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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3985 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 27, 2023

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No offence, but that just sounds like received aesthetic indoctrination.

My preference against tattoos arises from deeper preferences. I appreciate elegance, simplicity, and the beauty of fully functioning complex systems. There is something spectacularly beautiful about semiconductors, well-crafted clocks, and ant colonies.

Art is less beautiful when it lacks focus. I don't find the Mona Lisa (or really any portrait) very beautiful, but I certainly wouldn't choose to add some random design to her face, no matter how beautiful the design was, simply because then there would be two competing objects of attention. I wouldn't give a beetle a tattoo, paint a design onto a statue, etch a shape into a nice watch, or arrange ants into geometric patterns, because all of those things are already quite beautiful and don't need to be changed.

You could argue that this broader preference not to tattoo beetles etc. is also culturally engrained, but at that point I think it's both a reach and also pretty irrelevant.

Western culture has been historically low on tattoos, probably since Leviticus, which itself likely spawned from local hygienic concerns, like not eating pork.

All of the most tattooed countries are Western. We are the most accepting cultures towards tattoos in the world. You're inventing a just-so story that isn't just inaccurate, it's the exact opposite of the truth. That's not to say Westerners have always been accepting of tattoos--I have no idea what our history has to say--but rather that we are currently the very most accepting of tattoos.

I don't think tattoos always look bad, but they usually do, and the ones that look good IMO detract from the simple beauty of the human form much more than they enhance it.

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