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“I was like, I wanna go hard,” he recalls, opting for an expensive piece of amethyst jewelry that he considered his consolation for not getting to wear a bikini top. It’s cheaper than a tramp stamp, lower stakes than a boob job, and less corny than getting a Playboy bunny blocked out in the tanning booth.”īut when it comes to guys, the ironic mallrat look “takes balls,” says Emanuel Salazar, a salesperson at New York upscale piercing shop Venus by Maria Tash who had his belly button done about a year ago.
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The male friend who is considering one explained the type thusly: “All my friends who have them have them as, like, an ironic bad-girls-club hashtag. That’s the mood some revivalists seek to reclaim. A pre- Clueless Alicia Silverstone pretty much set that in stone in the 1993 music video for Aerosmith’s “Cryin’,” which was largely blamed for the nineties craze. One reason men may not go for it is that the belly button ring has associations not just of femininity, but of suburban girl rebellion. So why wouldn’t forward-thinking men get in on the belly ring thing this time around? No one even remembers which pierced ear is the “gay” one. Straight men in flyover states sport nail polish. Two decades after Nirvana performed in dresses, rapper Kanye West says his signature skirt is proof he’s not vain. (We have Louis Vuitton’s version in bandana print to anticipate). Men, too, are resuscitating the nineties, notably those short-sleeved shirts in garish Saved By the Bell patterns. Worn among nouveau grunge’s structured crop tops and platform creepers, the belly button ring is no longer a shameful vestige of one’s “fast” teenage years, as my mom would say. Beyoncé slipped hers back in for her “post-baby body” Shape magazine cover, Vanessa Hudgens wore one in Spring Breakers, and Lindsay Lohan’s wasn’t out of place at hipster costume party Coachella. Twenty years after John Paul Gaultier pierced Christy Turlington’s belly button (and Naomi Campbell, Christina Aguilera, and Keira Knightley followed suit), it’s back in style for women, in lock step with all other things nineties. But, to me, my friend’s choice had a timely logic to it. Its meaning - Is it gay? Is that a deal breaker? - has befuddled the audience on The Wendy Williams Show and a bodybuilder’s forum alike. The male belly button ring is rarely seen in the wild. The only differences were that, back then, I was using AIM, and now it was a daring guy friend through whom I hoped to live vicariously. It was a reenactment of an online conversation - part enthusiasm, part envy - I used to have weekly more than a decade ago, when my cohort was forging permission slips and finagling rides to Claire’s in the hopes of looking like Britney Spears. Recently, on Gchat, I egged a friend on to get a belly button piercing.