Why are women expected to only have small nonvisible tattoos?
Personally I don’t see any reason why men and women should be treated differently with regard to tattoos. But I agree with you, there’s often a double standard. It also often comes out in the many, many questions which purely ask whether women with tattoos are still attractive, as if a woman’s only role in life is to be looked at by men. I think that very often the people who believe that ‘small cute’ tattoos are OK on women but larger ones aren’t probably just haven’t given it all that much thought from this angle. They have a sort of vague idea that tattoos are ‘unfeminine’, and that women should therefore only get ‘cute’ tattoos to counteract this, without having really considered the implications of these ideas – the fact that it suggests that a woman’s main function is to be attractive, to appeal to other people, to be non-threatening; that she’s a visual object rather than a human being with a head full of valid, interesting, unique ideas. Which I think is pretty sad, really. In
