Misogynists hate, hate, hate it when women get tattoos. They just can’t all agree on why. The standard misogynist line on tattoos for women is that they are all, essentially, “tramp stamps” – a way of broadcasting that the woman displaying them is a slut, a skank, a whore. You know the drill.
But the “alternative right” racist/sexist/homophobe who goes by the handle agnostic has a rather different take. In a post on his blog Face to Face, he argues that women with tattoos are actually trying to broadcast their Puritan prudery.
Tattoos, you see, are just plain ugly, and help to accessorize a dreary look designed to repel men.
Notice how those girls dress in drab, dark monochrome colors, wear no girly jewelry, and sport flat hair rather than Big Hair. Their sassy, sarcastic, even nasty attitude echos their off-putting look.
Fundamentally, they are part of the larger trend toward drab dressing, and its signal of reluctance to get loose. Their personalities are more anti-social, so they express the neo-Pilgrim style in a more antagonistic fashion than the less abrasive girls in their generation, but they’re both variations on the same theme.
The tattoo-bearers are likely to be man-haters as well.
They are also part of the larger trend among women toward fear of or hatred toward men. …
In such a climate, women will alter their appearance and demeanor in order to deflate rather than excite the male libido. They act like prey trying to give warning signals to potential predators. The tattoo chicks are only the extreme version of this widespread trend. Girls sure don’t look or act as cute and flirty as they used to in the boy-crazy Eighties, when they thought of guys not as predators but as conspecifics who they wanted to court with engaging mating displays.
“Conspecifics” simply means “members of the same species.” Agnostic loves to drop that sciency lingo in order to make his prejudices seem smart.
Anyway, he continues by arguing that tattoos are especially offensive to pickup artistes and other “assertive” dudes.
Off-putting style also serves to filter out the more assertive and independent males, who would rather spend time on a girl who looks cute, rather than settle for one who’s all marked up or not willing to show anything at all. … By inking themselves up, girls ensure that only the guys who are willing to get walked over and slapped in the face will approach them. Why go through the long hassle of having your new boyfriend fixed when you can advertise that only the neutered need apply in the first place?
Ah, but this last bit is perhaps more revealing than agnostic means it to be. Tattoos are an affront to misogynists because they’re seen as too assertive, too masculine – a challenge to traditional femininity, and to men who prefer traditionally feminine women.
Tattoos on women make misogynistic men angry because on some fundamental level these men don’t think women have the right to decorate their bodies in a way that displeases men –or at least their kind of men. It’s the same kind of creepy, possessive anger that many misogynistic men show towards women who cut their hair short. It’s as if these men on some level believe women’s bodies belong to them, and not to the women themselves.
And that’s pretty unattractive.
RandomPest: thank you for the unsolicited Note From Your Boner. Piss off.
“It’s as if these men on some level believe women’s bodies belong to them, and not to the women themselves.”
They certainly do believe so. Because those tend to be the same men who, for example, insist that there is no such thing as marital rape.
@chimisaur: They probably feel like women doing what men want them to do saves more time. The fact that men have conflicting requirements is just a useful means to keep women from ever being right.
@Wetherby: My mum did the same thing after the end of a bad relationship – she asked me to take her to get tattooed on her 59th birthday! She picked an elegant little black widow spider, who appears to be perched on top of a birthmark on her hip. We both love her ink – and so does her fiancee, and her 3 yr old granddaughter! Then again, that kid is my sister’s daughter, and my niece, so she’s used to seeing women with ink and piercings. Not to mention that her dad’s a rocker, and has full sleeve tats. She sees tattoos as totally normal, and will plaster herself with Hello Kitty temporaries every chance she gets!
Otherwise, I’m afraid that the asshole of the day has some things right, for once. I *do* dress in a uniform of black jeans and tees, leather jacket, hair in bun, no makeup, thick glasses, and either skater sneaks or steeltoes as a big fat visual “leave me the fuck alone!” It began as a form of self-defence as a bullied teen, and since then I’ve become so sick of being creeped on or harassed that I seldom wear anything feminine or revealing anymore, unless it’s so damn hot out that I’d just as soon go naked. He’s also right that if he (or his sort) approached me, they’d get slapped, at the very least. (I broke the nose of the last guy who laid a hand on me without permission!)
My ink, on the other hand, has nothing to do with men, or anyone else but myself. All my tats are deeply symbolic, and loaded with personal meaning for me. I designed them all, and if I had the cash, I’d have a whole lot more! I think tattoos are beautiful, as have people from all cultures across all of human history. Hyena Girl, that is some particularly outstanding work! Gorgeous!
And if it all keeps the assholes away, so much the better.
@opium4themasses
Oh, right – it all comes back to the “women are appliances not people” thing I have such a hard time wrapping my head around. Seriously my brain must have a trapdoor for that shit or something, because it seems every time I successfully almost see the MRA et al point of view, ten minutes later I’m right back at disbelief that anyone could seriously believe crap like that. This is probably a good thing – keeps me a happier person.
@chimisaur — LOL!
I’m up for the mall trip — to get that awesome hair that zoon echon logon advertised. But could you please explain to me why hard chairs are misandry?
Repelling men is a bad thing, cuz all women and their bodies (actually, scratch women, just leave their bodies) belong to men and are created for their use and pleasure. Denying them such is not only misandry, but also a sin, as the Bible sez somewhere.
