Having a tattoo is a reliable and visible signal of someone’s inability to delay gratification and plan for the future. Among cognitive elites being anti-tattoo is very much an acceptable social prejudice.
The rise of tattoos this century is partially down to big advances in tattoo technology bringing down price. You can buy DIY tattoo guns online for $50 now. There is a social explanation as well which is harder to pin down.
>Among cognitive elites being anti-tattoo is very much an acceptable social prejudice.
if EHC dislikes tattoos, why don't they force anti-t sentiment on the rest of population like they do with anti-racism etc.?
>You can buy DIY tattoo guns online for $50 now.
You are confusing cause and effect. There are DIY guns because the thing is very popular, not vice versa (compare photographic film getting more expensive as demand decreases). The entire thing comes from neolite or even earlier.
(1) Tattoos signal openness, liberalism, bodily autonomy, and sexual looseness. (Good). However, they also signal economic leftism (bad) and mixed signals on IQ (intellectuals rarely opt for them, and they have a lingering "trashy" cachet). So it's a mixed bag.
(2) Tattoos can look good or bad. You can have artworks that are congruent with the subject's body, such as an intricate dragon tattoo on the shoulder, or a random mishmash of scribblings (as with Hope Walz). And then there are the obviously unwell individuals with spiders crawling across their face. The latter will have lower IQs. (In this sense, it's like with cryptocurrencies. On average, people who own crypto are dumber than people who own stocks, according to one recent study. However, I will bet a large sum that Ethereum owners are smarter than stock owners, while Ripple owners are far dumber. Tattoos, like cryptos, are not made equal).
(4) Strong anti-tattooism loads on disgust reflexes, and is strongly bound up with conservative and right-wing attitudes, a demographic known for its low IQ and lack of any actual morality. So another prediction is that militant anti-tattooists are at least as dull or duller than people with tattoos.
These claims are silly. Conservatives are higher in actual morality (mentally ill people are usually very poorly behaved, and criminals vote left-wing). This crude Hanania-ism doesn't work.
Criminals disproportionately vote Far Right. In the US, for MAGA (amongst whom a rap sheet has become a signifier of prestige, as in the rapper community); in Russia, for the LDPR; in Ukraine a few years ago, for Tymoshenko.
You have to stop thinking that MAGA dummies represent actual conservatives. Most conservatives in USA are suburban Christian conservatives with low crime rates.
Well, those MAGA dummies now represent conservatism and will continue to do so for as long as self-described conservatives critical of MAGA vote for MAGA candidates.
MAGAts are the Republicans and their authoritarian tendencies have made it a cult impossible to dissect from modern conservatism, which ironically isn’t conservative at all. Just racist, backwards-looking, regressive policies that have already failed before.
No true Scotsman is a very convenient way to ignore any evidence that contradicts your stance. The conservative movement in the US is very much MAGA now and you don’t have to look too hard to find plenty of tattoos on its adherents. Hell, the most famous Jan 6th photo of the Q Anon shaman makes that extremely obvious.
I think if we polled the vast Black and Hispanic populations of America, we'd notice that while in their own lives they might voice right-wing thoughts (it's a man's job to control the family, race is real, etc.), their actual voting patterns would be leftist in line with the fact they are voting for gibs and tribal alliances.
I'm all for removing the Black and Hispanic population so we can really test the theory if most criminal Whites are Right Wing in their voting patterns.
We can also remove the vote for anyone below a certain competency level (TBD).
Anatoly, during your years in the U.S. you must have had no contact with middle-class, church-going folks, i.e., the people who provide the moral center for the country. They rarely have tattoos.
I had contact with Ukrainian Baptists in Sacramento. One woman I was driving didn't have a seatbelt on. I suggested putting it on. She said, "God will look out for me." Ruminating on that, I replied, "But what if God is looking the other way when we have an accident." She gave a look as if she had genuinely never thought of it like that, and put it on. So as you can see I am very familiar with strong Christian conservatives and their folkways and thought patterns.
You point to familiarity with a fringe Christian group rather than the descendants of the Germanic, Nordic and Celtic settlers of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. Those descendants are the backbone of America.
> I had contact with Ukrainian Baptists in Sacramento. One woman I was driving didn't have a seatbelt on. I suggested putting it on. She said, "God will look out for me."
Or you know, she didn't really care for the off chance of an accident, same way we don't walk around wearing helmets and padded customes all the time. Most people didn't wear one either, until the state made it mandatory, like a good nanny.
In the end, she humored you by putting it on, since your insistence showed her that you were too scared about this.
> So as you can see I am very familiar with strong Christian conservatives and their folkways and thought patterns.
A, yes, Ukranian Baptists, that staple community of strong Christian conservative folkways!
Wow that's something. Perhaps the left needs to get tough on crime and up bail and punishments. Weird how the left is not pushing to punish criminals more given that they are their political opponents. In fact, it seems a left wing goal to eliminate bail all together and release criminals who don't post a dollar. Why is this the case?
In Sweden 'Working in a restaurant' is strongly correlated with 'having a tattoo', and there is significant social pressure to get one if you work in this industry.
The normal ingroup stuff ... 'you should do it, everybody has one, look we will all get the same one with the restaurant logo, when I am hiring I always look for tats which say you are committed/serious/playful/creative' stuff like that.
Depends where the conservatism comes from. If it's an imperfect model of the world and one is resorting to innate overt psychological ingrained preferences due to an intrinsic uncertain state of the world without metacognition then, yes there is an association with low IQ. Anti-tattooism is not co-correlated with low IQ in the East Asian communities. Some associations are tangibly related, some are not. When the natural inclination of a population is intergenerational stability, then such notions of dimensionality reduction on left or right don't work as well.
Didn't criminals in the USSR and Pre-USSR get disproportionate support by Leftists to terrorize the population, and even under the USSR, were a protected class relative to the people they were terrorizing?
I'd hazard in modern Russia the most common criminal elements are ethnic minorities who in fact don't vote in favor of Far-Right Russian Nationalism.
Māori who have not been deracinated can tell you at length about the significance of each line and curve in their moko ("tattoos"), if you have a half a day to hear it.
"Enough said" applies to people who have lost their culture. Like most in North America and the Anglosphere generally. And, yes, many Māori.
"How are openness (to bad ideas) and sexual looseness (promiscuity?) good things?"
I can address only the first point, openness. WE need to tighten its contextual definition to "bad ideas" for this discussion.
I'm of the opinion that "openness"--receptiveness--to *all* ideas is almost always of benefit in the intermediate/long term because it provides the opportunity for the individual to analyze and evaluate the idea for any possible validity, in which case it helps to construct a closer understanding of reality, or in the case of finding the idea to be demonstrably flawed, *knowingly* rejecting it and excluding its influence from the individual's own understanding of reality.
So yep, I agree with you that "bad" ideas should be rejected, but would only add that you have to be open enough to examine them and think them thru before you can be sure that they are, indeed, bad. Even then, some aspects of a generally bad idea might be useful or "good".
