TLDR: I just gave myself a pubic piercing and it looks amazing!
Back in autumn 2022, I had got myself a few new piercings and was considering what to get next. I was increasingly drawn to the idea of getting some sort of genital piercing, but reluctant to get anything 'functional' as I was worried about what possible future partners might think. So I looked at the other options and the first thing I found that really appealed was a pubic piercing. This is a fairly unusual piercing but not totally unheard of. Lenny Kravitz is probably the most famous person who is widely known to have one.
But even though I thought I would like the way it looked, I was put off by the fact that they have a reputation for being difficult to heal and prone to rejection. So eventually I gave up on the idea and got a lorum instead.
Fast forward to the end of last year, by which time I had several more piercings, including a Prince Albert (honestly, I am still worried about what future partners may think, but I like it enough that I'm willing to take the risk, plus I am increasingly inclined to suspect that there never will be anyone else anyway). I was starting to think that I was almost done getting pierced; that I had almost everything I wanted and was ready to stop and let everything heal up and settle in. But I did want to get a few more genital piercings before I finished up. Adding a pair of hafada piercings to the lorum to create a three-rung ladder was an easy choice, but I also wanted to add one other genital piercing to bring the total up to five. Mostly because I just liked the number five better than four. Again I considered adding the pubic piercing that I had liked before and again I decided against it in case it would have problems or reject.
For some reason I decided on a guiche piercing instead, which I got a month ago. But this did not prove to be a practical option at all. Despite taking great care with the placement, trying to position it so that it wouldn't be uncomfortable, it proved impossible to avoid agitating it when moving. Not only was it difficult dancing with it in, but even just walking required me to adopt a slighty odd, wide-legged posture to avoid rubbing it. Additionally, the piercing came out slightly crooked. Although it did straddle the centre-line of my perineum, it was still slightly off-centre and one side was slightly further forward than the other. This effect was further emphasised by the way that the skin in the area sat when relaxed, which meant that the piercing was rotated round to the side so that it appeared even more crooked than it really was.
After a month of discomfort, with an irritation bump starting to form at one end and the whole thing looking like it was becoming more crooked over time (possibly it was migrating slightly as it healed), I decided to give up on it and removed the jewellery. The discomfort disappeared almost immediately as the piercing began to close and heal, and I spent this weekend greatly enjoying the feeling of a piercing-free perineum. There are still a couple of lumps where the piercing used to be, but I'm sure they will disappear in time and in the meantime they are not uncomfortable.
At first I considered trying again with a slightly different placement, going for a 'vertical' guiche instead. But I was still far from certain that I could find a placement that would be comfortable and not have problems with rubbing or pressure that would interfere with movement. And before long my mind came back to the option of a pubic piercing.
My most trusted source of information regarding genital piercings is The Piercing Bible, by Elayne Angel. In there she writes that the reason that many pubic piercings are prone to problems is that they are often performed incorrectly, either being placed too high up (becoming a surface piercing on the pubis, which would need to be pierced with a staple-shaped surface bar to be viable), or being too shallow. If these pitfalls are avoided, she claims, the piercing should not be particularly problematic.
Heartened by this account, I decided that the practical drawbacks of a pubic piercing couldn't be any worse than those for a guiche, and so I decided to give myself a pubic piercing this evening.
This is the fourth piercing I have performed on myself, including the guiche piercing that I did not keep. All have been genital-region piercings. I originally wrote most of a fairly lengthy blog post on the experience of piercing myself but lost it to a glitch. Suffice it to say that I am still not convinced that it is a good idea and generally I would advise anyone to go to a proper trained professional for any procedure that involves driving needles through skin. Self-piercing the genitals is a strange and intense experience. Summoning the will to drive a 2.4mm (10AWG) needle through one's own skin is not an easy thing to do. I do not regret having done it, but I hope I will not have any reason to do it again.
In this case, though, I think it was worth it as I now have a new pubic piercing that I'm really pleased with. I think it looks fantastic. I spent a considerable amount of time marking it out, measuring and re-measuring the markings I'd made and applying, re-applying and re-re-applying the forceps but that effort seems to have paid off as I'm very happy with the placement. The two balls at the base of my penis look brilliant, although otherwise the whole area looks a bit of a horror-show as the piercing has not entirely stopped bleeding yet: it will probably be a day or two before it stops entirely.
I now have around six months of healing to look forward to. Hopefully by following the advice in The Piercing Bible I will be able to avoid the problems that others have experienced with this piercing. If not then at least I will have had a chance to enjoy it for a brief period.