Marks of Mystery

People respond to scars with fear, revulsion--andfascination. Why
do we develop scars, and why are we so captivated by them?

Sharon Stone has a scar on her neck.

Most moviegoers probably haven't even noticed it, but a group of
hardcore fans find the faint pink blemish so fascinating they have
created a Web site dedicated to "the mystery and intrigue surrounding the
scar on Sharon Stone's neck." Visitors to the site (http://people. we.
mediaone.net/bava/sharon/index.html) are invited to share their theories
about the scar's origin; some call it the aftermath of "routine head
transplant surgery," while others blame a "tragic limbo accident."
Strikingly, however, the vast majority of their theories revolve around
sex.

Why are these people so captivated by a five-inch streak on an
actor's neck? And why are they so intent on bandaging an esoteric
explanation onto what is, in fact, merely the souvenir of a childhood
horseback riding accident? The answer is simple: on a very basic level,
we find ourselves riveted by scars and the terrifying or titillating
stories they tell. "Scars seem to be fascinating," says Nichola Rumsey,
Ph.D., co-editor of Visibly Different: Coping with Disfigurement
(Butterworth-Heinemann Medical, 1997). "People respond to them with a bit
of fear, a bit of revulsion and a bit of excitement."

Why Do We Have Scars?

Our visceral response to scars reaches back through millions of
years of human evolution. For reasons no one quite understands, humans
develop bigger, thicker scars than any other animals. "Human wound
healing appears to have been optimized for quick healing in dirty
conditions," says biologist Mark W. J. Ferguson, Ph.D., a scar researcher
at the University of Manchester.

The good news is that when we're cut or burned, our immune systems
immediately go into overdrive to close and heal the wound, which may be
why humans tend to live so much longer than other mammals. But the bad
news is that our swift, strong inflammation response sets us up for nasty
scars. Surgeon N. Scott Adzick, M.D., who studies scarring at the Center
for Fetal Diagnosis and Treatment at the Children's Institute for
Surgical Science in Philadelphia, puts it this way: "If you're a caveman
or cave-woman running around, and you get bitten by a saber-toothed
tiger, it makes sense to patch that wound together as quickly as possible
in order to survive, as opposed to devoting the body's energy and
resources to healing perfectly"

However, other theorists have offered some different--and
intriguing--explanations of human's severe scarfing. One theory suggests
that human scarring evolved alongside human intelligence. As we started
relying on our brains instead of our instincts to get us out of risky
situations, scars developed to act as constant reminders of our previous
mistakes. If, for example, some caveman tried to snag a juicy mastodon
chop from the jaws of his cavedog, the scarred bite marks on his forearm
would warn him not to try it again.

Another hypothesis suggests that scars serve as sexual attractors;
when a cavewoman was courted by a heavily scarred caveman, she got the
message that he was brave, bold and had a high-functioning immune system.
(Of course, if the scar-as-memory-aid theory holds true, those scars also
meant he was a bit slow on the uptake.)

Scars and Sex

To most middle-class Americans, the idea of scars as sexual lures
seems bizarre. We think of scars as disfigurements, and try to hide them
from view or even remove them completely Yet our seemingly instinctive
recoil is a fairly new and geographically limited phenomenon. Even today,
many African tribal cultures still use "body art"--tattooing, branding,
piercing and intentional scarring--to proclaim their ancient lineage,
display their bravery and attract potential mates.

Women of the southeast Nuba, for example, traditionally received a
set of body scars that chronicled their sexual history. When a young girl
began to develop breasts, she got her first set of scars; those were
followed by a second set marking her first menstruation, then by an
elaborate final set incised after she weaned her first child. The Tiv, in
Nigeria, have a highly developed esthetic of facial and body scarring,
used extensively by both men and women to bring out each individual's
most attractive features.

Psychologist Devendra Singh, Ph.D., at the University of Texas,
sees a direct connection between the prevalence of scarring among African
tribal groups and the continent's high rates of infectious disease. In
general, he says, the more disease-ridden a community, the more likely
its members--especially its women--will use scarring to show off their
healthy immune systems and attract mates. "We found very systematic
relationships," he says. "If you live in a society where pathogens are
high, female-female competition is also very high." By decorating the
breast and belly, particularly the navel, he notes, "you're advertising
your femaleness."

