The truth about tattoos

I’ve just had a revelation. Tattoos are conservative. After all, modern liberal society effeminizes men, right? But tattoos show a man to be strong, manly, dauntless. They are a rejection of the rampant feminization of the modern world. So tattoos are conservative. And the larger the tattoos, the more of a man’s body they cover, and the scarier and more repellent they are, the more conservative they are.

The same is true of body piercings. The more metal studs a man has sticking out of his face, the more conservative he is.

By the same token, of course, movies, such as the Batman films, that show a strong, manly hero overcoming his fears and bashing villains are conservative. The more hyper-violent such movies are, the more conservative they are.

It’s so simple, now that I understand.

- end of initial entry -

Timothy A. writes:

A few more epiphanies of this type and you’ll be writing for National Review Online!

LA writes:

A reader wrote defending traditional, small, military type tattoos. I wasn’t even thinking of that type of tattoo, but of the kind of horrifying tattoo covering much of the body that has suddenly become very common in the last couple of years.

Of course I don’t approve tattoos at all. But if all we had were the little tattoos of previous times, usually worn by working class men, I obviously wouldn’t be discussing the issue, or at least not in the same way.

It always brings me up short, though it shouldn’t, when I criticize some horrible phenomenon, like the rapidly spreading number of people with grossly horrible tattoos covering their entire arms or much of their bodies, and with women getting in on the act, and someone says, “But what about a sailor with a little eagle on his triceps? Are you against that too?” As though there were any equivalence between the two phenomena.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 26, 2012 05:59 AM | Send