Daily Mail, 24 May 2004

There was a time when sentimentality meant wearing your heart on your sleeve. Now it’s more likely to be carved into the nape of your neck.

David Beckham has revealed a startling tattoo below his hair line depicting a green cross with wings extending almost from ear to ear. This enigmatic example of neck art has occasioned wonderment and disgust in equal measure.

At the same time, the quiz show host Anne Robinson has come clean about her recent face-lift, which she had done because she didn’t want a ‘face like a road map’. Now, there’s nothing like the boast of yet another celebrity about having her face lifted to cause the faces of everyone else to fall. But surely, something more than mere vanity is at work here.

After all, isn’t it somewhat strange that while people like Anne Robinson spend a fortune having blemishes removed from their physiognomy, people like David Beckham are busy putting fresh ones indelibly on?

The Beckham winged cross has hardly enhanced its owner’s natural beauty. It is, in short, thuggish and repellent. It is also very large, permanent and, since it is so visible on the back of his neck, in your face (so to speak). Even the tattooist expressed concern about using such a prominent location.

So what does its appearance mean? Amateur psychologists speculate it is some kind of tough-guy statement to counter the recent torrid allegations about the state of his marriage.

But this is the ninth tattoo to adorn the Beckham torso. Others sport his wife’s name spelled out in Hindi, his son’s name in inch-high Gothic lettering, his iconic shirt number 7, and a Michelangelo angel on his right arm.

This goes beyond one silly footballer dreaming up new ways to make himelf the centre of attention. For what was once the adornment of choice for sailors or skinheads has now become high fashion — particularly for women, who sport tattoos on their shoulders or in more discreet places.

Such tattoos are considered sexy. But however feminine the design, they display the innate ugliness of any disfigurement. They are not so much body art as designer wounds.

They are akin to the other fashion for using skin as decoration through body piercing. So people sport studs in tongues, diamonds through navels, and barbells, spikes and rings hung with bells and whistles.

Cosmetic surgery, too, is a bodily assault course. Botox injections to smooth out wrinkles employ a poison which, if used long enough, makes the facial muscles atrophy from lack of use. In addition to having their thighs and stomachs sucked out and their breasts pumped up, women are even having their toes shortened so their feet can fit into fashionable shoes. And they queue for collagen injections to plump up their lips, which instead of turning them into sex kittens make them resemble instead the inhabitants of a goldfish bowl.

This Cinderella illusion seems to have turned the beauty salon into a makeover of the macabre straight out of a horror film. Anne Robinson describes a previous treatment she underwent called ‘face lasering’, by inviting us to ‘imagine the M40 and several layers of tired, worn Tarmac being removed’. For heaven’s sake, this was her face, not a three-lane motorway!

So what lies behind this bizarre fashion for self-mutilation? Above all, tattooing and body-piercing turn the anti-social into a fashion statement. In these morally topsy-turvy times, it has become the fashion to celebrate or ape the degraded elements of our culture. Hence the foul language, binge drinking, drug taking and sexual debauchery.

Tattooing was always considered to be associated with thuggery, and indeed many men in prison are tattooed. Now, however, as our society slides deeper into the moral mire we have thug chic — or in the case of tattooed women, thug chicks.

By appropriating a symbol of male savagery and feminising it, tattooed women in particular signal a potent breach of a taboo and therefore — to those turned on by such things — a promise that female decorum is merely a veneer concealing a more primitive instinct.

This is all part of a culture which has made a fetish of challenging the very notion of what is disapproved of or even forbidden. There was a time when the deliberate infliction of harm on oneself or on others was illegal. Extreme notions of freedom of choice, however, then turned the infliction of suffering into a right, provided it was ‘consensual’.

So what was once considered grievous bodily harm has now become the last word in cool. Body mutilation is the decoration of choice for an age which has turned violence into a modish cult, from sado-masochism clubs to the film ‘Fight Club’ and real-life staged battles between rival gangs of football hooligans.

Tattoos expose a terrible hollowness of character. Their owners appear to believe that displaying feelings makes them real. But in a society where actual feelings are becoming increasingly shallow, committed and faithful relationships are disappearing and emotion is giving way to sentimentality, so it is becoming more important to announce that your emotions are permanent, if only in ink.

Tattoos also reflect a distressing inarticulacy and sense of personal insignificance. Those who wear them think they help them stand out as individuals. In fact, since they reduce individuality to crude slogans or cartoon images, they simply point up the owner’s fragile sense of identity.

Above all, tattooing, body piercing and cosmetic surgery all reflect rock-bottom self-esteem. All these procedures mean treating the body with contempt and even hatred in an attempt to deny or evade painful realities.

Face-lifts and other cosmetic surgery are designed to conceal what women have actually become through the effects of aging. They carve out a lie, a fantasy of perfection. They erase experience of life and produce faces which therefore look disturbingly blank and more than a little spooky.

If such surgery denies the progress of the human body, tattoing surely symbolises a denial of the progress of society. For tattooing belongs to ancient cultures where it expressed superstitions, appeased primitive gods or denoted social status.

Beckham thinks his angel tattoos give protection to his wife and children. Such a retreat to primitive ideas fits with the prevailing fashion for scorning the restraints of civilisation. For tattoos are only considered spiritual by people who go in for cults, witchcraft, crystals and other pagan throw-backs which denote what is often smugly referred to as our post-religious age.

In fact, this is an age of spiritual emptiness. The fashion for bodily mutilation is the outward sign of the horrifying increase in those whose sense of themselves is fragile or shattered, very often because of the fragmentation of the family.

It is no surprise that a footballing icon is increasingly disfiguring his splendid physique. Tattooing is a form of wanton damage. One might say that in Beckham’s self-mutilation, the hooliganism of the terraces is expressing itself in the vandalism of the body worshipped by the terraces.

For this is a culture the inner emptiness of which finds expression in both violence and self-mutilation, to retreat from civilised values, deny reality and take refuge in a cosmetic defiance and pretence.

Posted by melanie at May 24, 2004