I view myself as a centrist on most issues, who is is being forced rightward by the lack of a willingness to compromise on any issue by the woke left.
“I'm of the opinion that "openness"--receptiveness--to *all* ideas is almost always of benefit in the intermediate/long term because it provides the opportunity for the individual to analyze and evaluate the idea for any possible validity, in which case it helps to construct a closer understanding of reality, or in the case of finding the idea to be demonstrably flawed, *knowingly* rejecting it and excluding its influence from the individual's own understanding of reality.”
I disagree. For individuals openness to all ideas is frequently not (usually) a benefit. It is a truism that there are more wrong ways than right ways to do something. The corollary is that most new ideas (like most mutations) are bad or neutral, in which case the individual is not better off by adopting them.
Some are better, and the individual getting them will be better off and likely gain prestige as a result making them more likely to be copied by others and hence the society benefits.
The mistake you are making is that the utility of new ideas can always be evaluated successfully by the potential adopter (what is known as direct bias in cultural acquisition). Smart people will be more successful and this is how progress happens, but they are often wrong.
For example, when I was a teenager back in the 1970’s, I had lots of friends who used recreational drugs. I had no problem with weed or hash, but drew the line on “harder” drugs such as coke, heroin, acid, meth, benzos, etc. One of my friends questioned me on this since I saw myself as open-minded, and I replied that my mind is closed on this. Nearly fifty years later, I can say I made the right choice on most of these. Even though I was wrong on psychedelics, I don’t think I suffered from having never used them, though I am glad that somebody was open to this and some of their therapeutic benefits are being realized. I would also note that plenty of smart people have had drug problems.
“So yep, I agree with you that "bad" ideas should be rejected, but would only add that you have to be open enough to examine them and think them thru before you can be sure that they are, indeed, bad. Even then, some aspects of a generally bad idea might be useful or "good".
But everybody doesn’t need to do it. If the idea is good, that goodness will be demonstrated by those who did adopt it and its frequency will rise in the population.
By your response, and Realist's, I can see that I needed to qualify my statement more.
I'm talking about ideas that are new--untested in any fashion. I think I left this off because the concept of being open to old ideas that have been tested to your satisfaction makes no sense. Why test a previously tested idea? Only if new information comes in.
WRT being more open-minded when young, it's probably the other way around for me. I started college in 1965 and basically took a couple of work breaks to fund the process. After I was 4F in 70 I maybe took 3 years off, working.
I'd say that during that time I was reflexively liberal, as the term was understood then--anti war (actually anti-draft it later became apparent to me), pro-civil rights, pro extending the voting franchise, etc. I was not very open-minded outside of the contemporary liberal orthodoxy of the era. Few of my peers were.
Then life intervened. Much of that orthodoxy made no sense without added vast conspiracies of malevolent conservatives. The "people" were, you know, *righteous*.
Except they weren't. They were self-serving and I was in the position of always funding their demands for services of which I, myself, seldom (if ever) had any direct benefit from.
That's when I started being open to either entirely new ideas, or more likely, ones that were new *to me*--I'd heard of them, but hadn't tested them.
So if you think that the average man is better off without having an exploring, questioning mind, I might agree with you, but for me, nah... I still will look at everything and evaluate it. I wouldn't feel comfortable that I was not overlooking something important to my, or my family's immediate or intermediate future. Long term future is up to them, not me.
"So yep, I agree with you that "bad" ideas should be rejected, but would only add that you have to be open enough to examine them and think them thru before you can be sure that they are, indeed, bad."
How long do you need to 'examine and think through' a facial tattoo or piercing?
Sorry, straight conservative here with the high income and post grad. Yes high disgust as well but I defy you to challenge my IQ and investment account. What grates me most about tattoos, especially on women, is how down market you look. Getting a tattoo is much easier than staying in shape. Another correlate on the chart would be BMI (although imperfect) seems obese women get tattooed more to me.
> (1) Tattoos signal openness, liberalism, bodily autonomy, and sexual looseness. (Good)
Citation needed for this "(Good)"
> Strong anti-tattooism loads on disgust reflexes, and is strongly bound up with conservative and right-wing attitudes, a demographic known for its low IQ and lack of any actual morality
I'm sceptical of most studies involving mental illness because most so called mental disorders are either non-existent (like Multiple Personality Disorder) or not a disorder at all (like Psychopathy/Sociopathy).
Psychiatry is a normative based pseudoscience with virtually zero regard for actual objective biological health. It's based entirely on the moralistic fallacy that anything negative and immoral cannot possibly be just natural.
Any natural human trait that's hated by society gets called a "disorder" in the modern world. A growing number of Leftists call being racist, sexist, homophobic, etc a mental disorder, many Atheists call religious and spiritual beliefs a mental disorder, cognitive elitists call having low IQ a disorder, even basic human emotions like anger are increasingly being called a mental disorder, etc.
It's just another example of the Modern West's denial of Human Nature.
That's one of the few examples of a real disorder, along with Dementia.
The only real mental disorders are those that involve actual biological damage and malfunction of the Brain.
Being angry all the time isn't a disorder, being miserable & depressed isn't a disorder, being violent isn't a disorder, being impulsive isn't a disorder, being horny all the time isn't a disorder, being suicidal isn't a disorder, being selfish or narcissistic isn't a disorder, being paranoid isn't a disorder, etc.
And there's no consistent scientific evidence that being gay or bisexual is a disorder (though being transgender definitely is a mental disorder). A trait being correlated with many different negative life outcomes is not enough evidence for it being a disorder (that's an Appeal to Consequence fallacy).
Something being is "evil" or "destructive" isn't evidence of a disorder.
You provided no concrete scientific evidence that most of things you say are disorders are objectively disorders. You're just projecting your normative and ideological biases onto Nature.
If your entire argument for something being a disorder is "it's immoral", "it's gross" or "it leads to negative consequences" then you have no scientific credibility.
This is the fundamental problem with Psychiatry and Modern Psychology in general: it is Utopian at its very core.
Where's the neurological evidence in any of the research you posted that most of those traits are disorders? Every single one of them operates on the "it leads to negative life outcomes" fallacy.
And btw, just because a trait leads to reduced reproductive success doesn't automatically mean that it's a disorder either. Many of the world religions are anti-sex & anti-procreation (like Traditional Christianity, Gnosticism and most Indian religions), are they disorders too?
Here's a novel evolution-based thought that occurred to me, and I mean it in all due respect and do not portray it as any demonstrated truth. It's more of a "what if", based on the premise that human populations, once they meld into relatively stable social groupings (clans, tribes, etc.) tend to exert a sort of reproductive selection on individuals in that society based on community norms.
I'd use as a quick and ready example forcible rape. In private and between only the participants, there may be disapproval but usually no negative reproductive consequence. In a social group that rejects forcible rape, it may result in either the death of the rapist, his/her banishment from the social group--of which incarceration is a more restrictive form of banishment. Both social actions tend to reduce reproduction of such individuals, and hence reduce any genetic tendencies that drive the prohibited behavior.
