“Look at those hipsters over there. Which one would you want to bang?” This particular comment was exchanged between two ‘gentlemen’ at a party I attended two weekends ago. Taking into account their less than sober state of mind, I brushed it off in the moment yet over the past few weeks it has stuck with me. Not only because it was objectifying but because I was the one being thought of as a sexual object, because my pink hair, body piercings, and tattoos cause me to fall under this fetishized category of potential sex partner.
It isn’t news that young women are objectified on college campuses. Yet it seems like those who receive it on a daily basis, are the individuals who detour from convention. Tattoos, colored hair, and piercings decorate many of today’s young women and it seems as if no female body mod has been free from hearing an objectifying comment about their personal style. “Guys always ask if you’re ‘freaky’ and then proceed to assume what else is pierced… they don’t comment on how nice your face looks but how ‘sexy’ your piercings look,” says Morgan Kadlub, a nineteen-year-old student of the O’Brien’s Aveda Institute. With stretched ears, facial piercings, and rose tattoos along her collarbone; Kadlub isn’t you’re basic looking college female yet she is one of many young females to have experienced crude sexualization because of her look. Men take Kadlub’s piercings and inked skin at first glance and assume that she is sexually promiscuous because of her unique sense of expression.
“I never really have thought of being seen as an object to men until a partner told me that they had a fetish for dreads. Soon after I started hearing this more and more when I asked people if that was the case. I don’t think I was being objectified but I was very concerned with just fulfilling a fantasy. I was scared that was the reason for the relationship,” says Liv Maddison, an eighteen-year-old freshman at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. For some young-women like Maddison, sexual comments aren’t coming from strangers on the street but romantic partners. Many women in the body mod world feel a similar view to Maddison, wondering if their partners are only pursuing them because of a desire to be with an ‘archetype of woman’. That their facial piercings, tattoos, or in this case dreadlocks are more important than personality. Yet maybe it is merely a reflection on the way that our society views women with body modifications. After all, the acceptance of tattoos and piercings is still fairly fresh.
“Even though the body mod culture has come so far, I think there is still something really taboo about it that still clicks with people in the back of their minds that body mods on girls are trashy,” says Kelly Cobbler, a student at the Art Institute of California. Even though our society has come leaps and bounds from believing that only bikers and Satanists had tattoos, that doesn’t wipe away the mental association that only loose women have an excess of body modifications. Just look at the way tattooed women are portrayed in the media. You don’t see professional and academically- successful women with stretched ears or a tattoo sleeve, instead this look is saved for a small sector of performance artists and scantily clad fetish models. Women with tattoos are seen by college aged men as a fetish because that is the way our media likes to portray them and those who fulfill this image are somehow expected to portray the sexual illusion of what a ‘21st century tattooed woman’ is supposed to behave like.
Our society may be evolving to accept the tattoo lifestyle with hit reality shows like Ink Master and Best Ink, but the portrayal of women in this industry will not change until we make it so. Women with tattoos will continue to be seen as an erotic perversion if the only tattoo women in our vision are within the pages of a nude magazine or taking their clothes off at a burlesque show. Young women should not be afraid to express themselves with body modification, concerned that their tattoos or piercings will make our world see them as unprofessional, trivial nymphomaniacs. They should be able to live in a world where their nipple piercings are nobody else’s business but their own and their purple streaked hair has nothing to do with their sexual morality.