“Could you help me find the back of my earring?” she asks, looking around on the floor.
“Actually…. I can
‘t. Like, I really can’t, I’m sorry,” I say, standing there. I’m not just being a dick – the idea of touching an earring back sends a shudder through my entire body. I’ve been this way since I was a kid. In the way that people hate and fear spiders or elevators, I hate and fear small and ornate metal objects. I have the dumbest phobia of all: the jewelry phobia.
I am not making this up for the Unruly Bodies blog. Every time someone idly puts their necklace in their mouth, I want to tear my skin off, it’s so viscerally disgusting to me. My mom tried to make me wear a crucifix necklace when I was getting confirmed as a Catholic and I had one of the first panic attacks that I can remember. Nothing horrifies me more than the brush of someone else’s charm bracelet against my skin.
Part of it is textural: the small and ornate nature of jewelry is awful to me in a way I cannot put into words. Part of it is also material: I dislike touching metal, a disgust which extends to coins and Monopoly pieces, which I will touch but grudgingly. Over time I have become more comfortable with the “chain of spheres” kind of jewelry: Mardi Gras beads, those weird dog tag chains. Plastic and wood beads I can usually handle, especially if there’s no metal involved.
People often ask me, why? Why do you hate and fear jewelry so much, Archie? What will you do when you get married? (To answer the last question: I won’t marry, we won’t use rings, or I will just tattoo a ring onto my finger.) After some years of soul-searching, I realized the answer was sitting right in front of my nose, or rather, on my ears. When I was a baby, like, under a year old, my mother took me to Brazil to meet her family. While we were there, she had my ears pierced by a nun named Maria de Jesus. And so, I grew up with earrings in my body without my consent.
I wore them, the little metal studs for kids, with increasing panic until age eight or nine, when I insisted on removing them. It’s been over ten years, and no jewelry has profaned my ears since. The curling, ornate metal of an earring back is still one of the things in this world I hate the most. For me, the textural horror of the metal, the lack of bodily autonomy that the involuntary piercing suggested, and, yes, the gendered nature of the piercing (if I were a boy they would not have done this to me) – all these factors build into a cumulative horror that will last me the rest of my days.
When I mention this to people, sometimes they will apologize for wearing jewelry. To them I say, oh my god, I do things every day that annoy and disturb people for reasons neither of us have control over. I am very good at blurring out the jewelry I am confronted with in everyday life. Just don’t make me wear it, don’t dangle it at me, and don’t make me touch it. So, no, I can’t help you find your earring back, like literally I can’t.
POST SCRIPT: I just googled “jewelry phobia” to find an image to use for this post, and it turns out that last February NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. came out as having a jewelry phobia. What a brotherhood we form.
Unruly Bodies 
This post is super interesting, I’ve never heard of a jewelry phobia before! It’s interesting how you may not have known about your phobia (or maybe never developed it) if not for compulsory femininity. I’ve always hated that girls are often forced to get their ears pierced, it can be traumatizing because your bodily autonomy is taken away from you in the name of enforcing femininity. I’m glad you’re able to articulate your phobia and deal with it on an everyday basis.
It’s so relieving to know that other’s have “strange” phobias as well. For me, I can’t stand it when someone scratches their nails against denim or bed sheets…it drives me insane. It’s a deep gut wrenching feeling, so, I can relate.
This is very interesting but more than anything I am happy you were able to find the root problem and realize why you have this phobia.
I don’t think your anxiety is dumb, fear can come from so many places and experiences when you’re a kid can have a big impact on what scares you as an adult. Having girls’ ears pierced before they can decide if they want them on their body is a strange practice, but honestly I’d never really given thought to the effect this can have on a child. Weird gendered practices like this can be so traumatizing, but at the same time they’re so normalized it’s hard sometimes to realize the impact they can have.
A lot of gendered practices and enforced femininity is so violating in retrospect. Often it’s not clear cut as to why they’re so uncomfortable until you realize that it’s because you are expected to/coerced to regardless of your preferences, your autonomy is diminished and you’re taught that your consent doesn’t matter so long as someone has more power over you, and they’ll say it’s for your own benefit but in actuality, it can still be incredibly unpleasant and often unnecessary. And a lot of times you realize it when you’re younger and you can’t do anything about it. I don’t know. It just seems really depersonalizing to do something to another person like that–regardless of how young they are.