Baby, this is no business for a sweet little girl like you

If you know me or have snooped in my tax forms, you know that my parents are generally older than those of most people my age. (My "there was a one-in-three chance I would be born mentally retarded" factoid is one of my favorite mini-personal anecdotes.) If Cathi and I had been born at more conventional times, we would be nearing 40 right now. I'm not at all convinced that having older parents is something that heavily impacted my life, making me wildly different from youthful-parented normies. But there are a definite set of generational characteristics often attributed to Baby Boomers, and I can sometimes see them in my parents, highlighted by our wider-than-usual age gap.

Coming instantly to mind is tattoos. As a slew of comedians have observed, tattoos have become oddly common, considering that at this point they require a heftier load of permanent personal commitment than marriage. While even people my own age are sometimes puzzled by this trend, my parents come from a generation where, as my dad put it, only serious deviants and crusty sailors got tattoos. There was a fragrant stigma that went along with them that still instinctively prompts both my parents to wrinkle their noses at tattoos, even when confronted with the girly ankle flower variety.

Related to this, I think, is the fact that the cultural attitude towards deviance has changed since my parents were growing up. A while ago, one of my psych textbooks made the claim that in the 50s, conformity really was cool. Rebellion really was frowned upon, by practically everyone, not just lieutenant generals and floral-patterned great aunts. I instantly called my dad to verify this. He's always hesitant to make sweeping claims, but he agreed that, when he was a kid, there definitely wasn't the cultural encouragement to be the against-the-grain badass that there is now.

So, I guess, over time, as murderous biker outlaws became portrayed more and more as TV show heroes and less and less as the rapists on after school specials, tattoos gained appeal as the cool, rebellious thing to do and simultaneously lost the stigma. At least its one theory to explain the shift.

And really, I do think it's a shift that needs explaining. In general, I get the impression that practically everything in our culture, since the 40s and 50s, has moved in the direction of speed and immediacy. News periodicals can't stop talking about how saturated our culture has become with the pressure to keep moving. We skip from career to career instead of sticking with one company through retirement. We squat temporarily in crappily built houses instead of investing permanently in a solid homestead. Given this, it would have made more sense if someone had invented the three-year tattoo ("His name will be gone just in time for your second husband!"). This veritable explosion of everlasting skin brands is, in this light, really perplexing.

In the spirit of having Parents of the Old World and Friends of the New, I guess I do fall somewhere in between, opinion-wise. I feel no repulsion (and often like and admire) the tattoos of my friends. But in lieu of a fascist political coup that requires personal barcodes, I have no intention of ever getting one myself.