davidthompson

From the ‘style’ pages of Mic magazine, where the young and left-leaning can find “news to help you rethink the world”:

On election night, like so many, 26-year-old Nicole Narvaez’s feelings “kind of exploded.” “I went to bed in tears and woke up to the final news hysterical,” Narvaez recalled.

Hysterical. Her words.

“I cried on the train to work, at work, after work and many days since. Following the election I decided I wanted and needed to do something for myself that also meant something bigger.” And how she’d do that, she thought, was with a tattoo. “I needed to remind myself that our new president-elect and all the horrible things he has said and represents isn’t a representation of humanity, and to not let it eat me up entirely,” Narvaez said. “I needed something to remind myself of how strong I can be.”

Because the way to keep things in proportion and not be eaten up entirely by an election result is to have your body marked with a permanent reminder of it. And the strength-asserting tattoo chosen by the not-at-all-unstable Ms Narvaez?  

That night, after doing some research online, she walked into a tattoo parlour and got “GRL PWR” on her wrist and the Venus sign commonly associated with feminism on her pointer finger. “The two tattoos work in tandem when my hand is in a fist straight into the air,” Narvaez explained. “They work off one another.”

Tremble, ye patriarchs. This lady means business. Presumably, that fist-and-index-finger combo will be on display quite a lot in the post-election End Times.

The article, by Rachel Lubitz, goes on to inform its readers that Ms Narvaez is “not alone in feeling an urge to get something permanent on her body after the election,” that “feminist messages have been hugely popular,” and that this constitutes a “true insurgence.” Rather than, say, a display of impulse-control issues and possibly future regret. As illustrated, inadvertently, by a young feminist who wished to tell the world about her “belief in women’s rights” via the subtle medium of a large forearm tattoo. Specifically, one featuring “a coat hanger encircled in flowers with the words ‘We deserve better’ written below it.”

Attention, rubes, dupes and suckers. Do you pretend to experience crippling racial guilt in order to appear pious and fit in? Is “white supremacy,” “white privilege” and all that other pretentious angst weighing on your shoulders, harshing your buzz? Do you want to empower, or at least enrich, some “black femme freedom fighters”? Do you require monthly “tasks” - and a monthly bill of $100 – to atone for your pallor and “pay reparations” - to prove that, despite being white, you’re not a terrible person, unlike all those other awful white people? 

Then this is for you. 

Via dicentra, who reminds us that the above is not a work of satire.