Ladies and the Tramp Stamp
Alfred “Freddy” Cattabiani, head of promotions and sales at a brewery, sees these marked women constantly. “That would not be the girl I would marry,” Cattabiani said. “But I’d always date her because I could go home with her. Or at least in the back parking lot.”
Jed “Ash” Cunningham, a club promoter, says “tramp stamps” make him think of “a Long Island Italian chick with fake fingernails.” About six feet tall, Cunningham is tan with a goatee, gray eyes, and shoulder-length, dirty-blonde hair. He looks vaguely homeless. “Once she finds out I’m a rock star”—how he sees himself—“she’ll give it up on the first night,” he said.
Weeks after Lyn Marik got a four-inch-tall fairy tattoo on her back in 2004, the now 22-year-old creative director for a cabinet and stone company in Silicon Valley, Calif. noticed a change in how men approach her. “Guys who see my tattoo will all of a sudden get very slimy,” Marik wrote in an e-mail. “They look like they are thinking gross things and they start talking different like they are now trying to seduce me, [even] when I am sitting at my desk at work!”
Marik’s design is no accident; she knows “fairy” is synonymous with “queer.” “I am an out bisexual and this was a way to keep the courage to stay true to me,” she wrote. However, Marik had no idea that men would assume they were allowed to walk up to her and “caress” her back just because she happens to have a tattoo.
Occasionally, men will warn the women in their lives about the “tramp stamp’s” implied meaning. Joicelyn Dingle, a reporter at In Style, initially wanted a lower back tattoo. Then her ex-boyfriend, a producer on BET’s music countdown show 106th and Park, begged her to reconsider. “He said, ‘Joicelyn, please do not get it – every video girl gets a tattoo right there,” Dingle remembers.
So-called “spank buttons” and “lick me labels” elicit judgment from women as well as men. Twenty-five-year-old Nicola Zema works as a journalist and an editor at The Messenger, a conservative weekly newspaper in Walker, Ala. “In the mall I saw a woman bend over with a big, hideous tattoo,” Zema said. “I thought, ‘Oh, gross.’ Then I remembered that I had one just like it,” a 7-year-old souvenir from high school. Zema keeps her shame-inducing tattoo, a row of five stars across her tailbone, hidden at all times.
Conservative columnist Debbie Schlussel, a guest on television programs ranging from The O’Reilly Factor to The Daily Show, believes women with “tramp stamps” usually live up to the notoriety the name implies. “When I see a woman with one of these, I think cheap, whorish, slutty, not too bright and doesn’t have any kind of post-graduate degree,” Schlussel said. “If you are asking someone to put a needle into your body multiple, multiple times, then you are probably willing to do other things.”
Even fictional females hold their “tramped stamped” counterparts in low esteem. On an episode of 30 Rock this past season, Tina Fey’s character corners her ex-boyfriend and demands, “Who was that bitch who answered your phone eight months ago? So this girl, what’s her lower back tattoo? A Chinese character she thinks means, ‘Peace’ but it really means, ‘I have Chlamydia?’”
