Recently, one of my readers asked why women nowadays seem to get tattoos more often than men. (This observation is correct.) I’ll answer this question later, but I’d like to first start by exploring why women get tattoos. The following is a series of hypotheses that are based on observations and reflections, and they have a European metropolitan perspective. Things may have turned out differently in your part of the world. That being said, I think the main arguments are correct. The timeline may be a bit different in other Western countries or less metropolitan cities.

Going back in time, just a few decades ago, tattoos were marks of social outcasts. Criminals had them, often acquired in jail. Then there were (criminal) subcultures where tattoos were prominent, such as the biker scene. By getting a tattoo, you showed loyalty to your gang. There is a certain element of pragmatism as well, because it just wouldn’t work to get tattoos of two rival gangs. You join one gang, and you get the symbol of that gang inked on your body. Crime is one of the areas where we are far from achieving gender equality. It’s a pastime of young men. However, there are obviously women in those scenes as well. For instance, biker gangs are involved in the drug trade and prostitution, and women who lack options in life tend to do drugs (in exchange for sex) and whore themselves out. If a gang “owns” some woman, she’ll of course get the gang logo inked on her body too.

Tattoos entered the mainstream via pop music. Slowly but surely, the image of tattoos being marks of societal outcasts faded. Instead, it became increasingly cool among young men, probably starting in the late 70s, to get a tattoo. Still, up until at least the late 1990s, guys normally went to great lengths to only get tattoos that can be easily covered because you would not even get hired for some menial job if you had visible tattoos. In line with the overall degeneracy of society, a tipping point was reached in the mid to late 2000s. More and more men got tattoos and doing so no longer made you some kind of maverick. Instead, tattoos became a fashion statement.

As tattoos became more mainstream, women started to find them more appealing as well. In general, women are much more concerned about the opinion of the herd, while among men, I’d say that at least a solid 10% don’t care much about mainstream approval. If this sounds like the ramblings of a misogynist jackass to you, then think about how many niche websites and YouTube channels there are that are run by men and that attract men. There is just no female equivalent of, for instance, Andrew Anglin or Turd Flinging Monkey. If you want to bring up Lauren Southern, you’re a moron. She had ghost writers and she most certainly would not have started her YouTube channel if there was no money to be made. She just milked a bunch of thirsty betas.

With tattoos getting mainstream appeal, the flood gates opened and women started getting them, too. That is only part of the explanation, however. What you also have to consider is that a lot of mainstream figures started having tattoos: TV, movies, music — no matter where you looked, there were dudes with tattoos. Tattoos still had the thug appeal, which some women like, but now that mainstream media signaled that it is okay to get tattoos, women started to get them as well. Partly, it was certainly due to projection, i.e. just like women get college degrees because they like men with college degrees (as long as those men make a lot of money), so they got tattoos because they got wet looking at pictures of buff dudes with tattoos.

Once women started getting tattoos, another dynamic started kicking in. As I mentioned above, women much more care about what the common herd thinks, or may think, than men. Thus, the more women got tattoos, the more women without tattoos wanted to get them, too. To them, it’s just like fashion. Once enough chicks get a certain fashion items, a lot more of them will want them because they want to fit into the herd. You can even model this mathematically. It’s just like epidemiologists model the spread of infectious diseases or engineers model percolation. At first there are a few, then some more, and suddenly there is an explosion and basically every chick has a tattoo.

Because women are more susceptible to herd behavior, they get tattoos more often than men. It’s just psychology at work. Really, it’s a wonderful example of mass manipulation. Unlike with fads and trends that come and go, however, tattoos are not so easy to get rid of, so women will remind you of their herd mentality with their fresh or faded tattoos for the rest of your life.

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