Over the past few decades, we have seen trends in the body modification industry that come and gone. Remember when Rihanna’s star tattoos on the back of her neck were all the rage? Or when it seemed like every guy was getting tribal tattoos to look like The Rock? And let’s not forget when Miss Fergie got her eyebrow pierced back when she was just the girl in The Black Eyed Peas. Body Modifications very often get tied in with whatever is trendy in fashion, music, and beauty, which means that these trends can be in one minute and so last year the next. But what happens when you have to live with a trend that is much more permanent than a style of jeans or a shade of lipstick? Well just look at what happened to the lower back tattoo or how it is commonly referred to as, the tramp stamp. Believe it or not, the tramp stamp was once a very popular and cool tattoo of choice that many women got in the 1990s and early 2000s. Yet people eventually grew out of the style and deemed it tacky, trashy, even slutty to have a tramp stamp tattoo. And while it is perfectly acceptable to judge someone based on their tramp stamp in our society, you shouldn’t Let me tell you why.
If you think about it, the lower back is actually a really great place to get a tattoo. The square flat shape allows for you to get a large readable image, much like a chest piece but a lot less visible and a lot less painful. It was the first female dominated location to get a tattoo and you can thank women like Christina Aguilera for empowering women to own their own ink and not let the boys run the tattoo game. It is also a great way to highlight a nice bum, who can hate that? A lower back tattoo was the original way for women to get a large and commanding tattoo without having to be labeled as a tattoo person and allowing them to be feminine in a more unconventional way. Yet in 2015, this tattoo is being covered up or removed by women around the world because of the reputation that it has developed. How did this happen? You can thank the media for that one.
The lower back tattoo was something that many women during the 1990s got to feel free, to feel a little naughty, but most of all to feel independent. There were not many tattooed women at this time, thus the lower back tattoo was some was seen as rebellious while still being modest and feminine. Yet the trend began to turn sour when the media started to parody the lower back tattoo, labeling every woman who got this tattoo with a stereotype of promiscuity. In Cheaper by the Dozen 2, the character Anne gets the tattoo as a way to rebel against her strict father and her love interest Charlie cannot contain his desire for her after he spots the ‘scandalous’ ink, falling off of his family’s dock. In How I Met Your Mother, Ted Mosby gets a lower back tattoo after a drunken night with a ‘wild girl’ and the rest of the cast insults him for it. In Wedding Crashers Vince Vaughn’s character says “Tattoo on the lower back. Might as well be a bull’s eye” when he sees an attractive women and he immediately writes her off as a whore for her tattoo. The media has lead us to believe that lower back tattoos are slutty and rebellious, and that we should treat women who have these tattoos like trashy whores.
The real distincition between a tramp stamp and the male equivilent (we all know a guy with a tribal tattoo) is that there really is no male equivilent of the tramp stamp. There isn’t a typically male tattoo that has been slut shamed in our society for the simple reason that the media makes it much easier to shame a woman for being sexual. Guys can get away with being promiscious and are encouraged to be players, and even when we label them as douchebags or manwhores it doesn’t have the same weight as slut shaming a woman. To the media and our society, a man who sleeps around can still be intelligent, powerful, and respected yet a woman doesn’t have the same opportunity of sexual freedom. Thus a man can avoid being slut shamed for a tattoo, but as we know very well a woman, no matter her social standing, intelligence, or capablity as human being, is fair game if she has a lower back tattoo.
But the lower back tattoo isn’t the only body modification that has developed a sexual reputation. Rib tattoos, which many girls these days have gotten, have been criticized and labeled as “skank flanks”. Named after the side of animal betweent the ribs and the hip, having a tattoo in this area not only makes you a slut (hence the skank) but this term has also lowered women to pieces of meat. Rib tattoos grew in popularity with the mainstreamization of websites like tumblr and pintrest, allowing girls to share their small and feminine tattoos online. Like the lower back tattoo, rib tattoos can be done in a very girly way that fits with the curves of a woman and can be hidden extremely easily. Both lower back and rib tattoos tend to have similar traits, they allow for a woman to have a discrete and feminine tattoo without leaving their own comfort zone. Yet for some reason, just like the lower back tattoos, rib tattoos have been losing their good reputations for allowing freedom and as they become more common, we see more and more hate for this body modification. These tattoos just can’t seem to win.
We can also see this trend of slut shaming body modifications beginning to poison the sternum or under boob tattoo. Getting a tattoo on the sternum was once rare for a woman, but you can thank Rihanna for bringing this style to popular culture. Over the past few years, this tattoo has grown rapidly and dominated social media. Girls get this tattoo because it is very flattering, no matter if you have a small cup size or a big one. A sternum tattoo is a way for a girl to feel confident and beautiful about her body because when she has a beautiful tattoo, who cares if her boobs are too big, too small, or uneven. Yet this empowerment hasn’t stopped men from feeling threatened by a woman who owns her own body with a tattoo. “What kind of girl would be comfortable lying down half-naked in public for two hours while some fat dude with a beard jams a sharp needle into her skin? Answer: the kind of girl who takes sharp objecys in her vagina as hobby” says Matt Forney in his article 5 Reasons Why Girls With Tattoos And Piercings Are Broken. And while the opinion Forney may not speak for all the men in the world, there is no difference between calling a girl’s tattoos a slut and calling her a slut. Because these kinds of remarks build up and no woman in this world deserves to be invalidated for being open and free with her own body. We as women need to put a stop to the slut shaming, and that can start with breaking down the negative reputations of these types of tattoos. Everyone, whether man or woman, should feel comfortable getting a tattoo because they think it’s beautiful and we as a society have no right to make assumptions about their character because of it.