Over time, the social group's genetic composition will have less genetic factors that may increase the incidence of forcible rape.
So in a general sense, an individual living in a near-solitary social environment has no social norms to conform to, only his/her own, and hence any behavior that does not have great negative affect on reproductive potential is innocuous.
So the genetic make-up of any society is a result of group norming to whatever degree the norms are enforced in ways that have negative reproductive impact on the sanctioned individual.
Sociopathy & Psychopathy are purely moralistic constructs. There's zero neurological evidence that there's anything wrong with the brains of those type of people. Having zero empathy, shame, guilt, remorse, etc isn't a mental disorder.
However, there's plenty of cognitive evidence that the brains of trans people are genetically damaged
Are you going to tell me that being gay or bisexual is an evolutionary adaptation to population control or something rather than the atrazine causing hormonal changes or the social liberalism enabling psychological plasticity for being inoculated with ideological constructions of reality from high openness. One could argue that there is an advantage to being 1% or 99% in any category, like being midget-side lets you fit underneath tight spaces and live longer or something. And that neuroticism and worrying about the future all the time is good for women. The question is, just how many use cases and ordinal specifications can you perform on each set of distribution of trait variabilities.
Yd25 writes "Are you going to tell me that being gay or bisexual is an evolutionary adaptation to population control or something rather than the atrazine causing hormonal changes"
Are you aware that there is abundant evidence that homosexuality was a thing in the first millennium BCE? It is proscribed in Leviticus (why would that be in there if it did not exist) plus all the examples from classical civilizations.
Atrazine only came into use in the 1950's. It could hardly have been causing homosexuality two millennia before then.
The idea that all traits that Humans and other animals possess is an evolutionary adaptation is a strawman's view of Evolution that even Darwin himself knew was false.
Many, if not most traits found in all organisms are products of rare mutations that just so happened to stick around because they weren't too maladaptive. Also, there's more to biology than just hereditary. There's plenty of examples of traits which are biologically caused but not heritable like being left-handed.
Natural variability does happen due to mutations, but they don't all maximize reproductive fitness at the same combinations do they and they don't all become useful in all types of environments do they? Of course the goal of maximizing reproductive fitness may not be applicable to all humans, or desirable. Neutral-mutation theory is logical insofar that there is a trade-off for stability and novelty. Too much rapid changes means no time for settling, too slow changes means inability to adapt.
Being angry all the time and sensitive to retaliation might not produce the most stable worlds, and may only be great in war-time periods. Maybe it's time to consider the stability of the entire ''system'' of humans rather than just make edge-cases like, there is nothing wrong with having every human be top 1% or bottom 1% in every trait due to mutational differences and we should let genetic drift dictate the natural policy of natural preferences.
I guess there is also a novel theory of the organisms themselves dictating the traits that get enabled while not being heritable to enable a greater degree of flexibility of adaptiveness. If you want to perform the maximum reductionist view, mutations that increase energy cost without the benefit of increasing that entity's existence or potential future existences in some form of self-organizing cohesive form is harmful in the most abstract sense. This does not necessarily have to be their genetic offspring.
So what brain damage is correlated with being trans that makes it a disorder?
There are genetic disorders for which the cause is known, and others for which genetics plays a role that can rise to a disorder if sufficient severe. I have hypertension. My dad had it too, his too, and I suspect his grandfather too. There is a strong genetic component to hypertension. The same thing is true of schizophrenia. In neither case do we have some specific damage or malfunction as a cause. This does not mean they aren't disorders.
Being angry all the time could well be a disorder depending on what the anger is about. Being violent or impulsive can be a disorder depending on how far from the norm it is.
You have to stop this pretentious bullshit attitude. When the matter is disputed, you cannot argue in circles, as you do here repeatedly. Or find somewhere else to argue.
If my comments on this topic come off as pretentious, it's because I know your opinion is wrong, despite you being much smarter than I. My real life experience with the system let me see firsthand that it's all bullshit. Reading your writings on the "mental health" fad is like reading the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas; it's very intelligent and sincere, but the subject matter is nonexistent. To Aquinas, I'd recommend a telescope, and hope he doesn't explain away his observations like Brahe. The analogous experiment in this case is to personally visit a couple psychiatrists, compare their diagnoses, and observe the ridiculously unscientific way they arrive at their conclusions. Or just read about the Rosenhan and similar experiments, to spare oneself a potentially unimaginable amount of pain.
I once witnessed a mental health practitioner tell a room full of patients drugged-up on anti-psychotics that she was going to get their dopamine flowing with a fun activity. The logical retort to this imbecility is to point out that dopamine-blocking is the primary intended effect of anti-psychotics, so if she genuinely wanted to get anyone's "dopamine flowing", she would tell them to quit taking their meds. But it would not be smart to challenge someone with legal authority over you in that way.
P.S.: I don't mean to attack the quality of your outstanding work. But I do insist it would be much more accurate if (for example) articles like the one exploring the pathology factor emphasized that the correlations are between psychiatric labels, not scientifically diagnosed medical conditions. This is an important distinction.
P.P.S. I see you are being horribly smeared in the news. That is a sure sign you are doing great work.
> I'm sceptical of most studies involving mental illness because most so called mental disorders are either non-existent (like Multiple Personality Disorder)
Well, the people diagnosed with mental disorders do in fact have mental disorders. It's just that the attempts to classify them into specific mental disorders, or identify their causes, tend to produce BS.
I have never understood the recent increase in tattoos and piercings. It has always coded as low-class trash behavior to me. I've never had any of it done (including ear piercings, much to my mom's irritation). 45 year old heterosexual female with a bachelor's degree
To a certain degree, I've always viewed the decision to get a visible tattoo, however small, as akin to bungee jumping from a high bridge the first time. You basically step off, and realize that at that point there's no going back, and you must trust your future to your judgement.
That's where the analogy ends because after that the fundamental differences diverge.
I'm of the sort that seeks to eliminate open-ended situations, and so for that reason alone I'm not prepared to get one.
Respectfully, I am so glad I live in Canada after reading this brain rot. I can get behind mental health being semi related to tattoos - but intelligence? There is no credible scientific evidence to suggest that having tattoos correlates with lower intelligence. This misconception likely stems from stereotypes and societal biases rather than factual data. The overall consensus in the academic community is that tattoos are a form of personal expression and do not correlate with cognitive ability. One quick Google search can tell you as much. Strong anti-tattooism is found in conservative attitudes. Which checks out in my opinion, not because of some other comments here, but because this demographic grew up with assumptions that tattoos lead to certain behaviour when there was less data on the subject.
Looking forward to your next post examining the psychometric correlates of hat wearing featuring a handful of n<100 studies of Buckingham Palace guards, Orthodox Jews, Trump supporters, MLB players, and the American Association of Abraham Lincoln Impersonators. The possible signals conveyed by a pictorial representation are essentially unlimited; I somehow doubt that gets flattened into a binary signal when the medium is skin.