In fact, he adds, anthropologists report that among some groups,
women with scarred bellies are considered more sexually demanding--and
therefore more likely to conceive. A decorated belly also draws attention
to a woman's waist-to-hip ratio, which signals youthfulness and potential
fertility Similarly, males scar the face, shoulders and arms to point up
their strength and sexual maturity The sexual content of the scars can be
explicit; one Yoruba scarification design for the upper thigh is called
"finish at the vagina."

The Western world's apparent immunity to such sexually charged
scarring is historically quite recent, insists former anthropology
student Raven Rowanchilde, author of the article "Male Genital
Modification: A Sexual Selection Interpretation," published in the
journal Human Nature in 1996. "Westerners are suffering from the smoke
damage of Platonic ideals," she says. It was only after Plato embraced
the beauty of the idealized, natural human form that the Western world
rejected such ancient forms of adornment.

"We went from tribal groups using these marks to symbolize lineage
and status to having this pure, untouched body," says Rowanchilde, who
now runs a body design studio in Toronto. "The mark of civilization
became no marks at all." Judeo-Christian tradition embraced the unmarked
body to distinguish itself from surrounding pagans. Leviticus clearly
warns: "They shall not ...make any cuttings in their flesh."

Yet scars can still carry a potent sexual message for Westerners.
At the beginning of this century, upper-class Austrian men created a cult
of the dueling scar, says historian Kevin McAleer, Ph.D., author of
Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siecle Germany (Princeton University
Press, 1997). "The renommier schrniss, or bragging scar, was a mark of
social status," McAleer notes. "It indicated you had been to university,"
where dueling societies were critical to social life.

These duelists subscribed to an ethos of exaggerated masculinity,
in which skilled swordplay and fleetness of foot were less important than
stolid fearlessness. Using saber-type weapons, the antagonists--wearing
body padding and iron goggles--faced each other for dozens of brief
rounds, with each man defending against five whacking strokes and then
taking five cuts of his own. "This wasn't footwork, thrust and parry,"
McAleer says. "It was a mechanical robotic sort of motion," which the
opponent would try to fend off until his endurance failed.

"The idea was to stand your man and show courage--not to inflict a
wound, but to be wounded," he says. "That's the very strange part of
it--the true winner was he who walked away with a nice juicy scar, to
show that he'd stood the test. The point was not to get the other guy,
but to show that you could take it. You'd get these guys who looked like
they'd walked into a propeller. It was pretty gnarly, but the guys were
damn proud to look that way."

Women responded ardently to these proudly displayed scars, which
the combatants often soaked with beer or stuffed with horsehair, to
increase their size and prominence. "The scars showed you had courage and
education, and were good husband material," McAleer says. "Anyway, a lot
of these kids were rather good-looking, and you didn't have to ruin your
whole face in dueling. The scars usually accumulated on the left side of
the face, so from the right profile, he still looked good. And even if it
was an ugly, knotted scar, women were attracted by everything it implied,
and the pride with which the wearer bore it." The cult of the dueling
scar has faded, but hasn't entirely disappeared; Professor Ferguson,
whose research focuses on scarless healing, claims he was once contacted
by an Austrian who actually wanted his modest dueling scar made
bigger.

Beautiful But Flawed

Although Americans have never made a cult of scar worship, we tend
to find some scars strangely fascinating, particularly if they add
character to an otherwise conventionally attractive face. In 1986, Maria
Hanson was just one of a thousand pretty models trying to make their
fortune in New York City. Then her landlord, angry when she spurned his
sexual advances, hired two thugs who used a razor blade to slice her face
apart. The attack made headlines--and, paradoxically, the fine network of
scars it left on her face briefly made Hanson a media star.

"I imagine it has to do with the background level of facial
attractiveness," Rumsey speculates. "If someone is pretty good-looking
and they have a scar, I think the unconscious assumption would be that
they got scarred in a way that wasn't their fault, because they were
terribly brave. I think there's something about those with extreme levels
of beauty that can make other people stereotype them as fairly shallow.
Maybe a scar makes them a bit more human and desirable."

A scar on an otherwise flawless face fills us with intense
curiosity; we long to hear the sexy or sad story behind it, and we feel
slightly disappointed if the story is dull. One perfect example is a
scene in the 1988 movie Working Girl, in which actress Melanie Griffith
asks Harrison Ford about the (real) scar on his chiseled chin. "Some guy
pulled a knife in Detroit," he boasts, then admits the truth: "I was 19
and I thought it'd be cool to have a pierced ear. My girlfriend stuck the
needle through and I heard this pop and fainted and hit my chin on the
toilet." (According to the many Web pages celebrating Ford's scar, the
real story is even more mundane: he hit his chin during a minor traffic
accident.)

