The Scrapbook has plenty of prejudices but no official position, pro or con, on tattoos. We sometimes wonder if their explosive popularity over the last two decades evinces the angst of a declining middle class, but the appearance of tattoos on one’s skin doesn’t signify the quality of one’s character any more than their absence does. Some of our worst enemies have no tattoos.
On the matter of interpreting the social significance of tats, though, the New York Times is, as ever, way ahead of us. A recent headline: “Anchors Away: How Women Are Redrawing the Tattoo Parlor.” This is of course the reporting approach for which the paper has become famous: Take any topic ordinary people might be interested in and view it through the lens of racial, sexual, gender, or class prejudice.
That, and set the piece in Brooklyn, where they found a female-run parlor called Nice Tattoo. Its décor is airy and sunlit, and while it “welcomes all genders” (surely the author meant “both”? oh, forget it), “women make up the majority of its clients.”
The tattoo business, we learn, “remains an overwhelmingly male-dominated one: Just one in six tattooers is female, according to a 2010 study by Columbia University.” (How encouraging to know accomplished scholars are tackling these questions.) “The industry had been both historically male dominated and continues to be very heteronormative for men,” explains Margot Mifflin, a professor at City University of New York and the author of Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo. “Tattoo reality shows have been dominated by men, and commercial magazines are still unabashedly, laughably sexist, often with the pretense of being edgy.”
Clever readers will have noted the allusion in the paper’s headline. A century ago the typical tattoo was an anchor on the meaty arm of a sailor. Popeye had one, if we remember. And, speaking only for ourselves, we prefer the older anchor look—heteronormative though it may be.