Not sure about men, but for younger women a certain style of tattoo (thin, pencil looking outlines of shapes) is very in vogue. Also a form of group signalling (mainly very left, lgbt etc). Generally though I think it’s more of an aesthetic, an extension of clothing/jewellery for these girls. Tbh this whole ‘look’ reads as very conformist to me so I think it will be out of fashion as soon as a new aesthetic becomes dominant. I do suspect many of them will have them removed in 10-20 years.
Would be interesting to see some more recent data looking at your points - culture has changed a lot in the last 30yrs. Definitely growing up the tattoos I saw looked more indicative of ‘traditional’ concerns about a person’s temperament.
(1) Whatever tattoos signify, their rapid de-stigmatization and their popularization among younger cohorts means the signal would become weaker.
(2) There can be a lot of structure among the tattooed population. At least in the past, there were certain subcultures, I'm thinking of some army sub-units, in which getting a tattoo was a rite of passage and a mark of belonging. In those cases, the tattoo would correlate with whatever that army sub-unit is selecting for. This can make getting broad conclusion difficult. When I saw Hope Walz's tattoos I didn't thought about "mental illness" or "crime". Instead something like "over-educated barista" came to mind.
(3) I used to date a female healthcare professional. She once confided to me that she thought for a while about getting a back tattoo running all the way down and that her own tattooed image aroused her (I'm sanitizing the details in order not to be too +18). She decided not to go for it because she wanted to have children and it may make her non-eligible for the epidural. In this case the driver for the tattoo was a mild autophilia, the inhibitor was her future orientation.
As I recall the people with whom I've crossed paths, almost every single one had at least a past drug/alcohol addiction in his/her life. Women with them were keenly unstable, and with more tatoos came greater instability.
A couple of anecdotes suggesting it's peer pressure:
- My brother got his tattoo soon after dating his now wife, who has some tattoos. He didn't finish it, which I believe is because he's disinclined to tattoos by nature (no one else in the extended family has them, and it's a big family), and I suspect he originally got it to make her feel more comfortable.
- When I was doing capoeira at ages 17-19 I was genuinely tempted to grow out my hair and get dreadlocks because it was a heavily black Brazilian subculture and I thought it would be funny and therefore cool. (I'm aware, in retrospect, of how cringe this is.) This was despite my rather massive aversion to body modification of any kind, extending to logos and words on clothing.
Here in NZ everyone under 60 and their dogs seem to have tattoos.
In part this is because of the Polynesian custom of tattooing. However, they also got more popular, especially among women, from the late 1990's when it seems new brighter coloured inks became common (and better tools for producing finer lines?).
Piercings seem to be much rarer. Certainly fewer through eyebrows and such than in the noughties.
None of mine or my wife's extended family or our progeny have tattoos that I am aware of, but then we are somewhat unusual.
Tattoos at least in the Anglophone world and perhaps the West more generally is probably a decent signal for non-conformism. It might not carry over in other cultures.
For example, some of the native tribes in New Zealand have tattoos for cultural reasons. So these people might not exhibit these negative traits.
Also piercing for ears and noses amongst women have been commonplace for centuries.
It's gotten so prevalent that it lost any value as a signal for non-conformity, if it ever had one to begin with. Quite the contrary, it might indicate conformity in members of various sub-cultures, considering the default is not having a tattoo.
You could also view it as a signal of belonging to a non-conforming group. Scaleable based on size/number/thematic content. E.g., a small fraternity tattoo, vs a tongue tattoo. In the former you're just a bit naughty, maybe, and only sometimes, but if the latter, much more committed to marginal non-conformity.
In traditional tattooing cultures, they were associated with rites of passage — that is, conformity — to differentiate the boy from the man. (Menstruation was the rite for girls, but nothing is normal now because 10 year old girls get their periods and young men stay boys into their 30s!)
(My father and all of my uncles and who served in the military had tattoos associated with their branch of service - signifying the transition into manhood? Crazily, the only one of my cousins who entered the military was a girl who joined the Marines and she has no tattoos. The boys got tattoos and grew stupid beards.)
The West have no real rites of passage. Young people flounder and connect to subcultures to differentiate themselves, to leave the nest, to show they are no longer children. (Of course, so many of those subcultures aid them in remaining infantile and bratty.)
Right now, not having a tattoo in America is like having a tattoo was in 1982, back when the likelihood of the tattoo artist being a convicted felon was pretty high.
A great example of the reason you learn in introductory statistics that correlation =/= causation. It's almost like people with tattoos historically have been ostracized by society for expressing themselves, therefore leading to worsening mental health and fewer opportunities in their lives. I'm glad we're finally starting to see the undoing of this and people are starting to feel more free to express themselves.
"It's almost like people with tattoos historically have been ostracized by society for expressing themselves, therefore leading to worsening mental health and fewer opportunities in their lives."
I'd be interested in what someone with facial tattoos and piercings is trying to express.
Having a tattoo is a reliable and visible signal of someone’s inability to delay gratification and plan for the future. Among cognitive elites being anti-tattoo is very much an acceptable social prejudice.
The rise of tattoos this century is partially down to big advances in tattoo technology bringing down price. You can buy DIY tattoo guns online for $50 now. There is a social explanation as well which is harder to pin down.
>Among cognitive elites being anti-tattoo is very much an acceptable social prejudice.
if EHC dislikes tattoos, why don't they force anti-t sentiment on the rest of population like they do with anti-racism etc.?
>You can buy DIY tattoo guns online for $50 now.
You are confusing cause and effect. There are DIY guns because the thing is very popular, not vice versa (compare photographic film getting more expensive as demand decreases). The entire thing comes from neolite or even earlier.
I agree with your comments.
'Tattoo technology' is an excellent example of useless technology—except that it provides a red flag.
Temporary tattoos are also probably a lot more common. Even my kids get them as cute party favors, probably makes them more used to the idea.
There's a big difference between having one tatoo and covering your arms and/or legs with loads of them:
- having one tatoo (at least if you are under 30) might increase your 'hipness rating'
- covering yourself with them is a tragedy which you will almost certainly live to regret. It signals that:
1) you are probably a bit dim
2) you desperately want to get attention but are a loser in that -and probably many other - respects
3) you have no judgement about long-term consequences
4) you have no sense of the aesthetics of physical sex-appeal
Here is an example of someone expressing himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZJVaIkVyr4
(1) Tattoos signal openness, liberalism, bodily autonomy, and sexual looseness. (Good). However, they also signal economic leftism (bad) and mixed signals on IQ (intellectuals rarely opt for them, and they have a lingering "trashy" cachet). So it's a mixed bag.
(2) Tattoos can look good or bad. You can have artworks that are congruent with the subject's body, such as an intricate dragon tattoo on the shoulder, or a random mishmash of scribblings (as with Hope Walz). And then there are the obviously unwell individuals with spiders crawling across their face. The latter will have lower IQs. (In this sense, it's like with cryptocurrencies. On average, people who own crypto are dumber than people who own stocks, according to one recent study. However, I will bet a large sum that Ethereum owners are smarter than stock owners, while Ripple owners are far dumber. Tattoos, like cryptos, are not made equal).
