According to Reuters, the new trend among young women is to tattoo Sen. Mitch McConnell’s now famous words about Sen. Elizabeth Warren—”nevertheless, she persisted”—across their lower backs.
The craze started when a woman in Minneapolis asked her friends to join her in getting the phrase inked above her left cheek. She accidentally made the private invitation into a public event, and now women across the country are giving Mitch McConnell the chance to be forever memorialized on their rear ends.
“Every single women has had a Mitch McConnell or 10 or 20 in her life trying to tell her how to be and what to do,” said Nora McInerny, the self-proclaimed feminist who set the wheels in motion.
Two thousand women eventually said they’d get the tattoo, and some tattoo parlors are booked solid with requests. The Minneapolis location where McInerny got inked is charging $75 per tattoo (but you don’t necessarily have to get the “tramp stamp”).
There are a few problems with the tattoo. One, of course, it’s a trendy item and ink is permanent. If Sen. Elizabeth Warren doesn’t end up being the savior of progressive politics, these women will have a memory of a hopeful yet distant past, rather than a reminder of their inner Native American legislative goddess.
Second, tattooed words tend to run together after a few years, and the photo Reuters chose to accompany its piece shows the phrase inked in the kind of font that will become an unreadable mess around the same time Warren files the paperwork for her 2020 Presidential exploratory committee.
Lastly, regardless of how empowered these women feel by the phrase, it was still uttered by McConnell, which means they’ll have to live with the lasting memory of, perhaps, our strangest looking Federal lawmaker. Years from now, when these ladies explain their ink to their grandchildren, they’ll have to mention the GOP leader, and it probably won’t be a pleasant reminder.
For Mitch McConnell, at least, he can go down in history as making the lower back tattoo cool again, which is an achievement for a man who has dedicated his life to the most boring institution in the world, the US Congress.
