Sexed Ink

Well I am not quite sure about the overall message of Victoria Pitts’s article, “Reclaiming the Female Body”; some of the sentence structuring was pretty tough to get through. But I think it’s about women using body modification to reject normalized beauty ideals, and to “reclaim their bodies”. However, I think I would have to agree with radical feminists in that tattooing and other forms of body modification are starting to be “equated with more mainstream cosmetic practices that are seen as objectifying” (277). When in Kuwait, our unit would receive many care packages from our families or random folks. We would all take what we wanted and then discard the remaining items and put them on a shelf for anyone to take. Some of these items were magazines and bunch of them were “Ink” related. What these "Ink" issues all had in common is that they weren’t any different from any other magazine: Good looking women in skimpy outfits. They made tattoos and other forms of body modification “sexy”.  What’s even more interesting is that when they show some dudes tattoo, who is def. not a model, it’s a simple picture of the tattoo. Even more mind boggling, is that most of the time, the tattoos on the female models are fake. They are purposely promoting tattoos by making them appealing; no different than when selling any other product. I have included a couple pictures from the magazine Bound by Ink. I have also included a picture of Avril Lavinge’s “fuck” tattoo. Does the tattoo make one think that Avril Lavinge is rejecting normalized beauty ideas? Or reclaiming her body? Or does she and Maxim Magazine make the tattoo sexy, and thus in a sense making Avril Lavinge into a sex object even more than she already is?
Domalski