Scars Intentional And Accidental

The story behind the scar seems to make all the difference in our
response to it. "That's our initial response, 'What happened to you?'"
Rumsey says. Even in cultures that prize ritual scarification, there a
sharp distinction between nature and culture. Intentional scars are
considered beautiful, while random or accidental scars are ugly. To
redeem an ugly scar, therefore, the wounded person must create a scenario
that tells the story of the scar in an attractive and compelling
light.

The ultimate illustration of this desire can be found in the
self-portraits of painter Frida Kahlo. As a young woman, Kahlo's back and
legs were scarred in a streetcar accident. In her paintings, she often
portrayed herself as horribly mutilated, with gore dripping from her many
wounds; one painting shows her cut open down the front.

"The scars in her paintings are mostly invented," says Hayden
Herrera, a Kahlo biographer. "I think she painted them to force the
viewer to respond to her predicament. If her paintings were mawkish, we'd
hate them. But because she keeps her face this mask of reserve, and just
shows her emotions through the scars and wounds, the scars are sort of
noble, in some funny way, rather than self-pitying. She painted herself
scarred so she could deal with it. Her paintings don't look like, `Oh,
help, help, I'm hurting.' They're somebody saying, `This is what's
happening to me. This is the way it is. I'm not going to hide it.' These
paintings are so beautiful; they're incredibly distant and repressed, yet
at the same time jumping with emotion. Those paintings are like a ribbon
around a bomb."

Self-Mutilation

The impulse that drove Kahlo to paint imaginary scars on her body
is mirrored in patients who inflict real scars on themselves. "When I
look at self-mutilation, I try to understand the meaning behind this
supposedly senseless act," says psychiatrist Armando R. Favazza, M.D.,
author of Bodies Under Siege: Self-Mutilation and Body Modification in
Culture and Psychiatry (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). For some
patients, self-mutilation is a symptom of an underlying psychological
problem; patients with borderline personality disorder, for example,
often cut or burn themselves in an effort to relieve their overwhelming
psychic pain. For other patients, Favazza says, self-mutilation is their
primary psychological problem. "It usually starts in early adolescence
and goes on for about 15 years, interspersed with periods of eating
disorders and substance abuse," he says. "Some people call them
multi-impulsive patients."

To outsiders, self-multilation seems frightening and bizarre. But
to the patients themselves, self-inflicted pain makes great internal
sense. "It allows for fairly rapid, but short-term, relief from a lot of
pathological symptoms," Favazza says. "The major one is intense, intense
anxiety; when patients cut, it's like popping a balloon."

Self-mutilation can have great symbolic meaning for patients, as
well. "It ties in with cultural ideas of bodily healing, religious
salvation and establishment of order," Favazza explains. "When you look
at cultural rituals that involve mutilation, the scars are signs of
distinction." Similarly, patients can use their wounds and scars to
create deeply personal semiotics. "I had one patient who was involved in
an old-fashioned Oedipal-type situation, with her Dad coming on to her,"
Favazza recalls. "She was just cutting and cutting and cutting. She would
create the symbol on her body; the gaping wound reminded her of a vagina,
the vagina Daddy wanted. Then she'd go to the emergency room and solve
the problem by having it sewn shut. Afterward, she'd go home and put baby
powder and bandages on the wound. The scar was essentially the
baby"

For many patients with self-inflicted wounds, the scars tell the
story of their illness and their attempts to heal themselves. "For
patients in the middle of the syndrome, the scars are important," Favazza
notes. "Special scars have special meanings. I look at every scar as a
sign of the battle the patient has waged. Scar tissue is a sign that the
patient has won, and is still alive."

Body Modification

The symbolism of scars reaches so deeply beneath the skin that
increasing numbers of American youth are using intentional
scarring--called body modification--to chronicle their emotional lives.
"They say it's a rite of passage, an initiation into greater mysteries,
an opening for beneficial spirits or a healing of the wounded psyche,"
says Favazza. He cites women who get body piercings after being raped.
"By piercing themselves, they're reclaiming their bodies. It gives them a
sense of control."

