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When Will This Fad End?
This topic has been bouncing around my head for a while, but I’ve never gotten around to writing it. Someone on Ricochet will mention something, Jay Nordlinger months ago on a podcast complained about tattoos or a user whose name I forget recently said he was up for a good tattoo rant. Other times I see someone and think why?
I noticed markings on Dana Loesch’s arm in a Parkland CNN screenshot or a cross on a pastor’s back at a church swim party. Tattoos seem to be everywhere and there is no demographic that is exempt. This will come across as a get-off-my-lawn rant, but here we go.
I guess I’m a Generation X person. I still remember that about the only people who had tattoos were military veterans or criminals and they might only have one or two, no sleeves or multiple ones covering a lot of the body. Others might have had them, but they were in a private location. Maybe it was just where I grew up.
Some point along the way, tattoos became more mainstream. In the ’90s a lot of girls were getting lower back tattoos, but they were derided as “tramp stamps”. Then it seemed as though they exploded on the scene and everyone had one. Yes it’s me, but I have yet to see a tattoo that improves a woman’s appearance. As G. Gordon Liddy used to say, putting a tattoo on a woman is like putting a bumper sticker on a BMW. I will be glad when I don’t see ink everywhere I look.
Maybe things are changing. I saw this on Twitter. I don’t know what drove it, but we might be on the downward side of the trend. I can hope.
We have reached full mainstream tattoo saturation, it is now far edgier to not have tattoos. So it flipped on me and now I’m the dork. Crap.
— Chris Loesch (@ChrisLoesch) May 30, 2018
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Published in Culture
Sure. They like the pain of the needle. Self harm fits. Perhaps I’m being overly dramatic in phrasing it that way, but I suspect most people understood what I was referring to.
It’s creepy no matter how you phrase it.
A lot of employers require piercings to be removed before starting a shift.
The U.S. Army relaxed their policy on tattoos, but still require they be covered and coverable.
As long hair became more acceptable in the 1970’s, it was in part because more stable people were followin that fashion.
The impression of low class in the 1960’s was probably more accurate, and less accurate in the 1970’s.
This thread has been covering fashion statements that include cutting your skin. It includes pain, and the risk of infection.
No, growing your hair long is not the same as all that. And you can make judgements of people that submit themselves to all that.
Okay, so first, wrt “weird” baby names:
Lots of people have “weird” names. Lots of people have always has “weird” names. Look at the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries and there are lots of weird names and unusual spellings.
And I’m perfectly okay with that actually. We have freedom in this country, there’s no approved list of names people have to use. And people have taken that freedom and run with it. Sometimes you get bad outcomes (like the lady who tried to name her daughter after Tempestt Bledsoe, but ended up naming her Temptress instead).
But the flourishing of a diversity of interesting names is perfectly okay with me.
Second, wrt people standing out for their unusual personal style choices, I’m cool with that too. I may think its a bad idea to get a face tattoo, but there’s been a flourishing in the last quarter century of weird hair colors and facial piercings.
The thing is: tattoos, purple hair, waxed mustaches, facial piercings, all those things which we (with conservative temperaments) find off-putting, don’t actually hurt anything.
Yes, a “NO RAGRETS” tattoo may be buffoonish, but a nose ring, or purple hair, or whatever, isn’t always an indicator about a person’s work habits or characters. Tattoos aren’t the bad decision indicator that they were 20 years ago.
The natural counter is “Yes, but they’ll never get a job looking like that, and so it harms them.” Okay, first, that’s not true anymore. Receptionists at law firms have visible hand tattoos now. Second, the thing holding back people isn’t the tattoo, but it’s other people’s prejudices about it. And those prejudices are eroding rapidly.
I have a dear friend who has a very unique personal style. He has this long whispy beard, he always wears sunglasses (I think I knew him three years before I saw his eyes), and his fashion choices are always distinctive. When he got married, he had a custom wedding suit made by the same lady who did the stage clothes for the heavy metal band Pantera.
And he’s also a trained chemist with a masters degree who does patent work for a lawfirm. He’s a homeowner. He has children that he takes care of. Plus chickens, goats, a rescue pig…
I admire the man immensely because he does something I wish I could do: he lives life on his own terms. I’m … not quite there yet. But I’m working on it.
