Why do humans go to extreme lengths to alter their bodies?
It is certainly not to be different, but perhaps to be the same as their clique. It goes back as far as Viking tooth filing (and Gold Coast shopping malls).
Had the plumber out the other day to look at a dicky post-storm hot water system.
Thanks to ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred, the water heater, exhausted and battered, had surrendered, leaving in its wake a house full of cranky (and ripening) teenagers. Particularly our 16-year-old daughter, fond as she is of 50-minute showers complete with concert-volume music that, loud as it is, doesn’t even remotely compete with her full-throated, wall-bending, crockery-trembling singalongs with Billie Eilish and Coldplay under the (formerly) steamy water.
So Plumber Man arrived. He parked his ladder and pipe-laden ute out on the driveway, and given it was a sticky day – the sun was shining for the first time in weeks – I wondered why he was wearing a polo neck sweater and dark trousers.
Then I greeted him at the front door and realised he was not inappropriately dressed at all, but was the bearer of full leg tattoos, arm sleeves and neck ink up to the jawline. If there were crumbs of pink skin anywhere on this human palette, I didn’t see them.
His entire person was covered in writhing serpents and tentacles and licking flames and demons. Something was crawling up and out of his T-shirt, reaching beyond the neck-hole and strangling him.
At first glance, I hoped he had life insurance.
There were other assorted words and pictures gracing his face.
Just below his left eye, on the upper-ridge of his cheek, sat what looked like the rising sun symbol worn on ANZAC slouch hats. Then again it could have been a sleepy third eye. Then again, it could have been a cryptic prison symbol granting the bearer entry to an exclusive serial killer club.
He could be the Pipe Pulveriser, or the Waterworks Maniac or, save us, the Hotwater Hitman.
“Good afternoon,” he said politely.
A decade ago if I’d seen this illustrated man approaching the house I would have set the hounds loose, called the police and barricaded myself and the family inside until the cavalry arrive.
Today, such body decoration is so totally ho-hum.
In fact, I was recently wandering around a large shopping mall and realised, to my shock, that I was one of the few shoppers, one among thousands, without a tattoo. Me and babies in prams and toddlers on leashes were the only cleanskins in the entire joint. Even then I had to look twice at some of the toddlers. (Did I imagine a Donut King tat on the upper arm of one particularly robust four-year-old?)
Once upon a time there were only two types of tattoos on two types of people. The people were either sailors or ex-jailbirds. And the respective tattoos were of a topless woman dancing the hula, and bluebirds on the wing. There was a third illustration that was common to both of these tattooed species – MUM inside a love heart.
And that was it.
Turns out Mr Plumber was brilliant at his job, resolved our hot water system issues in a flash (though I swear, when he left, his Third Eye winked at me in a blokey, good on you mate sort of way.)
The whole experience got me thinking about what we do to our bodies and the reasoning behind tattooing, piercing, implants, diamond-encrusted teeth and the multitudinous ways we shift, distort, resculpt and pad out or tuck in our bodies.
Plumber Man’s literally readable face, and the bain-marie of shopping centre tattoos (warlocks, cats, chains and calf-sized Betty Boops) brought to mind a recent Swedish archaeological study into the body-altering practices of Vikings (c. 800AD – c. 1000AD).
Experts discovered that one group of male Vikings had deliberately gouged horizontal furrows into their top teeth. Why on earth had they filed their gnashers?
The archaeologists pondered teeth lines and their relationship to “interpersonal communication … verbal … and non-verbal, in the form of gestures and facial expressions, posture and body position in relation to people … to this we add the body as a culturally variable and modifiable entity.”
In short, the chaps with strange dentures may have belonged to a specific subgroup of Vikings, in this case merchants, and the filings were their badge of belonging and thus a form of identification.
Centuries later other remains with tooth modifications found in Sweden and various locations nowhere near port cities or the usual merchant hangouts remain an archaeological conundrum. Why did they do it? Were they part of a warrior elite that wanted to literally demonstrate their tolerance for pain? Were they advertising their courage? Did they want to look terrifying to potential adversaries?
Putting it simply, did they want to stand out? Show off? Feel part of a clique? How much of this body altering had its root cause in people simply wishing to overcome their own self-loathing and anxiety by gaining the strength and uplifting power of a group? Did they want to fit in somewhere by attaching themselves to these wacky teeth-filers?
I wondered if these Vikings were the Goths or the skinheads of their day, outcasts and misfits looking for their tribe.
I wondered, too, with the current prolificity of tattoos across countless acres of Australian skin, if the imperative to join the crowd, now that the crowd was largely awash in ink, was behind it all.
Or if tattooed people thought slapping an image of the Grim Reaper or an oblong, cockeyed, poorly rendered image of their baby child on their hairy thigh or creamy butt might have seemed something radical, anarchic and highly individual when they got it done, but had now been rendered passe because every Tom, Dick and Harriet were all now highly illustrated?
I imagine a 50,000-seat football stadium would not be big enough nowadays to hold every man in Australia who had an image of Ned Kelly – brandishing a shotgun and wearing his tin helmet and long overcoat, along with the words “such is life”, of course – tattooed to his person.
I look at young men and women covered in ink and wonder whether they will all one day share a nursing home, their wrinkled necks shadowed by black and blue globules that once were flowers or Glocks, poetic excerpts from Hallmark cards or a joke they thought was thigh-slapping back in the day, but now, infirmed, staring at the blurred words through weak, ageing eyes, the punchline not only no longer made sense, but left them questioning how these hieroglyphics ended up crawling across their skin in the first place.
All things must pass, as George Harrison so wisely said, and so will the tattoo epidemic, leaving in its wake a stained generation.
That fad may already be on the wane.
Journalist Jason Murphy wrote this in The Guardian last year: “What does kill tattoos is when they stop being cool. If tattoos become the preserve of kids who can afford one, tattoos start to lose their edge. Tattoos are a symbol and the meaning of symbols shifts. That’s semiotics 101.
“There’s going to be an acceleration in that shift in a few years, when the 2010-15 tattoo generation gets old enough to be weapons-grade uncool. Right now, the 18- to 20-year-olds of Australia have parents who missed the tattoo wave. But in five to 10 years a big chunk of kids coming of age will know tattoos as something their parents have.
“You may get a tattoo at age 18 if your 35-year-old idol has one. But if your 47-year-old parent has one? Ugh! No thank you!”
My periodic ethnological field trips to shopping malls have however discovered a new species of human, a phenomenon in body shape-shifting that now seems to be in epidemic proportions. Which means it, too, may already be on the wane.
This is the warrior class – extremely prevalent on the Gold Coast for some reason – of duckbill lips.
Duckbill lips already look curious on a duck, let alone a human being.
But they are among us, these protruding paddles, these lip ledges, these silicon-enhanced clapboards, waddling their way through shopping throngs. Who on earth decided that pumping up human laughing gear was attractive? Who declared that blowing up the mush was a good idea even if your name wasn’t Donald, Daffy or Daisy? Or you actually weren’t a member of small lip-plate wearing tribes in Ethiopia or Chad?
Then again who is anyone to judge?
Not I. My, err, lips are sealed.
(Quack.)