Lisa Romanienko, a sociology doctoral student at Louisiana State
University, believes the mostly youthful members of the body modification
movement are expressing their alienation from Western civilization, and
use their scars, tattoos, brands and piercings as public signs of their
disgust and defiance. These "self-symbolizers," as she calls them,
actually enhance their self-esteem by offending and repulsing the
bourgeois majority "It's an alternative to political expression, in light
of the decline of other organizations to express political views among
the Left," Romanienko says. "Anyone can see why kids would be doing this.
It's an intentional symbolic message."

Many young body modifiers maintain they're trying to connect
themselves to humanity's tribal history, now lost in American
civilization. "They see themselves as getting back to some kind of
essentialism," says Daniel Wojcik, Ph.D., an associate professor of
folklore at the University of Oregon and author of Punk and Neo-Tribal
Body Art (University Press of Mississippi, 1995). "They learn about
scarring practices in another culture, and then have themselves scarred
as a rite of passage." Some, as Romanienko suggests, are primarily
motivated by the shock value of their flashy scars. But many
neotribalists are more secretive about their body adornments, scarring
themselves for personal reasons, not political ones.

"The meanings are very diverse," Wojcik says. "It's dangerous, it's
sexy. For some it's an esthetic impulse. Others attribute some
transcendent significance to the act, and find some kind of altered state
of consciousness that's probably related to the pain involved and the
endorphin rush that follows it. It certainly seems to be profoundly
meaningful for them." For his book, Wojcik interviewed one unemployed
Seattle youth named Perry Farrell, who later went on to fame in the rock
bands Jane's Addiction and Porno for Pyros. Farrell's scars and piercings
were inspired by photographs he saw in National Geographic. For Farrell,
the scars were part of a self-made coming-of-age rite. "He told me, 'I
need to become a man,'" Wojcik says. "He told me how painful it was, and
how he felt transformed afterward."

The trouble is, it's hard to tell where fashionable body
modification ends and pathological self-mutilation begins, especially
when an individual turns to intentional wounding to mark an emotionally
charged life event. "If you've suffered some kind of abuse, this is a way
to acknowledge that in some kind of physical way," Wojcik observes. "Then
it becomes a ritual, meaningful event. You're responding to a spiritual
crisis, and you fortify yourself through these ancient forms of body
modification." However, one person's ritual cleansing is another person's
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

To Favazza, the distinction is the scar's meaning to its owner--its
story. "I define self-mutilation as something that derives from
individual psychopathology, the product of loss of control," he says.
"You can make a case that when you're symbolically reenacting what was
done to you, you're controlling it."

Living with Scars

For the millions of Americans with scars left by accident or
surgery, it might seem there's no debate about their meaning or
symbolism--only the problem of trying to adjust to a highly visible,
permanent and often disfiguring mark. However, Rumsey has found that even
with unintended scars, their context plays a critical part in the
emotional response of both bearer and viewer. "People who have a story
find it much easier to cope," Rumsey says. "We often hear about people
who get injured in war, or while saving somebody They do really well, and
come out confident enough to deal with it, if it's a story they can
happily tell that people want to know."

In fact, Rumsey's research indicates that psychological factors are
the best predictors of a patient's response to a new scar. "You can't
predict the effect of scarring from the size or type of disfigurement,"
she declares. "Some people get very upset about very minor marks."
Instead, patients' future adjustment depends partly on their previous
attitudes about physical appearance. "Prior experience and expectation
tends to play a part," Rumsey says.

Some patients' attitudes are deeply affected by media depictions of
people with scars. "In movies, the ones who have scars tend to be the
baddies," Rumsey notes. That's a particularly important issue for
children, who tend to be more vulnerable to such messages. Gender also
plays a role; a poll by Rejuveness, marketer of alternative scar
remedies, found that 65% of women said they were self-conscious about
their scars, compared with 35% of men.

But the key factors seem to be the person's self-esteem and social
skills, Rumsey believes. In her research, she's found that when people
with scars are friendly, relaxed and outgoing, they can overcome
strangers' initial recoil.

Rumsey began her studies by looking at the impact of scars on basic
social interactions. At a first encounter, she says, "I found that people
stand about a foot farther away if you've got a disfigurement." That
simple fact alone has an enormous impact on any social interaction, she
says. "If you take a good step backward, it changes the feeling between
the two people, so it's less personal and more distant."

