Everything you need to know about genital piercings

“I was a small-chested lady and so having those adornments just made me feel hot, like the size of my boobs no longer mattered.”

For most of us, getting stabbed in the genitals is the stuff of nightmares. Even the thought of it causes a cold sweat. Something sharp going into the most intimate of our intimate areas? Sounds like a mediaeval torture method to me. But as extreme as genital piercings sound, they’re really just like any other piercing and can make people feel better about their bodies.

Because the piercing is focused on a part of the body that tends to hold a lot of emotional weight, the impact and benefits can be significant.  For Jeremy*, who has pierced “20 to 40 genitals” in his decade-long career, the activity has never lost its thrill. “You’re handling arguably one of the most important parts of someone’s body and you’re going to put a needle through it, so the stress is always there. But it’s exhilarating! It’s fun!”

We like nosy people. Don’t be shy, head to our Beauty section for more.

He still remembers the first genital piercing he ever did. It was a clitoral hood piercing – the most popular choice for vulvas, with the Christina a close second – which he performed under the watchful eye of his supervisor as well as a team of four or five other trainees. Despite the crowd of onlookers, the woman in the chair was surprisingly calm and the process went through without a hitch. 

Jeremy tells me the weirdest thing about intimate piercings is you can never pinpoint who has them. Though they’re reportedly most common in the queer community, it’s not always who you’d expect. “It’s not some guy who’s dripping with piercings and tattoos with a mohawk. It’s more often than not some suburban mom who read about this in Cleo magazine or something and wants to get it done, or it’s a man who’s been happily with his wife for years and they want to spice things up a bit.”

Trends can play a huge role as well. For penises, the Prince Albert is the top choice, likely because it’s the most widely known. He says when Kendall and Kylie Jenner debuted their nipple piercings, suddenly everyone wanted a nipple piercing. Same with when Lady Gaga flashed her clit piercing on the red carpet in 2011. 

Aside from aesthetics, he says people often seek out genital piercings for their ability to enhance pleasure. The addition of metal barbells or rings can be extra stimulating for a partner during sex (after everything has properly healed, of course) and some clients even report stronger orgasms or heightened sensitivity. But it’s a high risk, high reward – Jeremy says the process can potentially cause loss of sensation as well, which many people don’t want to risk. Plus, they hurt.

“Your brain is a very powerful machine. Putting those sorts of instruments through those parts of the body, unless you’re a very specially wired person, that’s a bad time in general. For blokes I would say the pain is very, very intense. One thing that people really don’t want to talk about, and it’s a grey area in terms of – not legality, because it’s totally legal, but ethics and morality – is who’s there to get pierced because they want a piercing and who’s there to experience pain?” he says.

According to piercing professional Aiisha Lakey, many female piercers won’t do intimate piercings because they’ve had bad experiences or have been made to feel uncomfortable. “Clients have come in with their own connotations that it’s going to be a sexual thing. A lot of the time it is a sexual thing and I think that’s fantastic, but you have to have some kind of communication with your piercer,” she tells me. “It’s about open communication and finding a piercer that you are comfortable with who’s also comfortable with you.”

Aiisha says genital piercings are very special for her because they allow her to help normalise a part of the body that’s usually only seen in a sexual or threatening light. She says it can also be a beautiful way for people to reconnect with and reclaim their bodies.

“For trans people, once they start going through certain hormone therapies and if they experience some bottom growth, that opens up the opportunities for them to now have piercings that they didn’t have the anatomy for previously and through that, they are then able to have new sensations which are really fantastic for them and their identity.”

She has nipple piercings herself, which she got just six days after she turned 18. “I was that keen. It was that important to me. Back then, and still to this day, I was a small-chested lady and so having those adornments just made me feel hot, like the size of my boobs no longer mattered; I just felt like they looked great. Now I had a reason to look at them with love. Also because they were very painful. For that reason as well, it was like I had earned this.”

*Name changed to protect privacy.

For more on nipple and genital piercings, head here.