It’s impossible to tell if that’s the culprit

December 29, 2024 1:03 PM

To me, blondeness has always felt like both a special power and a strange curse, a fountain of youth and beauty from which I once happily drank in greedy gulps, but which now runs drier each year. In pictures from my early childhood, I sit shrouded by a mess of golden threads wrangled into a butterfly clip or a hair elastic, beaming with my Chiclet teeth, eyes huge and searching and slightly glazed over with an undiagnosed astigmatism. In later photos, from around kindergarten, I am posed uncomfortably in my chair, mouth pursed tight like a scar, tiny metal eyeglasses akimbo, eyes searching desperately now, begging for a future where the pain I was already experiencing as a six-year-old reject would amount to something. I can’t look at many pictures from the years beyond that. from American Blondes by Arielle Gordon [LARB]
posted by chavenet (19 comments total)

This is a strange piece, I'm not sure what to think.
posted by Toddles at 1:09 PM on December 29 [3 favorites]

yeah she kind of starts off saying something (something? Idk what. I too am a blonde who grew up near Bergen County NJ, bespectacled but not Jewish.) but I don't think it really managed to get anywhere coherent. can a hair color really be a blessing and a curse? maybe it's just hair.
posted by supermedusa at 1:27 PM on December 29 [1 favorite]

Nothing is “just” when people use it as a discriminator

'NEVER shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.'
'But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.'
'I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.'

(Yeats)
posted by clew at 1:30 PM on December 29 [9 favorites]

Hair color as a fetish I've always thought was just as "weird" as any other fetish, but hadn't really thought of hair color as an identity, a way to live or as a guide to living. (But I suppose many of us are put into buckets with some feature or other of our appearances, some of which are choices and some of which aren't in our control.)

When I was a kid, saying someone was a "blonde" was to note they had relatively bright yellow hair, maybe honey colored if you were being generous, and it was a relatively rare thing. Now people who have what can only be described as "light brown" hair--or darker--are labeled "blonde" and the term has almost lost its usefulness as a descriptor, which is probably fine.
posted by maxwelton at 1:31 PM on December 29 [2 favorites]

I like this kind of essay the best, where a portrait is painted by creating a mosaic of ridiculous observations.
posted by jabah at 2:32 PM on December 29 [6 favorites]

Marilyn Monroe is reputed to have asserted some prerogative against the will of a movie executive by saying, "The name of the picture is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and I am the blonde."
posted by Lemkin at 2:42 PM on December 29 [2 favorites]

I used to have blonde hair, and I miss it. I guess it is just an aspect of losing part of myself that I grew up with, how I picture myself, and now I seem like less of that self.
posted by NotLost at 3:15 PM on December 29 [5 favorites]

This is a strange piece, I'm not sure what to think.

A blessing, cherish the moment
posted by ginger.beef at 3:25 PM on December 29 [1 favorite]

Haven't read the piece, but I will say that from my observation, there was an extreme focus on blonde-ness in some of the worst movies of the late 70's and early 80's. To that point, I dated a woman back in the day who was a few years older than me and who was more steeped in that cultural moment, and she insisted against all evidence that she was unattractive, explicitly because she was not blonde. It's just really weird what gets in people's heads.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 3:47 PM on December 29 [3 favorites]

There’s a lot of unspoken subtext in this very compact essay that’s probably easy to miss without having relevant similar enough experiences. The definition of the hair color blonde is kind of irrelevant. (Also, most people’s hair color darkens a little into adulthood - there are a lot of golden-haired toddlers who turn into “dirty blonde” or very light brown-haired adults.) The author seems to mostly focus on feeling alienated from her community based on their responses to her having a different physical feature than expected, but that of course interacts with broader American cultural stereotypes of “blondes”, with the misogyny around how women who are privileged in some ways (meeting cultural beauty standards) are often more restricted in other ways so that their total cultural(and other forms of) power remains restricted. In the author’s case, the rejection from her community comes because she can pass as a member of the dominant cultural group due to her hair color, which did indeed gain her some privilege, but also some constraints that wouldn’t have been visible to the other members of her community.