(3) Also, tattoos look better on some races than others. https://x.com/powerfultakes/status/1826785852736893074 That should also some effects.
(4) Strong anti-tattooism loads on disgust reflexes, and is strongly bound up with conservative and right-wing attitudes, a demographic known for its low IQ and lack of any actual morality. So another prediction is that militant anti-tattooists are at least as dull or duller than people with tattoos.
These claims are silly. Conservatives are higher in actual morality (mentally ill people are usually very poorly behaved, and criminals vote left-wing). This crude Hanania-ism doesn't work.
Criminals disproportionately vote Far Right. In the US, for MAGA (amongst whom a rap sheet has become a signifier of prestige, as in the rapper community); in Russia, for the LDPR; in Ukraine a few years ago, for Tymoshenko.
Not really. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886916310996
This is self-report ideology, not voting.
You have to stop thinking that MAGA dummies represent actual conservatives. Most conservatives in USA are suburban Christian conservatives with low crime rates.
Well, those MAGA dummies now represent conservatism and will continue to do so for as long as self-described conservatives critical of MAGA vote for MAGA candidates.
MAGAts are the Republicans and their authoritarian tendencies have made it a cult impossible to dissect from modern conservatism, which ironically isn’t conservative at all. Just racist, backwards-looking, regressive policies that have already failed before.
No true Scotsman is a very convenient way to ignore any evidence that contradicts your stance. The conservative movement in the US is very much MAGA now and you don’t have to look too hard to find plenty of tattoos on its adherents. Hell, the most famous Jan 6th photo of the Q Anon shaman makes that extremely obvious.
Dubya voters aren't the sharpest tools in the shed either.
"Dubya voters aren't the sharpest tools in the shed either."
In the case of Biden/Harris voters, the tool shed is empty.
America's intellectual elites are voting for Harris/Walz.
The only Republican candidate in the 20C whom a reasonable smart person could have even considered voting for without shame was Romney in 2012.
I think if we polled the vast Black and Hispanic populations of America, we'd notice that while in their own lives they might voice right-wing thoughts (it's a man's job to control the family, race is real, etc.), their actual voting patterns would be leftist in line with the fact they are voting for gibs and tribal alliances.
I'm all for removing the Black and Hispanic population so we can really test the theory if most criminal Whites are Right Wing in their voting patterns.
We can also remove the vote for anyone below a certain competency level (TBD).
Sounds like someone is confusing media propaganda for reality.
Anatoly, during your years in the U.S. you must have had no contact with middle-class, church-going folks, i.e., the people who provide the moral center for the country. They rarely have tattoos.
I had contact with Ukrainian Baptists in Sacramento. One woman I was driving didn't have a seatbelt on. I suggested putting it on. She said, "God will look out for me." Ruminating on that, I replied, "But what if God is looking the other way when we have an accident." She gave a look as if she had genuinely never thought of it like that, and put it on. So as you can see I am very familiar with strong Christian conservatives and their folkways and thought patterns.
You point to familiarity with a fringe Christian group rather than the descendants of the Germanic, Nordic and Celtic settlers of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. Those descendants are the backbone of America.
"So as you can see I am very familiar with strong Christian conservatives..." ???
> I had contact with Ukrainian Baptists in Sacramento. One woman I was driving didn't have a seatbelt on. I suggested putting it on. She said, "God will look out for me."
Or you know, she didn't really care for the off chance of an accident, same way we don't walk around wearing helmets and padded customes all the time. Most people didn't wear one either, until the state made it mandatory, like a good nanny.
In the end, she humored you by putting it on, since your insistence showed her that you were too scared about this.
> So as you can see I am very familiar with strong Christian conservatives and their folkways and thought patterns.
A, yes, Ukranian Baptists, that staple community of strong Christian conservative folkways!
Wow that's something. Perhaps the left needs to get tough on crime and up bail and punishments. Weird how the left is not pushing to punish criminals more given that they are their political opponents. In fact, it seems a left wing goal to eliminate bail all together and release criminals who don't post a dollar. Why is this the case?
Deep Web Intel...
In Sweden 'Working in a restaurant' is strongly correlated with 'having a tattoo', and there is significant social pressure to get one if you work in this industry.
interesting. Could you please elaborate what kind of pressure?
The normal ingroup stuff ... 'you should do it, everybody has one, look we will all get the same one with the restaurant logo, when I am hiring I always look for tats which say you are committed/serious/playful/creative' stuff like that.
Depends where the conservatism comes from. If it's an imperfect model of the world and one is resorting to innate overt psychological ingrained preferences due to an intrinsic uncertain state of the world without metacognition then, yes there is an association with low IQ. Anti-tattooism is not co-correlated with low IQ in the East Asian communities. Some associations are tangibly related, some are not. When the natural inclination of a population is intergenerational stability, then such notions of dimensionality reduction on left or right don't work as well.
Didn't criminals in the USSR and Pre-USSR get disproportionate support by Leftists to terrorize the population, and even under the USSR, were a protected class relative to the people they were terrorizing?
I'd hazard in modern Russia the most common criminal elements are ethnic minorities who in fact don't vote in favor of Far-Right Russian Nationalism.
The Maori are big into tattoos...enough said
Not quite enough.
Māori who have not been deracinated can tell you at length about the significance of each line and curve in their moko ("tattoos"), if you have a half a day to hear it.
"Enough said" applies to people who have lost their culture. Like most in North America and the Anglosphere generally. And, yes, many Māori.
The Maori still are an impulsive, low-IQ, highly aggressive race of people who, until recently, were famous for being Cannibal raiders.
This isn't really to knock tattoos, but let's all be real who the Maori are.
Aren’t they just! But try to get the words right, there's a good chap.
Show me a culture without horrors in its past, and I'll show you a culture that left no descendants.
Karlin writes "Tattoos signal openness, liberalism, bodily autonomy, and sexual looseness. (Good)"
How are openness (to bad ideas) and sexual looseness (promiscuity?) good things?
What does bodily autonomy mean besides being old enough (>18) to legally get a body modification?
I note I am not a conservative, neither the standard type nor the pot-smoking or crypto-owning variety (libertarians).
Right: openness to the latest fads is just a species of mindless conformity.
"How are openness (to bad ideas) and sexual looseness (promiscuity?) good things?"
I can address only the first point, openness. WE need to tighten its contextual definition to "bad ideas" for this discussion.
I'm of the opinion that "openness"--receptiveness--to *all* ideas is almost always of benefit in the intermediate/long term because it provides the opportunity for the individual to analyze and evaluate the idea for any possible validity, in which case it helps to construct a closer understanding of reality, or in the case of finding the idea to be demonstrably flawed, *knowingly* rejecting it and excluding its influence from the individual's own understanding of reality.
So yep, I agree with you that "bad" ideas should be rejected, but would only add that you have to be open enough to examine them and think them thru before you can be sure that they are, indeed, bad. Even then, some aspects of a generally bad idea might be useful or "good".