The point is that he has a very distinctive personal style. (I once ran into him at a festival one Saturday in July and he was wearing a black boiler suit … because he could.) But the point is, he does this and he’s still a decent person who takes care of himself and his family, and is a fully functioning member of society.
I don’t have a tattoo. I’m never going to get one. Or facial piercings. And my wife gets upset every time I talk about growing my hair out and putting it into dreadlocks. But I’m okay with a society that allows other people to make choices like that. And while that choice may be an indicator of other things, a tattoo in itself isn’t the problem.
The military has always had restrictions on tattoos. And the story in question wasn’t what the LT had plastered on his body, but the girl he brought to the party.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
What this world needs is more people being judgey.
I believe the Left has a profound influence on society. And it is not good. A major premise of the Left is to destroy Western civilization. Also, a rejection of God and Christianity. That inevitably leads to a society with no morality, ethics and values. Oh, they will exist. But they will not be based on normative Western values. Instead they are based on nothing and morality, ethics and values will be based instead on anything and everything. Always shifting, forever changing.
So, part of this Western values rejection is an embrace of non-Western culture and ethics. And primitivism is part of that. Instead of appreciating the long progression of Western culture that began with a rejection of primitive ways and style, maturing through history with a style of dressing and clothes, body markings and body piercings and the like are a replacement for clothing. The style of clothing we wear now is the result of centuries of sartorial style that replaced the primitive look with a more mature style that covers the body and expresses itself in colorful clothing, elegant clothing, practical clothing, all clothing, that is a substitute for all that is primitive.
In short, this explosion of body markings, tattoos, body piercings and the like is a return and an embrace of primitivism, or a rejection and under appreciation of the culture that has preceded recent generations. Unless our society emphasizes and teaches the values that made Western civilization great and, well, civilized, our current society will see nothing wrong with full body tattoos, piercings and the like, that in essence are a substitute for clothing. after all, for the Left, nothing is better then anything else. So displaying individuality on clothes is no better then the individuality that is displayed with tattoos. After all, who is to say differently?
Haha. At church we call it “discernment.”
As the saying goes, The Return of the Primitive was not a how-to manual.
Anyone else up for a good grammar rant?
“Who’s” is the contraction for “who is” or “who has.”
“Whose” is the possessive pronoun and the word you were looking for but failed to find.
Learn it. Live it. Love it.
I have a tattoo.
I also have serious school-marm cred.
Wrinkled, hairless and bawling? (or was that just me…)
Of?
I can’t be the only curious Ricochetti.
A cute little butterfly on my left shoulder.
I got my tattoo from a peg-legged surfer on South Padre Island named Harpoon Barry, or ‘Poon for short, when I was on spring break with some of my college rugby buddies.
Here’s a clip of ‘Poon surfing:
The tat was once red and yellow and blue and green, but now has faded to mostly blue and is hard to discern what it is.
Not everyone with a tattoo is a criminal, but almost all criminals are tattooed.
Also, this thread needs some music.
Thanks for the catch. I thought I’d done due diligence before hitting publish, but this one slipped through. In the last few years I’ve noticed more of these types of errors when I proofread my stuff. I usually catch them, but wonder why they’re creeping into my drafts.
In Japan, in public baths, girls would clutch at each other when they saw my little inoffensive butterfly and murmur, “Yakuza!” with horror.
Traditionally, a tattoo was supposed to be a signifier that one is a respected member of a particular organization. i.e the navy, or a pirate crew, or a tribe, or a gang, etc.
In such a scenario, it’s an evolutionary adaptation. It allowed females to more easily gauge the relative status of the available men. It also allows tribe and/or gang members to quickly identify friend from foe, and to quickly gauge their own place in the immediate hierarchy so they don’t commit a social faux pas. Etc.
When that connection between tattoos and one’s status within the group is broken, the whole raison d’etre for tattoos goes away.
So, the popularization of tattoos is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, if everybody gets tattoos then those groups that still use tattoos as signifiers of group status (i.e. criminal gangs) lose a little bit of their power. The popularization of tattoos inflates away their utility, which may not be a bad thing.