She also found that visible scars had an enormous impact on others'
basic helping behaviors. In one study, she and her colleagues posed as
market researchers, asking consumers to fill out a questionnaire. Not
surprisingly, they found consumers were initially most likely to
cooperate with attractive researchers. When the researchers wore
artificial scars, they found that significantly fewer people approached
them--but those who did offered more help than those who approached
unmarked people. "We found that if you could get over that initial
approach, people would compensate quite strongly for it."

The researchers then started looking at the behavior of disfigured
people themselves. Many scarred patients felt self-conscious or
defensive, which made them unwilling to hurdle that social barrier.
Others overcompensated by behaving rather aggressively, "which further
throws things out of balance," Rumsey found. Such shyness and
belligerence are socially fatal; in one study, she asked her subjects to
rate their responses to a pair of researchers, one displaying great
social skills and the other visibly ill at ease. When the researchers
wore fake scars, they found that people's responses were polarized.
"People rated the skilled person very positively, and the non-skilled
person very negatively," Rumsey says. "My conclusion was that if you
couldn't change the World's inherent biases, you could do something by
attacking social skills and trying to put it a bit more under the
person's control."

Rumsey's academic work got a real-world endorsement in 1992 when
James Partridge launched Changing Faces, an English support organization
for people with facial disfigurements. Partridge, who had been severely
burned in a car fire when he was 18 years old, had written a book about
living with scars (Changing Faces: The Challenge of Facial Disfigurement
Phoenix Society, 1992). "There is a point at which my scars became less
repellent and more attractive," observes Partridge, now 46. "I don't
think it had anything to do with their physical appearance. I think it
had a lot to do with the coping skills I developed."

In some ways, Partridge believes, unintended scars can enhance
someone's attractiveness by forcing him to develop extraordinary
self-assurance. "I doubt very much whether the woman who was attracted to
the Austrian duelist was actually attracted by the physical touch of the
scars," he says. "It was his stature, his posture, his way of looking her
in the eye--his entire physical chemistry, if there is such a term. It's
not the scar itself that's attractive, but the person who shines out from
behind this scarred face."

The trouble is, many people with facial scars find themselves
locked into a social death spiral. When strangers stare or flinch, they
respond by withdrawing--which further undermines their social dexterity.
So Rumsey began looking for ways to help patients get past those painful
first meetings. "You've got to learn how first impressions are formed,"
Rumsey says. "Let's find techniques of showing them what a witty person
you are, what fun you are to be with, and develop a repertoire of things
to talk about for a minute or two until that other person settles down.
If you can achieve the confidence to depersonalize other people's
reactions, it ceases to be a problem."

Rumsey studied the effects of Changing Faces' workshops, which
bring together small groups of facially disfigured people to share their
experiences and develop some practical strategies for dealing with
socially stressful situations. She found that workshop participants did
report significant improvement in their ability to handle strangers.
However, since all the participants were self-referred, it wasn't clear
whether the workshop solutions would work for less-motivated patients. So
Rumsey created a pilot project to offer similar interventions to a
broader group. "We set up a kind of disfigurement support unit," she
says, asking for doctors to refer anyone with a facial scar. That
research is still ongoing (slowed, in part, by some medical doctors'
resistance to referring patients for psychological counseling).

Right now, the biggest challenge is convincing doctors and patients
that the story behind the injury is just as important to the healing
process as the wound itself. "Some injuries are much more difficult to
carry, because they're much more difficult to explain," Rumsey says. A
scar inflicted during the heroic rescue of a child trapped in a burning
building inspires admiration, but no one is likely to be too sympathetic
when a scarred person admits being injured while driving drunk. Adds
Rumsey: "If you can help them to think up a good reason behind the
injury, something they feel more confident and happy with, it's so much
easier to handle the inevitable questions."

Those questions, however rude, reflect our hard-wired human
curiosity about scars. When we see a scarred face, we instinctively find
our eyes drawn to it, and our minds drawn to the story that scar may
tell; a few insignificant decades of socialization are no match for
millions of years of natural selection. "If people look different, they
almost become public property," Rumsey notes. "You can't sit on a train
or walk down a street without people staring. When you walk around with a
very visible disfigurement, you know that everyone wants to ask, `What
happened to you?'"

PHOTOS (COLOR): Many African tribal cultures still use "body
art"--tattooing, branding, piercing and intentional scarring--to proclaim
their ancient lineage, display their bravery and attract potential
mates.