On tattoos and comparing women to cars

Late last month Lisa Khoury, assistant editor of The Spectrum, an independent student publication of the University of Buffalo, wrote an article urging female students to refrain from getting tattoos. Why? Because you shouldn’t “put a bumper sticker on a Ferrari.” 


Khoury writes: 

Your body literally has the ability to turn heads. Guys drool over us. We hold some serious power in our hands, because – as corny as this sounds – we hold the world’s beauty.

An elegant woman does not vandalize the temple she has been blessed with as her body. She appreciates it. She flaunts it. She’s not happy with it? She goes to the gym. She dresses it up in lavish, fun, trendy clothes, enjoying trips to the mall with her girlfriends. She accentuates her legs with high heels. She gets her nails done. She enjoys the finer things in life, all with the body she was blessed with.

I nearly hurled my computer across the room after reading that. 


If you know me in real life, you know that I don’t have any tattoos so you may be wondering why I’m so upset. Why? Because Khoury supports her argument against tattoos with the age-old sexist stereotype that women were placed on this earth to look pretty and be eye candy. She specifically states that women should not get tattoos, even if the ink has a deeper meaning and symbolizes something greater. Tattoos go against the socially accepted standard of beauty, I suppose, and will cause people to question your basic values, Khoury claims, so instead young women should “Invest your time, money, and effort into a gym membership, or yoga classes, or new clothes, or experimenting with different hairstyles.”