When it comes to personal body adornment, I would have to say I am quite conservative. It’s not because I have any problem with anyone else’s choices to go to great lengths to alter their look, I would think it is a combination of apathy, functionality and how I choose to represent myself. When I look at what I’m wearing right now, it’s pretty standard American dress. I’m wearing khaki shorts, a t shirt and flip-flops. I don’t have any piercings and have no visible tattoos. The only tattoo I do have is a simple set of three numbers 2.4, 112 and 26.2 commemorating the completion of my first Ironman Triathlon on my upper right thigh. I suppose I choose to present myself in this way because that’s how I want to be perceived, but also because it’s simple. And I suppose that is how I want to be perceived as, well, simple.
To address how I have changed my personal body adornment over the years, I’d have to go back to the first time I can remember addressing the issue. I made a pact with my best friend in eighth grade that if one of us got anything pierced, the other was obligated to rip it out, because we thought piercings were stupid. It was a dumb agreement entered into by two even dumber thirteen year-olds, but I have stuck to it, mostly because I have never had any desire to pierce anything, but partly because I take a lot of pride in being a man of my word.
In high school and shortly after, I paid a lot of attention to how I looked and the clothes that I wore, but as I got older I decided that that wasn’t where I wanted to spend my time, money, and energy. So like I said, the way I dress is partly out of apathy. Another key factor is that I’ve been with my wife for eight years now. I’m by no means letting myself go, but there’s no need for me to spend a lot of time trying to attract girls anymore. Also, as I get older, I have become more accepting of my roots. I grew up in a small redneck town and I’m okay with that. I Realize that you get judged a lot by how you dress and I want to be perceived as a hard working, down to earth, simple man. I’m a “jeans and a t-shirt guy” and that’s the image I want to portray. I don’t have any visible tattoos, like I said, because I realize that, though it may be silly, I might be judged by them in a professional setting. American culture as a whole is becoming more and more accepting of “alternative” looks, but I still don’t think having gauged ears or a neck tattoo would ever be worth losing a potential job over. I remember remarking to someone about how I thought that people who got facial or neck tattoos were short sighted, because they could never get a professional job. Their response was quite enlightening to me when they said, “people who get tattoos like that don’t ever want that kind of job.” I honestly had never thought of it that way, though it does lessen your options later on in life if you change your mind.
It’s funny when I think about “the values of my peer community.” I have a lot of friends in the service industry, because I worked at bars for a while as well as friends with professional sales and marketing jobs. I also have many friends that have jobs in construction. So “my peer community’s values” are about as diverse as you might imagine. I just had lunch with a high school friend of mine who has “FUN” tattooed on his chest and “burr-itoes” tattooed on his toes, among a multitude of others. I have another friend who is a very successful sales rep for a fortune 500 company, and she has a kanji tattoo between her cleavage, if you hadn’t seen her in a bikini, you would never know. I guess my family is pretty conservative as well. My parents have always had a style that I would classify as a “standard blue collar” look. They don’t have any tattoos that I know of and the only piercings my mother have are one in each ear lobe. My extended family follows suit, though my grandma on my father’s side did get her first tattoo at 80, which I thought was pretty cool.
I think that you made an interesting point about how your own experience of ‘getting pierced’ eventually lead to an appearance of peer pressure and I think that most of the bod y modification decisions we made are based on influences of others. For example, if people are all using tattoos to convey their beliefs in life, even if we personally don’t like tattoos, we are still feeling obligated to use those methods to modify ourselves. Although body modifications use to be considered very individualistic and unique, nowadays, body modifications have become a new thing in the society to be conformed and to be honest, I don’t think anyone should be forced to conform with certain ‘fashions’. Also, body modifications are associated with social statuses just as how you mentioned that you are perceived as a ‘tshirt and jeans guy’ and how tattoos could indicate personal behaviors. I think that it is a good thing that the society is accepting more and more ‘alternative looks’, but alternative looks could not be a forceful thing or a peer pressure.