Got this job thing going. What do you do when you're salaried and you run out of work to do? You make more, right? Theoretically, anyway. I would have to expand my job description, and it would have to be something of an intermittent function. Kind of irritating.
So, fuckit.
I'll be disseminating this URL to people who might want to keep up on what I'm thinking and how I'm doing, I guess, so I can believe that I'm not typing into a vacuum. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that.
This week's concept is tattoos. My company hires interns as cheap creative labor under the banner of partnership with a local university and providing valuable work experience to the victims of exploitation. They don't seem to mind, but that's interning for you. I'll call all of our interns Asok, because it's somehow a highly appropriate name for interns in a software company. (You can call me Tina)
Asoks 1 and 2 have been here a while, completed their school-mandated exploitation, and are now enjoying the benefits of a part-time job in the suburbs with air conditioning and a nice net connection. Asoks 4 through 6 are actually the teenage kids of permanent employees, and thus probably should not carry the title of Asok. None of them are deeply irritating, however, so I'll be gracious and dub them Asok.
The interesting one, however, is Asok 3. Asok 3 is interesting in a variety of ways, but the one relevant to today's story is his enthusiasm for body modification.
Tattoos.
He's got several, and plans to get more. He hopes to have most of his skin colored, modified, and otherwise inked, when his canvas is permanently painted, he intends to seek out other willing victims to decorate. Have decorated - for all that he's a graphic artist, he doesn't appear to be into coloring people himself.
So what exactly is up with that?
Lots of people get tattoos. It's starting to affect the blood supply, because you can't give blood within a year of having a tattoo done. What once was the province of sailors, bikers, convicts, and exotic tribesmen from exotic places is now a fairly routine event in people's lives. Has been for a while, too, it seems, judging by the number of aging hippies with artwork drooping from aging skin.
Why do people do it? And why do I care?
It's a mixture of fascination and repulsion. Despite the new, high-tech methods of tattoo removal, tattooing remains a lifelong marriage to the product of someone else's artwork. You can cover it up, you can hide it, but it will always be with you, a spot of color daubed on your self-image.
Maybe, people want a sense of permanence in a time where nothing is permanent. Maybe it's Marilyn Manson's influence. Maybe it's because long hair and pierced ears don't scare anyone anymore. Maybe it's because the behavior that can set an individual apart from peers is increasingly dangerous, and youth grow up with a dark awareness of death.
And maybe that is all media-driven bullshit.
I admit, I'm tempted. It's something Nice Girls don't do, something that would shock my mother. And because it would be permanent. If it were temporary, if it weren't painful, it wouldn't be meaningful.
Tattoos are a statement of power and control over a person's body - and by extension, self. If I choose to get a tattoo - or a piercing, or a scarring - I have proven that my body is my own, that I have control. I have placed my mark, willingly chosen.
If, however, I am tattooed as a result of someone else's will, they have made their mark. They have placed a signal, recognised in the deepest part of the human animal mind, that *this* body belongs to them.
This may still not be unwilling; the victim may be undergoing a rite of passage, submerging the self into a whole, earning their place in a selective society. It's a more permanent link to another person than the symbolic tie of a wedding ring, and ironically, more easily and cheaply done. Possession, control, unity - where willingly chosen, these can be part of a satisfying situation for individuals.
Where willingly chosen, of course. Unwilling, it is a deep violation, a message of forced subordination that lasts long after the power behind it is gone. Nazis could have issued dogtags to their victims, but they knew the power game they were playing. They chose to demonstrate their ultimate power of life and death by marking the bodies of their prey.
Permanence, a deep symbolic power - it's attractive, and some might say, addictive. Asok 3 is, perhaps, addicted. The time between tattoos for him has been decreasing rapidly, he views his skin as an artist's palette.
I'm interested. Perhaps fascinated, highly curious.
We shall see...
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Courtney Shiley, cshiley@mit.edu. you can send me mail