable for his partner. He enjoyed having frenum piercings (straight barbells located on the underside of the shaft of the penis), but his girlfriend hated them and decided Zeke's frenum piercings meant no sex.
"There can be some discomfort for the girl during sex, especially with frenums, and that's reduced with the beading because they're under the skin and can't get snagged," Zeke explains of his epidermal buffer.
He does admit there can still be some issues with scraping during intercourse, but it can be resolved through proper placement of the beads.
Luckily, if they become problematic, the beads aren't 100 percent permanent. They aren't like a piercing where one can simply take out the jewelry, but there is the option to cut out each individual bead.
"A good friend of mine, who I actually did his beading, had them in there for eight to 10 months, but he just cut them out a couple weeks ago," Zeke says with a shrug. "He just didn't like them."
He adds that he actually plans on removing a couple of his own genital beads. He and his girlfriend have found there to be a few that snag on her inner labia, so he has decided to relocate the beads for her comfort.
"I want it to be perfect," he says, "So, I don't mind taking a couple out to improve things for her."
A cut isn't always made to take jewelry out; sometimes cuts are made to put jewelry in. Zoe works at a local piercing shop and has pierced nipples.
Zoe says she adores the look of larger jewelry and decided to "go big" with her piercing. The piercing is currently stretched to a 2 gauge. The method used to pierce and gauge Zoe's nipples involved some cutting. A scalpel was used to pierce the nipple and then a 2 gauge taper was run through the fresh hole.
She says that nipple piercings are attractive in a general sense, but finds the visual of a large steel barbell through her nipple extra alluring.
"It looks so tough," Zoe, a Tempe resident, admits, "I like feeling like a tough chick."
Fillet anyone?
When Zeke moved to Tempe from Nevada, he found himself around a large number of people with surgical modifications. This allowed him the opportunity to see and hear about a variety of modifications before determining if they were right for him.
Through research he did at online body modification communities, he found there was a lot about subincision that appealed to him. Subincision is a practice where the underside of the penis is sliced open.
When explaining the perks of turning his penis into the genital version of a microwave hot dog, Zeke says, "It does make your [penis] head bigger. You gain about a quarter inch of girth and what a lot of guys don't realize is that they have three erogenous zones, not just the head of the penis, but the penis, the prostate and the urethra. The urethra is a very sensitive area. So, by splitting that partly and exposing it when anyone touches that it's pretty intense."
Still, Zeke tossed and turned over the decision for three years. He was emotionally attached to his Prince Albert piercing, because it was his first piercing and he had stretched it to incredibly large proportions.
"I flip-flopped because it [subincision] is so permanent and it's a surgical mess to go back," he says.
It took Zeke's girlfriend roughly a month to overcome the split in her sex partner's penis. But, now that she has moved beyond her mental block she sings praise of the surgical modification.
"You know when you're humping and you get that kind of painful 'ouch' feeling like you feel like your guts are being slammed back in your body?" she says, illustrating the act with hand gestures. "Yeah, you don't get that at all. What happens when you have sex with somebody with a sub[incision] is instead of banging into your cervix, it [the penis] glides over it."
Zeke interrupts to add that the feeling of his subincision engulfing his lover's cervix is "insane" and not like any other intense experience he could describe.
While there are more opportunities for men to have extreme erotic modifications, women still have a few options if they want a "harder" look down there. One possibility is to stretch typical genital piercings to larger sizes.
Zoe used to have her clitoral hood piercing stretched to a 2 gauge, which she says was a ridiculous proportion and she regarded it as a joke piercing. But, she says she enjoyed that it had an element of intimidation to it. She says during her first sexual encounter with the stretched piercing her partner stammered about his inability to function.
"He couldn't fathom that I had that much metal in my junk," she says.
After that experience Zoe says she learned how to pick her partners.
"You know you're with a real man when he can deal with a 2 gauge genital piercing," she says.
She could only handle the joke piercing for so long, though. When she wore a bathing suit strangers questioned if she had testicles and there were issues with positioning the piercing. These problems were enough to convince the 23-year-old to remove her hood ornament.
Society & Surgery?
Zeke, Zoe and others with extreme erotic modifications are consistently viewed by a society that asks, "Why would you do that to yourself? There's got to be something wrong with you."
Zeke and Zoe say they are well-adjusted adults with light-hearted attitudes and a strong sense of their community. They maintain that what they do to their bodies is not mutilation.
"I didn't do it to hurt myself," Zeke says, "I did it to improve parts of myself and that I think is completely acceptable."
Zeke isn't vain, but admits that his motivations for body modifications were mostly for looks.
"I felt really confident in the bedroom, which translated into my everyday life and the piercings and tattoos that I have, they make me feel better looking," he says. "It sounds kind of shallow, but it's beauty from the outside in."
Those within the body modification community view hardcore modifications as something along the lines of cosmetic surgery.
"The difference between cosmetic surgery and hardcore modification is that cosmetic surgery is designed to make you look more like the norm, whereas hardcore modification makes you look less like the norm," Zeke says.
Shannon Larratt, editor and publisher of online body modification publication BMEZINE.com, explains that it has only been recently that cosmetic surgery has been accepted by mainstream society. In the recent past, performing liposuction and breast implants ostracized a doctor, he says.
"We did eventually collectively decide that making someone more beautiful is a form of medicine and allowed it to go public, but moving toward the cultural norm, as cosmetic surgeons tend to do, is a much smaller step than moving toward a personal ideal that is different from the cultural norm," Larratt says.
He adds that he believes cosmetic surgeons will begin performing hard body modification procedures within the next 10 years.
Some doctors who won't perform certain modifications are clearly baffled by the presence of a body modification.
Zeke's girlfriend has her clitoral hood pierced and has endured near verbal abuse from gynecologists. At one point she says she even had an emergency room doctor inform her that her hood piercing caused her to have a miscarriage -- she wasn't pregnant at the time.
"They can't understand why you would elect to do that to yourself," Zeke says.
He says arguing whether the choice is right is futile. The purpose of these types of procedures is to bring happiness and not to harm anyone.
"What kind of sick person tries to deny another person's private happiness, because it's not what they want to do themselves?" Larratt wonders. "If someone cutting their wiener in half makes them happy, let them -- it's not as if they're telling you that you have to do it as well."
Reach the reporter at chelsea.ide@asu.edu.
