Everyone has something to say about someone else getting a tattoo. In a recent “Ask A Lady” on the Hairpin, the question was: “I’m about to turn 18 and want to get a tattoo of some writing on my shoulder. Should I?”
My answer, in my head: Wuahahahaha, NO WAY GWORL. Bad. News. Bears. End in tears, all that.
The “lady” of the column admits she got a “text-based” tattoo when she was 18, too, but that it’s not so pretty now and her friends who didn’t get tattoos now, somehow, still have prettier skin overall:
“And not to be too mom-ish about it, but I think there’s something nice about that [pretty, blank skin], and sometimes wish I could go back to being a clean canvas. (Although carefully planned tattoos can be absolutely gorgeous, too.)”
But what does that mean, “clean canvas”? I don’t know if it’s a great idea for everyone to be Hunger Games-ing it up permanently, but not wanting shit on your skin isn’t the same as being a clean canvas. No one is ever a clean canvas again. As soon as you’re born. Every scar, every new mole, that’s marring your canvas, baby.
This clean canvas/”women with tattoos” thing is, always, a Big Fucking Deal. For women with tattoos, women without, and innocent bystanders who might be exposed to a tattoo on a woman.
In February, Jezebel posted “I Hate My Tramp Stamp,” detailing the trials and tribulations of a silly tattoo on a notorious place, before the place was notorious. While most of the story is a sad tale of an 18-year-old getting a poorly-thought-out lotus flower from a tattoo artist that didn’t understand what she wanted, Madeline Davies hits a nerve for a lot of women when she says, “It means that I can never have my body just be my body anymore.”
Tattooing, and why women choose to get one, or two, or two hundred, is tied strongly to autonomy, to control over one’s body and control over the statement one makes with it. When Davies gets that tattoo, and then not only regrets the design but has it in a place where vast amounts of people extrapolate negative information from it, she’s lost a little control over the way not just her body or tattoo, but her “self” as a whole, is perceived.
Wherever you have a tattoo, there is this idea that it makes your body more public, open for business, for comment, for evaluation. For touching and grabbing. And people say, “You knew it would get you attention, so why does it bother you?” For the same reason I don’t want people touching my hair. Because it’s MINE. And there’s a whole ‘nother lecture in people telling me what I should or shouldn’t be doing with my body (*waves at Republicans with tattooed arm*).
The Jezebel article references “Why Put a Bumper Sticker on a Ferrari?”, an infamous op-ed by Lisa Khoury. In it, she says “that women hold the world’s class and elegance in their hands.” (If “cold drank” = ”class and elegance,” then yes, yes, I do.) She equates getting a tattoo with a total lack of morals. And class, like I said. And encourages your fat ass to hit the gym, and then the mall, to peacock that classy ass around like God intended you to:
“An elegant woman does not vandalize the temple she has been blessed with as her body. She appreciates it. She flaunts it. She’s not happy with it? She goes to the gym. She dresses it up in lavish, fun, trendy clothes, enjoying trips to the mall with her girlfriends. She accentuates her legs with high heels. She gets her nails done. She enjoys the finer things in life, all with the body she was blessed with.”
She doesn’t exactly explain why you’re allowed to buy things from Forever 21 though not adorn yourself with an actual custom piece of art, but perhaps designer knockoffs are God’s will?
Part of the issue, for Khoury, is that beauty is super important. Women are beautiful just as they are, except that you should really wear some high heels, Stumpy. But her unspoken point is that women do what they do for the male gaze and for the male gaze only. Never mind women who love women or women who don’t care. That shit cray.
And by that metric, for every man that professes their adoration for the hipster girl with the tattooed arms, there’s at least one who finds it the ever-frightening “gross.” It’s not classy, like Khoury says, or trashy. And then it’s about why it’s “trashy.” In an era where tattoos signified an outlier population of Hells’ Angels, maybe. There’s a semantic argument there about “trashy” actually meaning “other.” But when your average woman over 21 has at least one, doesn’t that start to slide slowly into “most women are trashy”?
The stereotypes don’t end there: It’s not actually dangerous, in most cases, to be young and a special snowflake, just annoying. But intrepid researchers recently released a study that alleged a correlation between heavy drinking and tattoos. Researchers in France asked to Breathalyze people as they exited a bar. Those with tattoos had a higher BAC than those without.
The MSNBC article manages to scare the shit out of all your parents by going on to point out that “[p]revious studies have shown that tattooed individuals are more likely to engage in risky behaviors, such as unprotected sex, theft, violence and alcohol consumption, compared to people without tattoos.”
The article’s message was that “researchers suggest educators, parents and physicians consider tattoos and piercings as potential ‘markers’ of drinking, using them to begin a conversation about alcohol consumption and other risky behaviors.” Blerg. Don’t we all, in our lives, have enough concerned conversations with our families and parole officers about every other thing? Does the paw print on my forearm have to be a warning sign? A warning sign of WHAT? A dangerous love of animal welfare?
In addition, studies have been done that show links between tattooed women and things like sexual abuse and borderline personality disorder.
Okay. But correlation does not imply causation. And then there’s this opinion from an MSNBC.com commenter:
“This study is further evidence that people who have tattoos are somehow different personality-wise than people who don’t have tattoos. Show me someone who has two or more tattoos and I will say that they are probably conflicted, immature, or at the least, self-absorbed. Tattooing is indicative of some type of personality variation to be sure. The more tattoos one has the more they are likely to be an extreme or conflicted or ‘different’ personality’?”
Lest you think I’m just a masochist for reading every comment ever, anywhere, these are the people that exist in the world. That guy’s yelling at clouds in his spare time too, sure, but there are a lot of people who hold an opinion somewhere on that spectrum regarding tattoos.
So, what is it? Are tattoos on women the worst? Am I going to hell for having a William Faulkner quote tattoo? Are you no fun at parties because you have no tattoos at all?
Image via Wikimedia
