Tattoos In The Post-Modern Era

Tattoos played a major role in gender discrimination as well and incited cultural discourse and anxiety in society. In the Modern Era, in the USA, especially after World War II when women became involved in the home-front jobs, they started to break away from the traditional stereotypical woman image by getting tattoos; this created much anxiety in society, because it was bringing into question the separation between a burly, working man’s and a delicate, housekeeping woman’s disposition. After the sexual revolution in the 60s, “tattoos were… resurrected in the counterculture by women who were rethinking womanhood” (Mifflin 55). The Modern Era was the era of skepticism about occupations and responsibilities, like who should be the breadwinner

During the Post-Modern Era, many young, up-coming artists displayed their art forms on many canvases, skin being one of them. Because there was a rise of tattooing from the earlier era, many more men and women were getting them. This new fashion trend implies that social anxiety against tattoos was partly alleviated. In this Post-Modern Era of skin art, tattoos were being recognized as symbols of empowerment and sexuality. “While men [chose] visible areas for their designs, women [chose] sensual areas”, so the women could keep the tattoos hidden only for the special people in their lives (Mifflin 57). Unfortunately, slowly over time, society turned this thought of women keeping tattoos hidden for their lovers into an objectifying factor against women in this era. A common example of this objectification is the term “tramp stamp”. “The chick spot [became] the tramp stamp and lost its charm” (Mifflin 101). This private spot for tattooing that was once considered sensual in the Modern Era, was now portrayed as trashy in the Post-Modern Era. This shift in cultural discourse is quite subtle; it is a change from concentrating on the purpose of tattoos to concentrating on the worth of a tattoo on a certain part of the body. This shows the change over time of the criticism women faced about their tattoos, now in the Post-Modern Era being called “sexually

Millenniums are the new trend-setters of this era. The younger generations started getting tattoos as a form of self-expression rather than following strict coming-of-age ceremonies as done since the traditional origins of this fashion statement. “Motivations for the acquisition of tattoos and body piercings seem to be diverse …however, most frequently ..[i]s the expression of individuality” (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1743-6109.2012.02791.x/full) . Professor Violetta Skrzypulec-Plinta did a research study concerning the correlations between tattoos and body modification, age, and sexual activity. In this field experiment, she interviewed 250 adults, half of whom had tattoos, about their sexual behavior and found a trend. She found that the median age of people who chose to get tattoos was 23.5 years old, and were highly sexually active. “About 73 percent of people [got] their first tattoo between 18 and 22 years of age, and an estimated 40 percent of Millennials have a tattoo” per Pew Research Center (USA Today). This increase in tattooing in young people mirrors the trend of tattooing in the older people (men and women) during the Post-Modern Era. This shows how tattoos were getting more widely accepted in society, and anxiety over the tattoo’s symbolism was mostly