Like Pluses said, it’s difficult to answer, but here’s my stab.

For me, I’m doing the suspension totally for the experience. When I first saw a suspension, I was about 16 and saw it on a Sci-Fi channel reality show. I was already into the body mod world by then, but I hadn’t actually sat down and seen anything like it before. And from the look of peace on his face, I decided then and there at some point, I was going to go ahead and do it.

A few years and heaps of research later, here I am scheduled to do a superman suspension on the 24th of September. The sensation and the pain are definitely a draw (I did a flesh pull for a warm up and it felt amazing) but the pain is less than some other mods I have (such as the tattoo on my collar bone).

I would say the asthetics of suspension aren’t really much of a driving force for the choice to do suspension, as you don’t keep the piercings after the event (surface piercing’s are hard enough to take care of normally, much less 12 of them on my back). If you’re doing a stylized ritual suspension, then you could get into the whole rite of passage side of it, but as I haven’t experienced that, I don’t want to speculate on it too much.

But yes, suspensions have been around in various forms for centuries amongst different cultures and every person has a different reason for doing it. If you want to see a bunch of first hand stories of suspensions, check out bmezine.com.

Hope this helps :)