A recent study came out talking about tattoos and whether or not people perceive others with them as attractive.
I didn’t dive in too far because as Richard Hanania has pointed out, social science just isn’t that good.
Most social science is based on voluntary polls where people are simply giving their opinions, and most people aren’t entirely truthful, even when the study is anonymous and won’t have any affect on their lives whatsoever.
A great example of this is that few if any women will say they want to sleep with bad boy, coke dealers who have access to cool afterparties, but anyone in the Red Pill/Game community knows that this modality of getting girls might be superior to all others, at least in certain contexts. Indeed, if women went for the kinds of guys they say they prefer–nice, kind, respectful, dad-bodded, self-identifying feminists–it’s likely this blog and community wouldn’t exist, nor would we know that being an incel was a thing.
Society is rife with these sorts of examples, and this is to say nothing of the fact that many of our most closely held opinions, the ones we say and think we truly believe in, are often wildly hypocritical and contradictory. Like, IG and Tik-Tok are currently running a profit model that centers, in large part, on allowing something very close to child pornography to drive engagement by allowing underage teens and often pre-teens to post photos and videos of themselves in extraordinarily sexual ways.
But no one seems to care–instead they’re outraged Leonardo DiCaprio only dates women 25 and under.
Do you one better: almost everyone I know agrees that of all social/economic problems our society faces, child poverty is worst–but how much do we hear about that? Again, no one seems to care: we’d rather bitch about narcissistic zoomer girls at the gym or cry about the fact the government is coming for our gas stoves, even though they’re not.
Once you’ve come to this observation, as I have, it makes it really hard to take polls of what people say seriously, because what they say, truly believe, and purport to care about is often different than how they act.
So, here’s the deal on tattoos:
Girls like them (clearly indicated by the fact above that a larger percentage have them–and that’s NOT an opinion–you either have a tattoo or you don’t) because it’s a way of changing one’s appearance, permanently, in a way that the individual thinks is for the better. That leads to this question: why do women think tattoos make them look better?
It’s a matter of projection: girls think it’s attractive when guys have tattoos. The skit is funny, and why? In a very small part because when the chick asks Colin Farrell if he has tattoos, she’s hoping he’ll say yes–it makes him more attractive. Comedy is often a more reliable observer of truth than social science. I can also say from first-hand experience that I get a lot more IOIs from women after getting tattoos than before, because of what it signals (guys with are more attractive to other women).
Anyway, if it’s attractive when guys have tattoos, women reason, it must work the same way in reverse. I theorize that this is often why so many single women in their 20s like and eventually get dogs; yes, there’s a feminine need to care for something small and helpless in lieu of having children, but it’s also a signal–I’m stable, responsible, and ready to care for others. This is what women want in men: a guy who’s stable, responsible, and ready to care for others, which is why anyone advising guys on photos for online dating will say it’s paramount to include one of him with a dog.
The same is true of women seeking wealth as a means of showing how great a romantic partner she is–to her, being in her early 30s, owning her own home, and having her “shit together” is exactly what she’d like to find in a man.
All of this is either untrue or irrelevant in terms of what men actually find attractive. Personally, I don’t care if a girl has tattoos or not, but a lot of guys would prefer women not to have them. Men don’t particularly care if a woman has a dog–I imagine some see it as a minor plus, some as a minor negative. And finally, most men would much rather date a 24 year-old hair dresser, who’s thin, youthful, and attractive, than a 35 year-old woman who’s starting to show her age but nonetheless owns her own home and has her shit together.
So, for men, I’ll tell you what I tell my clients: if you have a tattoo you want to get, go ahead and get it. It’s a net positive. Most chicks like dudes with tattoos (same is true often true of piercings), and it’s not going to hurt you much with chicks who don’t like them, because for them it’s probably like the guys who see the dog as a net negative–still not a deal breaker.
And for women I’d say…the same thing for short term mating. When you’re young and hot, it won’t matter (it’s mostly super old, stuffy guys who have a strong negative reaction–guys 40 and under aren’t going to care much), and once you age out of the dating market it won’t matter then either.
However, for women who want to be as high value as possible for long term mating–who want to get married and have kids–remember that you’re competing for a very small number of guys, some of whom may prefer that the woman he marries doesn’t look like she was a goth stripper in her 20s.
And that, Charlie Brown, is what do on tattoos.