I’m trying to figure out what the hell he meant by ‘drab’. I know lots of people with tattoos, myself included, and if I was asked to describe the style of the average tattoo adorned person I would not use the word drab. At all. Ever.
Tattoos are often colorful and lively, not drab.
@emma – there was a post a couple years back on some guy filing a lawsuit against a college for only having hard chairs in the library, which supposedly discouraged smaller-butted men from participating in the full higher-education experience. I really can’t do the awful thing justice, if you search the blog or look back at the welcome package I’m sure you’ll find it ^_^
Notice that in this fantasy women get tattooed so that they can hit men in public for no reason at all.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…?
Most of my friends have tats. One of my friends got a beautiful pair of dancing cranes on her lower back to commemorate her marriage. Another got a painting her father made tattooed on her shoulder to remember him by. It’s lovely. Another friend has an awesome tat of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster on her arm because she is an even bigger horror buff than I am. My stepMIL has a tattoo over her heart that all of her friends got when one of their biker buddies died. Another got a rose on her sideboob because she felt like it one day. Another has a tat that represents her nickname. People get tattooed for different reasons, none of those reasons have anything to do with these dorks who think women’s bodies exist to please them.
That’s what pisses them off. Women go their entire lives never once worried that they aren’t pleasing random boners and that makes these jerks sad. They want everything to be about them and not much is. They are incidental. The world is not a game where they are pcs and women are npcs who only exist in relation to them. Their egos cannot handle that, so women’s agency must exist to cheat or harm then in some way.
That’s some effed up S, right there.
I don’t have any tattoos. That’s not because I want assholes to approach me. It’s because I’ve never seen anything I wanted on my body forever. My husband and I have talked about getting special tattoos for our 25th anniversary, but it isn’t a burning desire we have and good tattoos cost money, take time and they hurt. So, we probably won’t. If we did it would be so that when we see the ink, we smile. We’re not trying to send a message to douchebags we don’t even know.
Funny how these guys don’t think men get inked to send messages to women or as a pretext for violent behavior. They understand that men’s bodies and reasons are their own. They really just cannot grasp the concept of women being people too.
PS. David, i love the photo you choose. That photo is so steamy hot. I’ve read The Mad Baker’s blog and it’s good. I love her tats, especially the ones above her knees. Excellent choice.
I just reread the article and comments, and then moved my bun to the crown of my head from its usual nape position, so I can use the ink on the back of my neck to its full oppressive power!
@fromafar2013 – I think he means the goth, grunge & emo looks, and not the tattoos.
Since the 80s were big into neons, I guess anything else looks drab in comparison. Ugh. Neon pink. Pastels. Of course, he totally fails to remember that the guys were also wearing these colours. Preppie fail.
By drab they mean: “dark monochrome colors, wear no girly jewelry, and sport flat hair rather than Big Hair.”
The horror.
“Their sassy, sarcastic, even nasty attitude echos their off-putting look.”
It deepens.
I’ma run off now to collect all my girly jewelry and donate it to some organization that MRA loathe. All the while marveling the fact that Big Hair deserves capitalization. That’s some serious… stuff, right there.
@chimisaur
“a lawsuit against a college for only having hard chairs in the library, which supposedly discouraged smaller-butted men from participating in the full higher-education experience”
LMAO! (no pun… I think).
Thanks. Can’t make this stuff up.
*chose 😛
Yeah, it’s fine if he has a preference for body art free girly girls, but I’ve met plenty of people who are attracted to goths.
I also find it funny that in his fondness for 80’s fashion he doesn’t realize that goth became fashionable in the 80’s.
Not that all women with tattoos are goth, but with the complaints about black clothes and unfriendly attitudes that seems to be what he’s referring to.
I wonder if my one and only tattoo is misandry. It’s of Lowly the Worm from Richard Scary. It’s not meant to be a commentary on small penises, but I could see MRAs and PUAs being insecure enough to think of it that way.
I wouldn’t be suprised if the dood used to be overly obsessed with Molly Ringwald movies.
*surprised. I missed an ‘r’. Grrrrrrr.
Apparently pest can’t seem to bring himself to type ‘women’ even when it saves space.
Awesome. My left calf is hella misandry, and my right thigh is going to become significantly more misandry in June.
Christ women being able to do whatever they please with there own body’s like they were free thinking people or something reeely bothers these guys doesn’t it.
It’s like David Wong was saying on the craked podcast a few weeks ago we’ve entered an age where men feel entitled to access to women’s body’s all most 24/7. Anything a women does that displeases them is being done deliberately just to spite them its like they literally can’t conceive of women as being actual people doing things for there own pleasure.
It just occurred to me that my next tattoo I’m planning is of Ada Lovelace. Is that extra misandry x2?
Also, I’m sorry I wrote “Mad” instead of “Militant”.
That sounds like a combination of these two:
http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/5150/breadmaster.jpg
http://www.thehardmans.com/images/bomber2.jpg
20/20
Gotta <3 David Wong.
So, tattoos and dark, monochromatic outfits make this guy’s boner sad? How horrible! You can’t see me right now, but a single tear is tracking down my cheek while I play the world’s smallest violin.
Wut? The ’80’s were the pinnacle of cute, flirty, girly fashion? The decade of stirrup pants, acid wash denim and massive shoulder pads?
And ew for all the predator/prey talk.
As opposed to an attractive non-human female?
RandomPester’s talking about women in this clinically detached way, like women are some sort of subspecies rather than, y’know, fellow human beings.