No pictures; don’t ask.
Kameron Hurley points out this Livejournal thread on tattooing and the ideal female body:
This past weekend, the Women’s Studies department at my university held a conference, and one of the presenters read a paper that she’d written about the female tattooed body. She talked about some historical aspects of tattooing and how she believes that tattooing has been co-opted by mainstream culture and has therefore lost a lot of its spiritual meaning. She also commented on how because tattooing has traditionally been viewed as a male-only venture, women who do get tattoos feel compelled to:
a) get a tattoo with traditionally “feminine” imagery; e.g. a flower or a butterfly
b) get a tattoo that can be easily concealed, e.g. on the lower back, so as not to compromise femininity
I’ve noticed that this is largely true, and I found the paper quite interesting. While many women may not explicitly be choosing tattoos based on this reasoning, it seems like women, when considering tattoo designs and placement, have really been influenced by what society expects a woman’s body to look like.
For the record, I call those small-of-the-back tattoos butt-staches, visual kin to the moustache. Also known as ass-toppers.
Having had reasonably close ties to the local body modification community from adolesence onward, I must say I generally agree with these points. However, I don’t find it much of a stretch to say that the vast majority of people who get tattoos and piercings have little to no appreciation or knowledge about the history and art of bodily modification. Those who find themselves outside of this community tend to get the requisite bellybutton piercing or butterfly tattoo. It is rare to find a person with a large, obvious tattoo who a) is not well-informed of the depth of body mod culture, or b) got it for intensely personal reasons.
My own tattoo is indeed rather feminine and in a place where it is easily hidden for professional consideration, but it is also much larger than the average bear’s. Anyhow, I can’t speak for most women on this point because I got my tattoo for explicitly feminist reasons.
When I was pregnant, I suffered from the delusion that once the boy was born my body would just “snap back,” that the day he was born I would be back to my flat-bellied, pre-pregnancy eighteen-year-old body. One night shortly before the illness took over and labor was induced, I was reading “The Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy.”
This book should be burned, not because it contains inaccurate information or anything of the sort, but because one of the very last chapters of the book — the chapter following all those other chapters that tells the mother-to-be that she is beautiful, glowing, healthy, goddess-like, etc. — is titled “The Ol’ Grey Mare Just Ain’t What She Used To Be.” Ouch.
This chapter is the one that finally informs the pregnant woman in question that she will
- Always have stretchmarks,
- Have droopy breasts no matter if she breastfeeds or not, and
- Will probably never get back to her pre-pregnancy shape unless she indulges in an obscene amount of plastic surgery.
This coming from a former Playboy playmate. Thanks a lot, lady.
I remember reading this chapter and breaking into hysterics. The tears are probably attributable to the third trimester hormone rampage, but I chose to hold onto my belief that all it would take was a diet and some exercise to “get my body back.”
Needless to say, I never “got it back,” but not for lack of trying. I developed an unhealthy preoccupation for diet and exercise, sometimes starving myself and sometimes exercising to excess. I got down to my lowest weight ever, but did not look like I did before. I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that I had an eating disorder. All it took to reform myself was a conscious change in attitude and the first taste of real mayonaisse in two years. Good god, that mayo.
Despite my reform away from the self-inflicted abuse, I resented my inability to reverse the toll pregnancy had taken on my body and took it out on the other young women around me wearing skimpy clothing all summer long, while I settled with jeans, t-shirts, and bras big and pointy enough to put Marilyn to shame.
One day I decided I had had enough with the resentment and shame and disappointment about my body. Once I realized I would never have the ideal female body, and that I had never had the ideal female body, I felt the need to do something to “get my body back.” I needed to make it mine — not my son’s, not my partner’s, not some stranger’s. Mine. I stopped pining over the ideal that never was and never would be and settled on making myself into my own ideal.
Within the month, I took the money I had scrounged from spare change and set aside for a possible future vacation and put it toward my new tattoo. I was done honoring the bodily expectations of others.
The night I came home from getting the outline done, an eight-hour session I should add, I pained over the web of hardening scabs across my back, slept on my stomach, and bitched all the sleepless night about my aching kidneys. But when I woke up the next morning, I went to shower and, shocked, stopped dead in front of the mirror. I looked at myself in a way I hadn’t in a very long time: beautiful.
Such was the beginning of the long journey to self-love. But better.
Today the tattoo feels like less of an anomaly and more like a part of myself that should have always been there. Before I got the tattoo, my skin, my visual self, was a text always in need of a good edit. Swipe off a paragraph here, add some descriptive language there, in need of a better introduction or a more polished end. Now, instead of the constant self-criticism that plagues many and once plagued me, I have a beloved visual reminder of the value of accepting one as he or she is.
That’s as good a reason as any to submit to some ink.
On my other tattoo: Stars.