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Edited on Thu Jun-24-10 09:23 AM by iverglas
Now, I have to admit up front that I've taken to dying my hair. I've had white temples since I was 21 -- at least, that's when they were first kindly pointed out to me by a friend, who pointed at my head one day while we were standing at a bus stop and said "what's that?!?!" And given that my hair was long long at the time, I'd probably been sprouting white for a while already.
I dabbled with henna for a couple of years not long after that -- and didn't actually realize how red-headed I'd become until a housemate referred to me as "the little red-headed kid" (not that I was little; figure of speech). But that had to stop when the white at the temples widened; henna makes white hair orange. A few years later, my secretary/friend and I were holidaying in Maine, and she talked me into doing my hair with her, with one of those good for several washes varieties. Again, it took a couple of times of doing that before I realized I'd become kind of blonde. My hair is naturally a very golden medium brown (some might actually call it dark blonde); very hard to match with fake colour. I did it a couple more times to tone it back to brownish, and then abandoned the effort as just too much damned work.
But a couple of years ago I committed: with the white hairs interspersed through the rest getting more noticeable, and me looking just older and tireder than I am at all, I went for permanent colouring, and root touch-ups when I get around to it. Still can't really match my real colour, so it's kind of medium brown with a slightly reddish tinge.
Anyhow. As a youth, I felt great disdain for women who dyed their hair, especially bleached blondes. (I'm not talking fogies like me doing it to maintain the illusion of youth -- or really, in my case, because white hair really does not become me at all, and just makes me look blotchy and draggedy down.)
I still do, and the reasons are in part the same, although more articulated. Basically, to be artificially blonde is to sexualize one's persona in an overt and unmistakable way. "Blonde" wraps up all the sexualized stereotypes of women: it references Marilyn Monroe and her predecessors in blonde, and all the bleached stars and starlets since. It signals sexual availability. Like starving to achieve the increasingly emaciated body demanded by the public arbiters of women's worth and desirability, it is a rejection of one's body, one's self, and adoption and internalization of those judgments of women. Women don't, for the most part, dye their hair red or black -- let alone brown -- to raise their score on the scale by which we are judged.
We recently had a bizarre series of sexual assaults and murders committed by a senior military officer. This is peripheral to that story, but one report had a photograph of a victim's 14-yr-old sister. Her hair was bleached blonde. It saddened me. I can understand a 14-yr-old dying her hair pink or orange for fun, or in rebellion, or for some other normal 14-yr-old reason. A 14-yr-old with bleached blonde hair is a sexualized child. And it is so inappropriate, just like 5-yr-old beauty contestants in lipstick and heels, that I wonder what parents are thinking.
Recently I was thinking about this and the other obvious point struck me.
Blonde, as a female ideal, is also a racial ideal. Okay: duh.
Artificial blonde is symbolic of the inappropriate sexualization and imposed standards of attractiveness to which women are subjected.
It is also symbolic of the standard of attractiveness to which people of colour are subjected: a standard that says the peak of perfection is white, and specifically northern European / Anglo-Saxon white.
And I will say that women who are artificially blonde are participating not only in the perpetuation of this female stereotype, and thus in the oppression of other women, but also in the perpetuation of this racial stereotype, and thus in the oppression of people of colour. Blonde (the whitest of white) is attractive and valuable. It stands alone as the height, as measured against both stereotypes, to be aspired to, and can be achieved in 20 minutes by most white women.
People of colour can't even mimic the look without making themselves look ridiculous. Unlike white women who, for the most part, can enhance both their "femininity" and their whiteness by going blonde even if they aren't born that way, women of colour aren't and can never be blonde; if they try, they don't raise their score on either scale, because they just can't pass for blonde even if they are.
Feminists are forever being castigated for being insensitive to the concerns of other oppressed groups. Well, here's our chance to show some solidarity.
Just say no to fake blonde. Give up a little of the status and privilege that we white feminists can so easily achieve at the expense of our sisters of colour. The more we buy into the stereotype and enjoy the benefits we get from adhering to it, the more we participate in devaluing those who can't mold themselves to it.
Oh, and let's see about getting our gay brothers on board too.
... the usual typos fixed ...
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