Thursday 11 September 2014

Tit for Tats

Recent interesting posts on MarginalRevolution about the so-called "body art" known as tattoos have got me thinking about the issue. I find them thoroughly objectionable, but as is said in the new book by Professor Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner, one should put one's moral (or in this case perhaps one's aesthetic) compass out of commission when analysing a phenomenon as a social scientist.




What do tattoos signal? For women, they probably signal some degree of promiscuity. As far as I understand things, in order to get a tattoo, one needs to be touched and those otherwise functioning people who want something to stand out like a scar on their skin normally pay someone to ink them up in this way. In other words, they pay to be touched. Provided there is no discrepancy in price for men and women, this seems to me to indicate that tattooed women are a little bit on the easy side. If they paid to be touched, imagine how much one could touch them, if so inclined, if one did not charge for it. Or, maybe that is just me not seeing the point of touching outside a relationship. This point may be sensitive to the decision of where on one's body to get it.





For men, the promiscuity signal is of weaker value because men are biologically more inclined towards such behaviour anyway (greater downside risk for women than for men, since men don't become infertile for nine months). If I have understood correctly, it hurts to get a permanent mark on one's body, so perhaps tattoos signal that one withstands pain? If so, they make other people less likely to attack, since they will then know that the fight can take a long time before there's any chance of submission.




Historically, tattoos have been more common in prisons and on ships, both of which are male-dominated environments. In such environments, some men exhibit homosexual tendencies. A tattoo which signals a high tolerance for pain (apart from embarrassment...) could then say to potential rape victims that they had better give in. To a potential rapist, they will signal greater resistance as the above paragraph makes clear. I have always found tattoos to signal a bit of "butch"-ness as well, in which case a tattoo turns a man who was previously an acceptable substitute for a woman into a poor substitute.




However, this last point is at odds with the conjecture above that women get tattoos to signal availability. But actually, I conjectured that they signal promiscuity, which is slightly different from availability. Maybe tattooed women are promiscuous and stupid, so they want "it" more but choose inefficacious ways of getting it. Or is my aesthetic compass getting in the way after all? I suppose even a somewhat "butchified" woman will still find it rather easy to find a mate for the short term. Generally women only have to say "yes" rather than make an effort for very short-term relationships. Or maybe tattoos do not signal "butch"-ness after all? I wonder what the relative ratios are between men and women who sport those nasty things.




There is probably a bit of a low-brow association with tattoos. In sports such as football ("soccer", that is, I don't know the American kind) they are very common indeed, and since that sport does not require much in the way of equipment, it may be that lower-class backgrounds are overrepresented in the game. By contrast, I have never seen a golfer or a tennis player with a tattoo and those are considered gentlemen's game (though it may be that their respective associations also have rules prohibiting tattooed persons to play). Perhaps tattoos are had by folks who know their mental faculties are so deficient that higher aspirations are futile, alternatively, by people who are so brilliant that even something so objectionable as a tattoo won't hurt their career prospects?


Tattoos were nowhere before this century as far as I can recall, but now they are not uncommon. I wonder what has caused this trend. If social interactions were enough, why have they not risen and fallen in the past? And why should one permanently mark oneself because of social interactions? Maybe I am missing something, but peer effects do not seem to have such big impacts in other contexts. Perhaps laser removal technology has improved and come down in price, so that tattoos are not in fact quite so permanent anymore? These are strange things to me, possibly because I failed to disable my aesthetic compass.

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