We Hunted The Mammoth

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.