Although Customizing the Body turned out to be, I am told, a rousing success in the world of university presses, it enjoyed only moderate attention in the larger media universe. Getting in on the ground floor of a popular cultural phenomenon does generate a certain amount of media attention, and I soon found myself on the journalists’ golden Rolodex. In the 1990s I was interviewed for stories in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, Newsweek, Ladies’ Home Journal, Esquire, and a number of smaller publications. I also appeared in special tattoo segments on NBC, the Discovery Channel, TLC, and a variety of local programs. While I sometimes found my conversations with journalists and media figures to be relatively interesting, interviewers frequently asked the same basic questions (“Why does someone get a tattoo?” “Does it hurt?” “What would you tell a parent whose child wants to get a tattoo?”), and dealing with the media soon became rather tiresome. Unfortunately, once one’s name gets attached to a particular “hot” cultural topic a kind of academic “role entrapment” occurs—until the topic cooled I was hounded for comments even long after my active research interest in the issue was over.
Less tiresome were the calls, letters, and, later, e-mails I received from everyday people who had read the book or seen my comments in the media. The most common communication was from people who had finally decided to get a first tattoo after reading Customizing the Body. Some personal tales of initial hesitance and eventual identity transformation were quite touching and reinforced many of the basic ideas in the book.
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