RSSNose Rings And Tattoos
November 5, 2008
Go ahead. Read this and start typing your comment. Tell me that you totally disagree and that I’m hampered by old-fashioned tastes. I can take it.
A tattooed Mom
A long time ago, maybe a year or more, a great and wonderful friend, let’s say Joy, asked me to write about her many tattoos. This is a 40 year old woman in a good marriage, with children, living in a small town.
Here is what she said:
What makes a person want to be so different or stand out? I know I don’t want to be noticed, but yet here I am […with facial jewelry, various piercings, and tattoos]. I recently got my nose pierced and I love it. I feel different and it makes me feel beautiful.
I’ve thought of what to write many times but couldn’t find a place inside myself to write from. It would be like trying to write about why we should shave our heads. I can’t get anywhere close to that topic.
Photo byMarco Gomes
Piercings at the office
More recently, the question came up of nose rings and piercings in women over 40, particularly those of us who work in conformist, traditional, office environments.
Most importantly, I think you do what you gotta do. Since I don’t aspire to that look, I ask myself what motivates women to go there. You buy a lipstick because the color’s pretty. Permanent transformations might be intended to send a different message – or am I reading too much into it?
Leaving a hiding place
There are many levels here.
Joy is saying “I’m not who you think I am”. She is mounting a quiet revolution against an oppressive upbringing. She’s speaking to her parents, to her childhood, saying “I am my own woman. I don’t have to be who you wanted.” The words are too hard and too awkward, so the gesture takes its place.
The question now is “Who is the real woman? The child who lost her way, who couldn’t be a part of her parents’ world because it conflicted too deeply with her own spirit? Or the adult who is looking for her own voice but drowning in self-doubt?
Photo byangler70
And where is the answer to be found? The anxiety has been huge and taken a physical toll. The true woman inside is screaming to be let out, to find her shape and her voice, but isn’t sure she’ll be accepted. She’s also not sure what the final shape will be or what the first step in finding it would be. The present contours are only safe because she’s lived in them for 40 years. It takes big emotional energy to fight back against 40 years of training. On the other hand, is committing yourself to resigned unhappiness ever a better choice than conquering the complete unknown?
The appealing forbidden
Similar but not the same is the anti-establishment connotation. The voice sounds like “Despite the rules I have to live by, I cannot be fully controlled”. Depending on the woman, it sometimes looks a little desperate. It reminds folks of all those other piercings and smacks of a mid-life crisis.
Do teens do this stuff because everyone else is, because the overlying creed of the teenager is to be part of a group? Seeing yourself as a dissident, rebelling against the institutions your parents appear enslaved by, that’s all part of teenagerhood.
Cultures and crowds
Do women over 40 make these more invasive and permanent physical changes only because they feel it looks good? Some must. East Indian women are almost expected to have tattoos and piercings, but maybe we’re just used to seeing it. We expect different cultures to adorn themselves differently.
Photo byJim Patton
Is it regional? In a city with an artistic and university population, people look entirely different. Or is it just the same thing as Joy said, but on a bigger scale? In small conservative towns, people don’t want to stand out. In cities, people need to do more to be noticed in the crowd. It tramples convention less because everyone has more liberal taste and expectation in the personal decoration of others.
My tedious taste
What do I think about a nose ring? It looks strange, no matter how old you are. It never ever looks refined, elegant, or classy. In a 20 year old, it just conveys subversiveness, but not beauty. But, look, maybe you don’t aspire to tasteful. Tasteful might bore you sick and you may long for freedom of expression.
My style is tame and lackluster, you know? I don’t like purple eyeshadow either. I wear colorful clothes, the less well tailored, the better. I don’t care if I look like a walking color wheel, because that’s when I feel like the real me. You could put me in a fitted suit and heels and I’d feel like an impostor, like a soap opera character. It would shut me down and I would act as dull as I thought I looked.
I get a confusing message from tattoos and piercings, small or large, in women our age. Rather like “Is this woman doing this only because she thinks it’s gorgeous, or is there a social point she’s trying to make, or have I missed a personal statement of some sort?”
It becomes a distraction that people don’t know how to react to. In Joy’s case, that’s exactly what she’s after…to make people a little uncertain around her. She wants them to ask themselves if they know her as well as they think they do, her parents most of all.
Revealing The Real Me
I guess we’re all trying to broadcast “the real me”. Would you agree? Often, the message is simply “You think you know me but you don’t. There are parts of me that are concealed. I can do things you don’t expect. I am stronger than you think. I’m not afraid to make permanent changes in who I am. And I’m starting with this piercing.”
Photo byziobill
At the end of the day, unless anyone else is being harmed, you do what makes you feel good. You are always stronger than you, or anyone else, knows. If you’ll walk away from a nose piercing with renewed strength and wondering why you waited so long, then do it. Forget about everyone else. As Joy’s husband says so eloquently, “F— ‘em all, let God sort them out.”
Comments
2 Responses to “Nose Rings And Tattoos”
Got something to say? I hope so.
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A Greener Tea
Web Maintenence by Rick Beckman
Well done and perfectly said . . . perhaps because (once again) you’ve accurately conveyed exactly my feelings. Just because I wouldn’t do it, doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing.
Susan
“What do I think about a nose ring? It looks strange, no matter how old you are. It never ever looks refined, elegant, or classy. In a 20 year old, it just conveys subversiveness, but not beauty.”
I disagree, I kinda like the diamond nose stud, I think it looks “uniquely elegant”
Do I have one? Nope, wish I had the nerve, but it’s just not me. Piercing the ears are as far as I’ve ever gone.
I did throw caution to the wind in Mexico once and got a henna tattoo on my lower back, but it faded by the time I got back to reality.
I do find it a bit disappointing that a 40+ women is still sending messages to her parents…but whatever works for her.