Before you suggest Keller seek another kind of therapy, realize that she has the force of a burgeoning movement behind her. It started innocently enough with multiple ear piercings, then the odd hole in a nostril. But in the past three years, piercing has taken off, traveling southward to nipples, then navels. Now nothing’s off-limits. For rebelling adolescents, piercing is the ultimate Mohawk; for skinheads, a frightening badge of hate. But at the Gauntlet, a national chain of parlors that pokes 18,000 holes a year, the stock in trade is consenting, rational adults. More than a few suit-and-tie Americans, having bridled at the normalcy of their lives, now pass gingerly through airport metal detectors. For this middle-class majority, piercing is a spiritual outlet in a society that long ago lost its taste for dramatic rites of passage. “Other people internalize their rituals,” says Victoria Wolf, who wears a “Madison” hoop where a locket might hang. “We put them on our body. They’re little celebrations of life.”

The celebration involves at least a little pain, though it’s far from excruciating. Lance Rubin, an owner of Venus Body Art in New York, says the sensation has more to do “with the head you’re in.” For aficionados, the pain is coupled with pleasure. Sometimes it’s erotic, like the thrill Julie, 29, a San Francisco music teacher, feels thanks to the little barbell she had inserted in Los Angeles last week on her way to Disneyland. “This keeps my nipple constantly erect,” she said. Carl Edwards, 23, met his wife, Jean, at a Seattle coffeehouse after pulling from his bag a copy of “Modern Primitives,” the piercer’s bible. In 1992 they solemnified their union with a particularly private piercing session-he got a “Prince Albert,” she went into shock-then married legally. “Neither of us holds to religion. Since we met through piercing, we thought it only natural,” says Edwards.

Distasteful to some, piercing is rarely dangerous when performed by a competent professional. And for those who start, it’s often addictive. “When I’m 55, instead of going under the knife to get a tuck, I’ll have more piercings and feel better about myself,” says Alex Keller. The human body just isn’t what it used to be.