I view myself as a centrist on most issues, who is is being forced rightward by the lack of a willingness to compromise on any issue by the woke left.
Openness predicts partnership dissolution, as they call it, AKA divorce and breaking up. Green is always greener mentality.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pere.12315
Yes. Been there. Done that.
It's what the old Carly Simon song "We Have No Secrets" is about.
“I'm of the opinion that "openness"--receptiveness--to *all* ideas is almost always of benefit in the intermediate/long term because it provides the opportunity for the individual to analyze and evaluate the idea for any possible validity, in which case it helps to construct a closer understanding of reality, or in the case of finding the idea to be demonstrably flawed, *knowingly* rejecting it and excluding its influence from the individual's own understanding of reality.”
I disagree. For individuals openness to all ideas is frequently not (usually) a benefit. It is a truism that there are more wrong ways than right ways to do something. The corollary is that most new ideas (like most mutations) are bad or neutral, in which case the individual is not better off by adopting them.
Some are better, and the individual getting them will be better off and likely gain prestige as a result making them more likely to be copied by others and hence the society benefits.
The mistake you are making is that the utility of new ideas can always be evaluated successfully by the potential adopter (what is known as direct bias in cultural acquisition). Smart people will be more successful and this is how progress happens, but they are often wrong.
For example, when I was a teenager back in the 1970’s, I had lots of friends who used recreational drugs. I had no problem with weed or hash, but drew the line on “harder” drugs such as coke, heroin, acid, meth, benzos, etc. One of my friends questioned me on this since I saw myself as open-minded, and I replied that my mind is closed on this. Nearly fifty years later, I can say I made the right choice on most of these. Even though I was wrong on psychedelics, I don’t think I suffered from having never used them, though I am glad that somebody was open to this and some of their therapeutic benefits are being realized. I would also note that plenty of smart people have had drug problems.
“So yep, I agree with you that "bad" ideas should be rejected, but would only add that you have to be open enough to examine them and think them thru before you can be sure that they are, indeed, bad. Even then, some aspects of a generally bad idea might be useful or "good".
But everybody doesn’t need to do it. If the idea is good, that goodness will be demonstrated by those who did adopt it and its frequency will rise in the population.
By your response, and Realist's, I can see that I needed to qualify my statement more.
I'm talking about ideas that are new--untested in any fashion. I think I left this off because the concept of being open to old ideas that have been tested to your satisfaction makes no sense. Why test a previously tested idea? Only if new information comes in.
WRT being more open-minded when young, it's probably the other way around for me. I started college in 1965 and basically took a couple of work breaks to fund the process. After I was 4F in 70 I maybe took 3 years off, working.
I'd say that during that time I was reflexively liberal, as the term was understood then--anti war (actually anti-draft it later became apparent to me), pro-civil rights, pro extending the voting franchise, etc. I was not very open-minded outside of the contemporary liberal orthodoxy of the era. Few of my peers were.
Then life intervened. Much of that orthodoxy made no sense without added vast conspiracies of malevolent conservatives. The "people" were, you know, *righteous*.
Except they weren't. They were self-serving and I was in the position of always funding their demands for services of which I, myself, seldom (if ever) had any direct benefit from.
That's when I started being open to either entirely new ideas, or more likely, ones that were new *to me*--I'd heard of them, but hadn't tested them.
So if you think that the average man is better off without having an exploring, questioning mind, I might agree with you, but for me, nah... I still will look at everything and evaluate it. I wouldn't feel comfortable that I was not overlooking something important to my, or my family's immediate or intermediate future. Long term future is up to them, not me.
"So yep, I agree with you that "bad" ideas should be rejected, but would only add that you have to be open enough to examine them and think them thru before you can be sure that they are, indeed, bad."
How long do you need to 'examine and think through' a facial tattoo or piercing?
Do you really think I was talking about specific bad ideas, Realist?
You were referring to all bad ideas.
Sorry, straight conservative here with the high income and post grad. Yes high disgust as well but I defy you to challenge my IQ and investment account. What grates me most about tattoos, especially on women, is how down market you look. Getting a tattoo is much easier than staying in shape. Another correlate on the chart would be BMI (although imperfect) seems obese women get tattooed more to me.
> (1) Tattoos signal openness, liberalism, bodily autonomy, and sexual looseness. (Good)
Citation needed for this "(Good)"
> Strong anti-tattooism loads on disgust reflexes, and is strongly bound up with conservative and right-wing attitudes, a demographic known for its low IQ and lack of any actual morality
Ah, this is parody. Got it.
throws large rock at your head
Why is economic leftism (bad)?
How is it a "mixed signal on IQ"? The data presented indicates it's purely a negative signal.
Weak samples, weak data, old studies, and tons of confirmation bias.
This guy's entire substack is riddled with confirmation bias. I wondering if it's just an outlet for his low iq insecurity?
It’s definitely an outlet for some kind of inferiority complex.
I'm sceptical of most studies involving mental illness because most so called mental disorders are either non-existent (like Multiple Personality Disorder) or not a disorder at all (like Psychopathy/Sociopathy).
Psychiatry is a normative based pseudoscience with virtually zero regard for actual objective biological health. It's based entirely on the moralistic fallacy that anything negative and immoral cannot possibly be just natural.
Any natural human trait that's hated by society gets called a "disorder" in the modern world. A growing number of Leftists call being racist, sexist, homophobic, etc a mental disorder, many Atheists call religious and spiritual beliefs a mental disorder, cognitive elitists call having low IQ a disorder, even basic human emotions like anger are increasingly being called a mental disorder, etc.
It's just another example of the Modern West's denial of Human Nature.
Do you think Down Syndrome is a disorder?
That's one of the few examples of a real disorder, along with Dementia.
The only real mental disorders are those that involve actual biological damage and malfunction of the Brain.
Being angry all the time isn't a disorder, being miserable & depressed isn't a disorder, being violent isn't a disorder, being impulsive isn't a disorder, being horny all the time isn't a disorder, being suicidal isn't a disorder, being selfish or narcissistic isn't a disorder, being paranoid isn't a disorder, etc.
And there's no consistent scientific evidence that being gay or bisexual is a disorder (though being transgender definitely is a mental disorder). A trait being correlated with many different negative life outcomes is not enough evidence for it being a disorder (that's an Appeal to Consequence fallacy).
Something being is "evil" or "destructive" isn't evidence of a disorder.
Well, I already covered this Caplan/Szazian-like claims.
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/homosexuality-is-a-mental-illness
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/preferences-can-be-sick-mental-illness
You provided no concrete scientific evidence that most of things you say are disorders are objectively disorders. You're just projecting your normative and ideological biases onto Nature.
If your entire argument for something being a disorder is "it's immoral", "it's gross" or "it leads to negative consequences" then you have no scientific credibility.
This is the fundamental problem with Psychiatry and Modern Psychology in general: it is Utopian at its very core.
Thomas Szaz was mostly correct
A useless reply. My posts are full of evidence, your comments are verbal tilt stuff. Do better.
