Put the Nipple Down and Keep Your Hands Where I Can See Them

Don’t ask me why, but I am suddenly overwhelmed with a perverse need to blog about nipple rings, or rather about the need to remove them. This is nothing I speak about from a personal point of view, mind you. The only things pierced on me are my earlobes. Each lobe actually has two piercings, but that’s because the doctor, who did the first job forty some odd years ago, made no attempt to get the holes even with each other.

A couple of years ago, I finally did what I had wanted to do for a long time. I had new holes punched. It took a while to get through to the hole punching tech that I wasn’t going to be wearing two pairs of earrings at the same time, and that I was only interested in getting the new holes in the right place and not in keeping them even with the old holes. It might have been funny if I wasn’t the one sitting there letting some stranger do something strange and little bit painful to my body. Usually when someone hurts me, I’m going to be doing some hurting right back without even thinking about it. But this time, I sat very still and smiled and said I was fine when she asked. It wasn’t bad, and they finally healed, and now my earrings hang straight. I’m happy.

Now to the point of discussion I started with. Did you happen to see or hear about the woman who was forced to remove her piercings before boarding an airplane? She had to remove pieces of metal from her nipples, basically in public, and with a pair of pliers when it became evident that she wouldn’t be able to comply any other way. I think the thing that got me the most was her assertion that she could hear male airport personnel snickering. The bastards. I’d like to give them a piercing or two. As Gloria Allred, the woman’s lawyer, pointed out, “The last time that I checked a nipple was not a dangerous weapon.” I thought that was funny in very sarcastic and point perfect way. Dangerous nipples indeed.

Then I got to thinking. How could you turn a nipple into a dangerous weapon? Janet Jackson almost did. It got a lot of people stirred up anyway. I’m not a Janet Jackson fan and don’t care for her music, so I wasn’t watching when the fateful exposure took place. But whoever booked her and Justin Timberlake had to know what kind of show was possible. Besides, unless you were watching on a really big screen, just exactly how visible was her nipple? Oh, well, that’s old news, and really, who cares?

Back to the dangerous weapon thing. Use your fertile imagination and try coming up with a scenario in which said nipple becomes of weapon of some sort. To make it a real challenge, try coming up with something that doesn’t involve any piercing paraphernalia. Let’s prove our public airway officials right. Show them, and the rest of world, just how dangerous a nipple truly can be. I dare you.