Reflections on the Tattooed Lady

Introduction

Nancy Mace has had an interesting and somewhat conflicted career. For just one example, she was the first woman to graduate from the Citadel, and during her congressional stint she was an active voice in opposing the use of women’s bathrooms there by trans men. In other words, she successfully invaded a male-only space, and then fought hard to preserve a female-only space.

She is a Republican, and a fiscal conservative. She is pro-life after a fashion, but her interest in carving out rape and incest exceptions demonstrates that she doesn’t really understand what the battle is actually over.

Now that her unsuccessful run at becoming the governor of South Carolina is over and done, Nancy Mace was recently seen promoting her new podcast—and in that sleeveless process she revealed some of the tattoos that she had gotten during her time in Congress.

And yes, you guessed it. Those tattoos are the topic for today. Stop squirming, boys and girls.

So that is what we are going to talk about—but in this post I am going to limit myself to just one aspect of the question. If anyone wants to read about what I think on the subject more generally, you can look here, here, here, or here. There is more to be said than what I am going to attempt here in this discussion.

That One Aspect

The one aspect of tattoos that I want to discuss here in this space is aesthetic. Tattoos on women do not adorn. They are not lovely. They do not elevate. They are uglifying, not to mention being low rent. Nancy Mace was an elected representative in Congress, and a gubernatorial candidate for the state of South Carolina, but in this image she looks like a waitress from Waffle House. She is now a tattooed lady instead of what she ought to be, which is a lady. She is an attractive woman, but now she looks like she is a woman having a personal meltdown. She looks like she just showed up at the Domestic Abuse Center.

I’ve gone and ripped it, haven’t I? So I am willing to talk about that also. But that’ll have to wait until the next section. Let’s talk aesthetics first.

Scripture teaches that women ought to adorn themselves.

The apostle Peter says here that women should avoid the adornment of ostentatious display, and rather that they should adorn themselves with a gentle and quiet spirit internally. This is the way that the holy women in ancient times made themselves lovely for their men. The Scriptures take a very dim view of the impulse that some women have to deck themselves out like a circus pony. That is not necessary, Peter argues. Loveliness that comes from the hidden springs of character is a real force.

But there is also an a fortiori argument to be found here. If women should not attempt to hide the absence of gentleness with glitter and glitz, how much more should they not be displaying the absence of gentleness with the gritty?

Paul says much the same thing that Peter does.

Notice again that this is not a prohibition of women adorning themselves. It is a prohibition of trying to do it in a certain way. The command that Paul gives is for women “to adorn.” The command is positive—adorn yourselves, but not in a certain way.

When women adorn themselves like they were angling for an invitation to a seventeenth century party at Versailles, that is an error of addition and multiplication. They do not have the internal beauty, and so they compensate for that lack by decorating and overdecorating the exterior. But when other women are having an internal crisis, and they “adorn” themselves by means of subtraction and division, the results are even sadder.

When a woman is loved and secured by her father, and then by her husband, the result is that she flourishes in loveliness. Love bestows loveliness. When that is lacking for whatever reason, she might fight to hide the deficit by means of bangles that shine, or she might start adding blemishes of her own because she feels blemished.

Mace has said that she got the tattoos during a time of personal turmoil. She has been married twice before, and when she broke up with her third fiance, she turned to the ink. Now the point here is not to pick on Nancy Mace, or to intrude into her private sadness. The point is rather that she has externalized and memorialized that sadness, and then shared it all with the world, as much as to say “and so what do you think of that?”

All I am doing is saying what I think of that.

Do I grant that there are any exceptions to the aesthetic point I am making? Sure. I can think of a couple of exceptions. One has to do with the aesthetic issue directly, and the other has to do with the motive I generalized about above.

Suppose an absolutely gorgeous woman gets a teeny tiny tattoo of a butterfly on her right ankle. I don’t think that the butterfly added to her beauty in any significant way, but per hypothesis she was running a big surplus anyhow. Whatever aesthetic impact there was turned out to be largely insignificant. Okay, but technically she still got a tattoo.

Here’s another exception. Do I think that there are any Christian women out there who get tattoos, not because they feel blemished or damaged, but rather because they had come to think the tattoo was attractive in its own right? Again, sure. It need not be any kind of deep spiritual turbulence going on. But at the same time, I still think it remains an aesthetic mistake. A woman could do this because she believes it is an adornment, while I would continue to believe that it was an adornment fail. We all have this category in principle. We have all seen women out and around in some godforsaken outfit. Her roommates had told her it was “cute” because they didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and so she went forth. She thought it was cute, but it wasn’t.

And this, of course, naturally, takes us into deeper waters. It is not the case that aesthetics is a realm governed by complete relativism. There is such a thing as objective beauty, and there are standards of loveliness, and these standards, like all standards, have to be grounded in Scripture. It is also the case that not everyone is equally equipped to understand and identify what is going on with regard to such standards. It is a vexed subject. But however vexed it is, it is also an inescapable subject. And I believe that Christians should recognize that ours is the age of ugly, and that we fallen a long way when it comes to aesthetics—in painting, in architecture, in music, and in feminine adornment.

The Demand for Silence

Let’s go back to my comment about waitresses at Waffle House, and talk about what is likely to have been some of the reactions to that. What have I got against Waffle House? Nothing, actually. And are you aware, Wilson—I am, actually, perfectly aware—that tattooed waitresses are de rigeur at pretty much any restaurant you choose to go into these days? Some of the tattoos are impressive if you limit yourself to the artistry of the image itself, while a significant number of the tattoos look like they were done by a drunken chimpanzee who had been inadequately trained. But either way, it is my view that the woman is not thereby adorned. Something negative has happened.

Now the outrage that the comments above have quite possibly created is an outrage that is grounded on the fact that I am a man, and a pastor at that, criticizing women. Moreover, I am criticizing women over something that they can now do nothing about, however much they would like to, and however much they regret how much they had to drink that night.

In the old days, if a woman had second thoughts about an outfit, or about a hat, she could always just ditch it, and try to forget the unfortunate comments directed her way at that party. But a tattoo? That is a bit harder to ditch.

I’ll just finish with this observation. I am sure that there are Christian women out there who agree with what I said. I think there are Christian women with tattoos, who wish they hadn’t got them, and who agree with what I said. Then there are Christian women with tattoos who do not agree with my assessment, but they understand my point and are not offended. To all such, I would simply say that we should discuss it further.

But there is another cohort, made up of Christian and non-Christian women both, who have bought into the zeitgeist, the one that says that men as men have absolutely no right to criticize anything that women might say or do? And when a man does it, as I plainly did above, they have the right to respond with unbridled rage.

And to all such, I simply reply . . . what is a woman anyhow?