Where's the neurological evidence in any of the research you posted that most of those traits are disorders? Every single one of them operates on the "it leads to negative life outcomes" fallacy.
And btw, just because a trait leads to reduced reproductive success doesn't automatically mean that it's a disorder either. Many of the world religions are anti-sex & anti-procreation (like Traditional Christianity, Gnosticism and most Indian religions), are they disorders too?
Here's a novel evolution-based thought that occurred to me, and I mean it in all due respect and do not portray it as any demonstrated truth. It's more of a "what if", based on the premise that human populations, once they meld into relatively stable social groupings (clans, tribes, etc.) tend to exert a sort of reproductive selection on individuals in that society based on community norms.
I'd use as a quick and ready example forcible rape. In private and between only the participants, there may be disapproval but usually no negative reproductive consequence. In a social group that rejects forcible rape, it may result in either the death of the rapist, his/her banishment from the social group--of which incarceration is a more restrictive form of banishment. Both social actions tend to reduce reproduction of such individuals, and hence reduce any genetic tendencies that drive the prohibited behavior.
Over time, the social group's genetic composition will have less genetic factors that may increase the incidence of forcible rape.
So in a general sense, an individual living in a near-solitary social environment has no social norms to conform to, only his/her own, and hence any behavior that does not have great negative affect on reproductive potential is innocuous.
So the genetic make-up of any society is a result of group norming to whatever degree the norms are enforced in ways that have negative reproductive impact on the sanctioned individual.
Anyway, this looks possible to me.
What is the concrete scientfic evidence that being transgender is a disorder but being a sociopath isn't?
Sociopathy & Psychopathy are purely moralistic constructs. There's zero neurological evidence that there's anything wrong with the brains of those type of people. Having zero empathy, shame, guilt, remorse, etc isn't a mental disorder.
However, there's plenty of cognitive evidence that the brains of trans people are genetically damaged
Are you going to tell me that being gay or bisexual is an evolutionary adaptation to population control or something rather than the atrazine causing hormonal changes or the social liberalism enabling psychological plasticity for being inoculated with ideological constructions of reality from high openness. One could argue that there is an advantage to being 1% or 99% in any category, like being midget-side lets you fit underneath tight spaces and live longer or something. And that neuroticism and worrying about the future all the time is good for women. The question is, just how many use cases and ordinal specifications can you perform on each set of distribution of trait variabilities.
Yd25 writes "Are you going to tell me that being gay or bisexual is an evolutionary adaptation to population control or something rather than the atrazine causing hormonal changes"
Are you aware that there is abundant evidence that homosexuality was a thing in the first millennium BCE? It is proscribed in Leviticus (why would that be in there if it did not exist) plus all the examples from classical civilizations.
Atrazine only came into use in the 1950's. It could hardly have been causing homosexuality two millennia before then.
The idea that all traits that Humans and other animals possess is an evolutionary adaptation is a strawman's view of Evolution that even Darwin himself knew was false.
Many, if not most traits found in all organisms are products of rare mutations that just so happened to stick around because they weren't too maladaptive. Also, there's more to biology than just hereditary. There's plenty of examples of traits which are biologically caused but not heritable like being left-handed.
Are you refuting your own argument?
Natural variability does happen due to mutations, but they don't all maximize reproductive fitness at the same combinations do they and they don't all become useful in all types of environments do they? Of course the goal of maximizing reproductive fitness may not be applicable to all humans, or desirable. Neutral-mutation theory is logical insofar that there is a trade-off for stability and novelty. Too much rapid changes means no time for settling, too slow changes means inability to adapt.
Being angry all the time and sensitive to retaliation might not produce the most stable worlds, and may only be great in war-time periods. Maybe it's time to consider the stability of the entire ''system'' of humans rather than just make edge-cases like, there is nothing wrong with having every human be top 1% or bottom 1% in every trait due to mutational differences and we should let genetic drift dictate the natural policy of natural preferences.
I guess there is also a novel theory of the organisms themselves dictating the traits that get enabled while not being heritable to enable a greater degree of flexibility of adaptiveness. If you want to perform the maximum reductionist view, mutations that increase energy cost without the benefit of increasing that entity's existence or potential future existences in some form of self-organizing cohesive form is harmful in the most abstract sense. This does not necessarily have to be their genetic offspring.
Being transgender is not a mental disorder, it is a poor choice
So what brain damage is correlated with being trans that makes it a disorder?
There are genetic disorders for which the cause is known, and others for which genetics plays a role that can rise to a disorder if sufficient severe. I have hypertension. My dad had it too, his too, and I suspect his grandfather too. There is a strong genetic component to hypertension. The same thing is true of schizophrenia. In neither case do we have some specific damage or malfunction as a cause. This does not mean they aren't disorders.
Being angry all the time could well be a disorder depending on what the anger is about. Being violent or impulsive can be a disorder depending on how far from the norm it is.
"So what brain damage is correlated with being trans that makes it a disorder?"
I wouldn't classify transsexualism as brain damage but as a genetic disorder.
This isn't a fair comparison at all. Down Syndrome is scientifically diagnosable. "Mental" disorders are not, and such diagnoses are mere opinions.
You have to stop this pretentious bullshit attitude. When the matter is disputed, you cannot argue in circles, as you do here repeatedly. Or find somewhere else to argue.
If my comments on this topic come off as pretentious, it's because I know your opinion is wrong, despite you being much smarter than I. My real life experience with the system let me see firsthand that it's all bullshit. Reading your writings on the "mental health" fad is like reading the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas; it's very intelligent and sincere, but the subject matter is nonexistent. To Aquinas, I'd recommend a telescope, and hope he doesn't explain away his observations like Brahe. The analogous experiment in this case is to personally visit a couple psychiatrists, compare their diagnoses, and observe the ridiculously unscientific way they arrive at their conclusions. Or just read about the Rosenhan and similar experiments, to spare oneself a potentially unimaginable amount of pain.
I once witnessed a mental health practitioner tell a room full of patients drugged-up on anti-psychotics that she was going to get their dopamine flowing with a fun activity. The logical retort to this imbecility is to point out that dopamine-blocking is the primary intended effect of anti-psychotics, so if she genuinely wanted to get anyone's "dopamine flowing", she would tell them to quit taking their meds. But it would not be smart to challenge someone with legal authority over you in that way.
P.S.: I don't mean to attack the quality of your outstanding work. But I do insist it would be much more accurate if (for example) articles like the one exploring the pathology factor emphasized that the correlations are between psychiatric labels, not scientifically diagnosed medical conditions. This is an important distinction.
P.P.S. I see you are being horribly smeared in the news. That is a sure sign you are doing great work.
> I'm sceptical of most studies involving mental illness because most so called mental disorders are either non-existent (like Multiple Personality Disorder)
Well, the people diagnosed with mental disorders do in fact have mental disorders. It's just that the attempts to classify them into specific mental disorders, or identify their causes, tend to produce BS.
