No kind of reality show would surprise us these days. I mean, we’ve pretty much seen them all; many of them are entertaining in a shabby way (Celebrity Rehab) but most of them, to the extent I’ve seen most of them, are wince-inducing. They tend to be so degrading to their participants — who indeed are willing, no doubt — that one has to look away (see Rock of Love). I don’t take a high minded approach to reality TV. It’s voyeurism at its most pronounced, but then so is television in general.
Television and reality shows are not fully voyeuristic, because the stars/participants willingly allow us, indeed want us, to watch. So it’s permissive voyeurism. Nonetheless, we like to watch: we like to watch people grind their way through often humiliating circumstances because, for a moment, it enlarges our self-opinions. Of course, if most of us had the opportunity we’d sign on, and likely be just as goofy and degrading as those we grimace at.
And I certainly don’t take a high-minded view of tattoos, having been tatted quite a few times myself. I wish I could say I got them multiple years ago, way ahead of the hip curve, so to speak. But that’s not the case: lots of people beat me to it, and that makes me a follower, at least in the area of tattoos. But there are lots of us: just about every man or woman I run into or see in public, and age is generally not an issue, has some sort of tattoo. It’s the thing to do. And if some smarmy magazine says that tattoos are “so yesterday,” well, I’d invite the magazine staff to leave its headquarters for a moment or two and hit the streets.
Some are repellent. Others are stunning. Where the distinction between seductive and simply unappealing is most apparent, in my observation, has to do with female tattoos. If you’re a woman and you get it wrong, it can be so very wrong. Men, for reasons I really can’t explain (except perhaps it’s an innate bias) have more latitude when it comes to getting inked. There’s more margin for error.
Maybe my belief will be challenged by what promises to be an interesting (and I don’t mean to use that word in the often neutral, neutered way it is used) new television series from A&E, Tattoo Highway. Here’s the premise: Thomas Pendelton, a famous ink-man, and his wife, Monica, and a business partner, take to the highway in a fully equipped and renovated tour bus — taking the tattoo parlor to the populace, so to speak. Thus the show will have to do with the realities of running, and running across country to anywhere and everywhere, as a mobile tattoo parlor, which will only result, I believe, in genuine human drama.
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