People in glass ponytails probably shouldn’t throw stones.
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The story goes sailors would wear gold rings so if they got killed in a foreign port, they’d get a decent burial. But if they were passed out drunk, it’s easy to pull the ring off their finger. So they started attaching rings to their ears.
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According to the Atlas Obscura:
“Pirates didn’t really wear earrings at all—or bandanas,” says Angus Konstam, author of Pirate: The Golden Age. “Both were the invention of the late 19th-century American artist Howard Pyle. When he was asked to depict pirates for children’s books, he based them on drawings he’d made of Spanish peasants and bandits. So, his pirates wore sashes around their waists, headscarves… and earrings.” As Konstam points out, Pyle is often credited with popularizing what is today considered stereotypical pirate dress, and our continued depiction of pirates wearing earrings is likely thanks to his work.
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please tell me they at least wore excessive eyeliner! is everything we know a lie? 
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It’s China. People will regard as repressive only what the CPC instructs them to regard as repressive. There will be a rebound if and only if the CPC demands it.
Fishermen in the Netherlands wore (and sometimes still do) earrings. The idea is that this will be enough to afford a burial. Something like this:
Sailor ≠ pirate 
At least some people that work(ed) on the sea did wear earrings as a burial insurance.
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People who work the sea are statistically the least likely to need land burial if they die young. If someone got sick and died, you can be sure they were thrown over the side in the same way, whether they had an earring or not. Same for those falling overboard.
I’m sure some people held onto jewellery as a makeshift bank, but not truly for funeral costs.
The burial part is a warm and cosy myth. Nice to say as a bit of romantic embroidery, but not much more than that. It’s repeated often as “common knowledge” because it sounds nice, but no one can point to anyone actually paying for a burial with an earring.
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If a fisherman gets sick and dies I’m fairly certain they will just take him home. They don’t go out for longer then a few days and the death of one of the crew seems like a great reason to cut that period even shorter.
That’s a lot different from traversing the ocean from Europe to the Americas.
The story goes these gold earrings are for fashion, superstition (purported health benefits), a safer place to keep your wedding jewelry, ánd identification and some bit of money in case you get knocked overboard and wash up on a shore where no-one knows you, and couldn’t identify you anyway, after a few days bobbing around in water.
In the Netherlands it also seems to have been popular mostly for people on the inland waters, rivers, lakes, etc.
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I agree with you that “The story goes…”
I’m just saying it’s a story. People like jewellery and sometimes make up stories to justify it.
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The people of China are not sheep. They may feel constrained to follow the party line, but this doesn’t mean they believe whatever the government tells them. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more distrust of the government in China than in the United States. It is simply considered wise to very often minimize the expression of this distrust.
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Fishermen in the Netherlands wore (and sometimes still do) earrings.
In fact many European men wore earrings in the Early Modern period, or at least one earring – for similar reasons that we do today, to look good, to show off our wealth… So I’m sure some pirates might have done too.
I just find interesting the way in which our visualization of a pirate appears to have been shaped by the artistic choices of this one guy!
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