I have never understood the recent increase in tattoos and piercings. It has always coded as low-class trash behavior to me. I've never had any of it done (including ear piercings, much to my mom's irritation). 45 year old heterosexual female with a bachelor's degree
To a certain degree, I've always viewed the decision to get a visible tattoo, however small, as akin to bungee jumping from a high bridge the first time. You basically step off, and realize that at that point there's no going back, and you must trust your future to your judgement.
That's where the analogy ends because after that the fundamental differences diverge.
I'm of the sort that seeks to eliminate open-ended situations, and so for that reason alone I'm not prepared to get one.
Respectfully, I am so glad I live in Canada after reading this brain rot. I can get behind mental health being semi related to tattoos - but intelligence? There is no credible scientific evidence to suggest that having tattoos correlates with lower intelligence. This misconception likely stems from stereotypes and societal biases rather than factual data. The overall consensus in the academic community is that tattoos are a form of personal expression and do not correlate with cognitive ability. One quick Google search can tell you as much. Strong anti-tattooism is found in conservative attitudes. Which checks out in my opinion, not because of some other comments here, but because this demographic grew up with assumptions that tattoos lead to certain behaviour when there was less data on the subject.
Looking forward to your next post examining the psychometric correlates of hat wearing featuring a handful of n<100 studies of Buckingham Palace guards, Orthodox Jews, Trump supporters, MLB players, and the American Association of Abraham Lincoln Impersonators. The possible signals conveyed by a pictorial representation are essentially unlimited; I somehow doubt that gets flattened into a binary signal when the medium is skin.
I enjoyed this. Thank you. ( found via X on rob henderson’s feed)
Not sure about men, but for younger women a certain style of tattoo (thin, pencil looking outlines of shapes) is very in vogue. Also a form of group signalling (mainly very left, lgbt etc). Generally though I think it’s more of an aesthetic, an extension of clothing/jewellery for these girls. Tbh this whole ‘look’ reads as very conformist to me so I think it will be out of fashion as soon as a new aesthetic becomes dominant. I do suspect many of them will have them removed in 10-20 years.
Would be interesting to see some more recent data looking at your points - culture has changed a lot in the last 30yrs. Definitely growing up the tattoos I saw looked more indicative of ‘traditional’ concerns about a person’s temperament.
(1) Whatever tattoos signify, their rapid de-stigmatization and their popularization among younger cohorts means the signal would become weaker.
(2) There can be a lot of structure among the tattooed population. At least in the past, there were certain subcultures, I'm thinking of some army sub-units, in which getting a tattoo was a rite of passage and a mark of belonging. In those cases, the tattoo would correlate with whatever that army sub-unit is selecting for. This can make getting broad conclusion difficult. When I saw Hope Walz's tattoos I didn't thought about "mental illness" or "crime". Instead something like "over-educated barista" came to mind.
(3) I used to date a female healthcare professional. She once confided to me that she thought for a while about getting a back tattoo running all the way down and that her own tattooed image aroused her (I'm sanitizing the details in order not to be too +18). She decided not to go for it because she wanted to have children and it may make her non-eligible for the epidural. In this case the driver for the tattoo was a mild autophilia, the inhibitor was her future orientation.
As I recall the people with whom I've crossed paths, almost every single one had at least a past drug/alcohol addiction in his/her life. Women with them were keenly unstable, and with more tatoos came greater instability.
A couple of anecdotes suggesting it's peer pressure:
- My brother got his tattoo soon after dating his now wife, who has some tattoos. He didn't finish it, which I believe is because he's disinclined to tattoos by nature (no one else in the extended family has them, and it's a big family), and I suspect he originally got it to make her feel more comfortable.
- When I was doing capoeira at ages 17-19 I was genuinely tempted to grow out my hair and get dreadlocks because it was a heavily black Brazilian subculture and I thought it would be funny and therefore cool. (I'm aware, in retrospect, of how cringe this is.) This was despite my rather massive aversion to body modification of any kind, extending to logos and words on clothing.
Here in NZ everyone under 60 and their dogs seem to have tattoos.
In part this is because of the Polynesian custom of tattooing. However, they also got more popular, especially among women, from the late 1990's when it seems new brighter coloured inks became common (and better tools for producing finer lines?).
Piercings seem to be much rarer. Certainly fewer through eyebrows and such than in the noughties.
None of mine or my wife's extended family or our progeny have tattoos that I am aware of, but then we are somewhat unusual.
Tattoos at least in the Anglophone world and perhaps the West more generally is probably a decent signal for non-conformism. It might not carry over in other cultures.
For example, some of the native tribes in New Zealand have tattoos for cultural reasons. So these people might not exhibit these negative traits.
Also piercing for ears and noses amongst women have been commonplace for centuries.
It's gotten so prevalent that it lost any value as a signal for non-conformity, if it ever had one to begin with. Quite the contrary, it might indicate conformity in members of various sub-cultures, considering the default is not having a tattoo.
You could also view it as a signal of belonging to a non-conforming group. Scaleable based on size/number/thematic content. E.g., a small fraternity tattoo, vs a tongue tattoo. In the former you're just a bit naughty, maybe, and only sometimes, but if the latter, much more committed to marginal non-conformity.
An attempt to have one's cake and eat it, too.
I think for young women not getting a tattoo is non-conformist these days.
Funny since most of the tattoo people are permanetly living in social media reality
"Tattoos at least in the Anglophone world and perhaps the West more generally is probably a decent signal for non-conformism"
In 1970 maybe. In 2024 it's the greatest signal for conformism.
"...a decent signal for non-conformism." Jumping on the latest fashion is very much a type of conformity.
Hog wash. If anything it’s the opposite.
In traditional tattooing cultures, they were associated with rites of passage — that is, conformity — to differentiate the boy from the man. (Menstruation was the rite for girls, but nothing is normal now because 10 year old girls get their periods and young men stay boys into their 30s!)
(My father and all of my uncles and who served in the military had tattoos associated with their branch of service - signifying the transition into manhood? Crazily, the only one of my cousins who entered the military was a girl who joined the Marines and she has no tattoos. The boys got tattoos and grew stupid beards.)
The West have no real rites of passage. Young people flounder and connect to subcultures to differentiate themselves, to leave the nest, to show they are no longer children. (Of course, so many of those subcultures aid them in remaining infantile and bratty.)
Right now, not having a tattoo in America is like having a tattoo was in 1982, back when the likelihood of the tattoo artist being a convicted felon was pretty high.
I think there is nothing more disturbing than cops with sleeve tattoos.
A great example of the reason you learn in introductory statistics that correlation =/= causation. It's almost like people with tattoos historically have been ostracized by society for expressing themselves, therefore leading to worsening mental health and fewer opportunities in their lives. I'm glad we're finally starting to see the undoing of this and people are starting to feel more free to express themselves.
it was in the past. Now people speaking against tattoos are ostracized.
"It's almost like people with tattoos historically have been ostracized by society for expressing themselves, therefore leading to worsening mental health and fewer opportunities in their lives."
I'd be interested in what someone with facial tattoos and piercings is trying to express.