According to an essay in Stories & Ink by Adam Jolley, the pain experienced while having a tattoo done “activates the body’s natural release of endorphins, the same chemicals responsible for the high experienced by runners.” It can be therapeutic, one might say.
Ask soon-to-be former U.S. Representative and world-class transphobe Nancy Mace (R-SC), and she’ll tell you that is really the truth.
In an article in Politico published earlier this year, Mace said of her being tatted, it was “the pain that I needed to feel.” But even after declaring her tattooed status, Mace kept the skin art covered.
Now, via her YouTube channel, they are there for the whole world to see. She has almost 40,000 subscribers.
Jesus makes an appearance in her body art, as does the opening line from Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which can arguably be called a queer novel.
Mace, who will turn 49 in December, does have her share of potential trauma and pain to process through the discomfort experienced while being tattooed.
She has been twice divorced, claims to have been raped at the age of 16, and was the first woman to graduate from South Carolina’s military college, The Citadel. Brutal student life at that institution was painted for us by one of its most famous graduates, Pat Conroy, in his book, “Lords of Discipline.” She owns a signed copy.
Her father, also a Citadel graduate, was a career military man, a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran and, by her account, an absent father, physically and emotionally. He served as the Commandant of Cadets at the Citadel from 1997 to 2005. His daughter graduated magna cum laude in 1999, and he handed the diploma to his daughter. She, as Conroy’s novel begins, “wears the ring.”
“My father was gone much of the time and paid little attention to me when he was home,” she recounted in the Politico article, adding, “I sometimes wondered if he even loved me.”
She has said that most of the tattoos were done one right after another during a very difficult time in her life, personally and professionally, including the reactions to her using the podium of the U.S. House of Representatives to accuse four men of “the most heinous crimes against women imaginable — rape, non-consenual photos and videos of women and underage girls, and the premeditated, calculated exploitation of innocent women and girls in my district.”
Reactions to the unveiling of the two sleeves of artwork have been both positive and negative.
Regarding the negative reactions, Mace told The Hill, “Everybody just needs to relax…Yes, I have tattoos. I have a few of them. I might have more than a few. And no, they are not a federal emergency. So stop.”
She is not the only tattooed member of Congress. Lauren Boebert has also shown off her body art.
Abigail Nichols, in an article published on The Daily Wire on August 17, draws a line between what Mace and others have done in flaunting their tattoos and what she sees as a pendulum swinging back to the right.
“As the left loses its grip on culture through extreme ideological stances on abortion, LGBTQ issues, and socialism, the pendulum is starting to swing back to the right side. Conservatives are the new rebels…”
Apparently, having tattoos is a part of that new conservative rebel image.
This story is brought to you by Rosedale Health and Wellness and Dudley’s Place.