On the other hand, institutional tattoos also serve as a warning to those outside that group. If everybody has tattoos and they become more socially acceptable, then the urgency of that warning is diminished. Just look as how too many idiot people say that the MS-13 tattoos “don’t really mean anything, they’re just decoration”.
When a venomous animal has markings that scream “stay away”, it’s idiotic to think, “oh, what pretty markings” and get closer to the animal.
People who get tattoos and aren’t in a gang are kinda like the Scarlet King Snake, which mimics the coloring of the venomous Coral Snake.
In the case of the Scarlet King Snake it makes sense because it wants predators to think it’s dangerous so they’ll stay away. In the case of humans it makes way less sense to sport a symbol that screams “stay away” and then get angry when people discriminate against you because of it.
Completely agree with the doctor on this one.
Also think not ‘killing the nerves’ is good advice, absent serious extenuating circumstances, in the context of most emotional pain.
When I was in training we used to say that anyone with 5 or more visible tattoos is a sociopath until proven otherwise.
I think the rule still holds. It’s just that the sociopaths have become more common.
Leprosy (Hansen’s disease) is a disease in which a bacteria destroys the pain nerves in a person’s hands, feet, and other parts of the body. The resulting lack of pain leaves the person unaware of injuries to those body parts, and this results in the horrible, disfiguring injuries that leprosy is famous for including losses of fingers, feet, or whole limbs.
With pain intact we unconsciously make innumerable adjustments in posture, limb position, foot pressure, and so on, in order to avoid injury. Without pain an important protective mechanism is removed.
My observations are anecdotal and my psychological analysis is from a guy who only took a couple of psychology classes in college. I do have a pretty good eye for noticing trends. It seems a generation or 2 ago parents would name their kids after relatives. It was more of a way of honoring a grandparent,Aunt or uncle. Today it seems a way for parents of making their children unique. Mix in the racial,sexual and other superficial ways of identifying oneself I find troubling and think this is one reason why we have our “snowflake” problem.
You are spot on Thelonious. Most people with tattoos are just folks who are advertising their superficiality. In my experience, aside from folks in the service or tats about kids, everyone I know that has one either hates it in short order or is extremely shallow. I was once asked on a date if I had a tattoo. I said that “people that place such value on skin-deep aesthetic are not trustworthy. If you want to know about my personality by looking at my skin, ask me about my scars. There are scar people and tat people. I’m a scar person.”
I made it through 24 years in the Navy with no tattoos. Before I went in my grandfather, who was fully tatted up from his service time, took me aside and said “Don’t do this. One day you’ll be an old man and hate them.” Made sense to me.
Re: tattoos on others, especially women, I don’t think too much about the character aspect. Too many people that I know are good folks have them. That being said, I do find them unattractive. Piercings even more so.
Tattoos are heavy metal particles in your body. The particles are too large to be absorbed by your immune system so they stay there. Here’s the best explanation I’ve seen. It also explains why they blur over the years.
Smarter Every Day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0B7F5UbTOQ
I do have a few women friends who have tattoos. They are pretty much uniformly of the tasteful, small and unintrusive variety, in the sense that they are something like a 3/4″ daisy on the ankle, or in the case of the most extreme, a Celtic “bracelet” that’s about 5/8″ wide and encircles her wrist.
Anything other than ordinary ear piercings, I usually find bizarre, if not overtly repulsive (full disclosure: I worked in a hospital for 20 years. People pierce things you wouldn’t believe, using things you wouldn’t believe to do so, sometimes with unintended consequences you wouldn’t believe. Or, if you do believe them, I’m not sure I want to know you). And, far more than my friends’ rather tame tattoos, most piercings scream “Look at me!” to me. Trouble is, I don’t want to look at them. Ugh.
So, I agree that there’s a considerable “showing off” factor here, even if all you’re showing off is your own (or your tattoo “artist’s”) illiteracy, like the girl in the photo accompanying the OP.
I have to confess that the first time I saw that, I thought it said “NO RUGRATS,” and my first thought was, “How appropriate. A tattoo that refers to a cartoon show about a bunch of toddlers and what the world looks like them, and how they pretend to deal with it, while the adults around them pretend not to notice.”
I’m still not sure that isn’t a spot-on analysis, even though the premise was faulty.
Shouldn’t be too much work to fix that up…
We needed some comic relief, Made me LOL!