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
10 Responses to “Nose Rings And Tattoos”
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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.
I think it is irresponsible to judge a person based on his/her exterior. Taste, beauty, and elegance does not exist anywhere but in the mind. I challenge the people reading this to think outside the box and realize how stupid it is to even care what message tattoo’s and piercings convey to others. We must live life whichever way makes us feel incredible at the end of the day. If that means a forty year old married mother of four wants a nose ring then it is her prerogative. Seriously, we have much more important things to worry about.
Great comment, Angela.
What you have said is the bottom line, no question. Nobody gets to dictate “taste, beauty, elegance” , since not one of them can be right or wrong – and the great thing about the society we live in is that it opens our minds to other interpretations of those words . Human beings are so multilayered that you could never know one by just looking at the surface.
I like your last sentence best. We all could work everyday on getting past what things look like. This would be a better place.
Sincere thanks for the honest comment.
I find it very rebellious to not show tattoos or piercings other than ears in our company.
I’ve always thought it very “against the norm” to look more classic, elegant and sophisticated in a salon environment.
So to me, NOT having tattoos or facial piercing makes us uniquely “different.”
While I expect that a woman our age in a tie-dyed tee shirt and torn jeans with Janis Joplin hair would be saying one thing with a nose piercing, in the last couple years, I started seeing some fairly sophisticated and professional women in El A with little diamond studs in their nostrils. I’m not sure what they’re trying to convey, but if it is a trend, I’m for it! One of our “outside counsel” firms sent a fabulously attractive woman with exquisite gray hair, who had a little diamond twinkling in her nostril… it was HAWT!
I adore what Christopher Hopkins left; not having any tats or holes is being different!
And that’s how I feel about it. I am…wayyyyy over 40 but have several friends my own age still sporting tats and fresh ones at that. I look down at my own skin’s lack of elasticity and think about gravity pulling any artwork into a freakish design understood only by myself and a long term lover. I do remember Pop’s shame the first time the grandkids saw the Betty Grable hula dancer on his arm and they weren’t impressed with the warship across his chest either. I wonder about the dragons and asian symbols in the youth of today’s aging skin and how it’ll not impress the youth later.
I do, however, applaud everyone for supporting another career choice for people. It’s going to keep some one off the streets somewhere. That’s a good thing.
My abhorrence to poking permanent holes in my body come from the usual ear piercing and the damn hygeine I have to participate in for that small orifice let alone more of them! Egads that would take longer to get ready to leave the house. Unless I’m living where I’m working…at the parlor.
But, a big but, I was just observing a Indian female performing a beautiful dance. She is wearing a diamond in her nose. It’s very attractive…on her!
My friend, a high school secretary, had hers done and it seemingly changed her life. She realized her dead-end marriage and moved forward in a new and very positive manner. All because she got her nose pierced, I think not. But because she invited a courageous form of change into her spirit and the nose stud exemplifies her committment to her own changing.
I have another gal-friend who delivered her own grandchild and the baby was tiny and fought for his little life. She felt the presence of divinity saying to her to mark this event. She darted out of the hospital and bought the tiniest mark for the price of any size that very day.
Who could I ever be to say it’s unattractive to another? I probably have some unattractive qualities myself unknown to me, of course. But using art to herald to the world who I am now is not something I need. But some one else just might. And I am happy for them when they find what works for them. Watching spirits soar is a past time I enjoy.
Salida,
Well, now, how well said is that?? However we need to process and mark and recognize our moving forward, that is what we must do. It’s our right brain moving forward and taking over for a much-needed change. It is us communicating our inner emotion instead of our daily schedules and logic-driven lives.
Life changes us. We choose new husbands, new careers. Who knows what they sign up for when they embark on these ventures? Nobody. Sometimes we change with them, sometimes without them.
I recommend to you a most fascinating book. It’s Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke Of Insight. This woman is a brain scientist at Harvard who suffers a stroke at 37. The hemorrhage is in her left hemisphere. She recounts the precise shutting down of her left side functions. Because of her deep understanding of brain regions and their roles, she can be quite precise about what is happening in her head. But most fascinating, as the left side is being bathed in blood (blood is toxic to nerve cells), the right side is no longer being inhibited. She is finding joy, peace, oneness with the Universe at the exact time of the stroke. As she tells of her 8-year recovery, she works very hard at finding a way to NOT lose all she learned about her capacity for happiness and deep inner peace, of sharing and belonging, and love for others. All those things live in us all along, but the left side of our brain suppresses them as it keeps us communicating with the external world, instead of just living in a long joyous meditation. It is FASCINATING.
I am 43 years old and just got my nose pierced. Didn’t think it was an age thing lol. I always wanted it done and just never did it until now. I LOVE it and quite frankly, I don’t care what anyone says. Everyone has an opinion. Not everyone can be right!
I am 46 years old & I wear a teeny diamond stud in my right nostril. I work in an art studio, so this is ok at work. I feel like it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, & now I am old enough to finally do it. Some people like it & some give me a hard time, but I like it & I just gotta be ME & do what makes me happy. It’s a small thing, really.