Women are accused of preferring men with Harleys, cigars, and a bad attitude, a.k.a. bad boys, often branded with tattoos and piercings. Maybe it’s true that nice guys finish last, at least when it comes to attracting women. What is it that is so attractive about rebellious men? The danger? Their blatant disregard for rules? Or perhaps it is their risk-taking behaviour? It appears that female preference for tattooed and pierced men (hereon referred to simply as “rebels”) is actually a preference for men with good genes.
Current research at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Anthropology in Wroclaw, Poland, suggests that tattoos and piercings may communicate to potential mates that the bearer possesses good genes. The idea is that only individuals with strong immune systems can afford to put themselves at risk of contracting the infections and diseases associated with tattoos and piercings. Much of an animal’s immunocompetence (the body’s ability to produce an immune response) is genetically determined. Therefore, finding a partner with a strong immune system is valuable, since offspring will inherit your partner’s superior immune response genes.
One possible explanation of the seemingly innate attraction to rebellious humans (especially among females) is the handicap hypothesis. The handicap hypothesis proposed by biologist Amotz Zahavi in 1975 suggests that genetically superior or “high quality” individuals can afford to invest in costly mating signals, while this cost would be too great for an individual of inferior quality to incur. If the handicap hypothesis explains female attraction to rebels, we would expect tattoos and piercings to be more common in high-quality individuals.
Symmetry is thought to be an indicator of healthy development in animals, and previous studies have found that when asked to rate the attractiveness of individuals, people with more symmetrical bodies consistently ranked highest. When the level of body symmetry was measured in 200 rebels and non-rebels, investigators found a significantly higher symmetry amongst rebellious men than in non-rebellious men. Professor Darryl Gwynne, sexual selection and mating systems specialist from the University of Toronto Mississauga, warns that symmetry as a quality proxy is still debatable, and finding that rebellious individuals tend to be more symmetrical suggests that the handicap hypothesis is functioning in human mating practices.
Scientists studying mating systems and sexual selection have long emphasized the importance of signalling in animal mating behaviour. The belief that symmetry is a good indicator of an individual’s quality is rooted in the assumption that “if you come through all of [your] development without losing symmetry, you’re of higher quality […] though the evidence supporting symmetry in non-human animals is sparse and there is much criticism of the research done to date,” says Gwynne. Honest signals are traits that are costly to produce and are thus correlated with an individual’s quality; they are therefore the best traits to use when evaluating members of the opposite sex. This is in contrast to “dishonest signals,” which are susceptible to exploitation. Examples of dishonest signals used in human mating systems are abundant and include high heels, perfume, makeup, hair pieces, and so on.
Whether the investigators in this study have truly identified a human case of the handicap hypothesis is debatable. In order for tattoos and piercings to serve as a signal of a strong immune system, there would need to be a real threat of infection and disease resulting from these body modifications. Though this danger may have been true in the not-so-distant past, it is definitely not the case in modern society, where health regulations remove the threat of virtually all risks associated with tattoos and piercings. One interesting observation the investigators made was that symmetry was only higher in male rebels and not in females. That is, only male rebels appear to be signalling good genes through their rebellious behaviour. This finding is not entirely surprising since females are rarely the sex that is being evaluated in mating systems and therefore they are usually not required to produce elaborate signals to attract males.
However, it does raise the question, why are females partaking in this mate-signalling behaviour of tattoos and piercings? With the dawn of health regulations and increased sanitation, it is possible that women have decided to adopt this mating signal, thus stripping it of its original meaning. Perhaps men will now have to engage in increasingly risky practices in order to honestly signal their quality.