I once attended a student talk about the “sexual capital” of the character Joan on the tv show Mad Men. There’s no doubt Joan had some extra power in certain areas within the show’s office setting due to her perceived sex appeal, but it certainly didn’t translate into the “capital” part of the phrase “sexual capital”, and the men in the show didn’t take her skill or intelligence seriously in part because of her appearance. The character of Peggy, on the other hand, was able to progress a little farther in her career, but her perceived lack of attractiveness was also a significant part of that. Women are told they can be smart or pretty, but not both. That would be too intimidating for sexist (straight, cis) men who still wield much of the economic, political, and cultural power; or for our patriarchal culture in general, which ends up being upheld in various ways by people of all genders. Given the focus in the essay on the author’s perceived Jewishness or lack thereof, it might be tempting to compare to colorism in the Black community, but from my limited knowledge, it sounds like perhaps lighter-skinned Black people just have the limitations of regular racism to deal with that are lessened in some situations due to their relatively lighter skin tone, and don’t face different, balancing stereotypes or restrictions? But there are maybe similar issues of the ways dominant culture divides and limits solidarity among members of an oppressed group based on how well individuals conform to the dominant culture or image?
posted by eviemath at 3:59 PM on December 29 [11 favorites]

Just want to note that a surprising number of then-brunette girls at my 50th high school reunion had become blonde in the interim (I'm guessing 'cause it's an easy 'fix' for gray hair).

[And isn't that a weird, archaic word to hear today: brunette]
posted by Rash at 4:06 PM on December 29 [3 favorites]

I'm a natural brunette although I currently dye my hair red (because it's fun and I have a bad mix of gray -- I don't mind going gray but I just find the current mix to be unattractive to me personally).

However, the summer after I graduated from high school, I bleached my hair. I want to be clear, I was very obviously a bottle blonde. I was also a 115-pound 18-year-old so I need to take that into account.

But the way men reacted to me was different. It wasn't better or worse than it had been before but it was ... different. I think part of it was that I was attracting different men than I did as a brunette. But the energy of these men just felt different to me. Maybe they were less interested in "me" as a person and more "me" as a blonde.

My blonde summer did bleed into my first semester of college. People were confused when I returned from fall break with auburn hair.
posted by edencosmic at 5:38 PM on December 29 [5 favorites]

I spent most of my life dyeing blonde--I've gone redhead for awhile now--and I still think of myself as blonde by default even thought I'm really yet another "dirty blonde" where the best thing about your hair color is that it takes dye really well.

I feel like 95% of the world is brunettes and I don't want to be yet another one blending in with the rest of them. It annoyed me that the crush clearly went for brunettes, because I sure as hell wasn't going to dye my hair to boring to please him, but maybe that was part of the issue :P
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:14 PM on December 29 [1 favorite]

My partner is whitehaired-and-grey and perfect, thanks
posted by ginger.beef at 7:46 PM on December 29 [1 favorite]

Tressie McMillan Cottom is working on a book about about book about beauty standards and blonde as a racial signifier and I can't wait until it's out. She kicked up a storm on TikTok last year that's led to some continuing conversations (Insta) about what "blonde" means. It was immediately what I thought of when reading this piece - an illustration of the insider experience McMillan Cottom is noting as an external observer.
posted by EvaDestruction at 8:09 PM on December 29 [9 favorites]

I don't know if I understand what is going on in that essay, but I do know there is something there.

As a child and teenager, I had auburn-ish hair which grew darker during my 20's. Both my grandmothers went on about my blue eyes and dark hair in a way I understood had some sort of context or meaning that had to do with Jewishness, but I have to this day not figured out what they were talking about.
Then at some point while I was doing my PhD, during the winter break, I had my hair cut and bleached. I wanted to experienced the life of a blonde, and woah, that was an experience. Actually, my hair just wouldn't go blonde, the hairdresser called the end result "strawberry blonde" and also said I resembled a young Mia Farrow. But the effect was there 100%. When I returned to class, even though everyone knew who I was and understood that it was just a hairdo, I was treated as if I was 50% dumber than before. It was insane. I didn't worry much, but took note.
When I went to our traditional big family and friends Christmas event, my own mother couldn't recognize me, most people couldn't, they all assumed I was some bimbo brought in by one of the boys. It was a laugh, but since then I've thought that life really is different for blondes, and that hair color really carries a lot of weight in ones overall appearance.

Now I am grey and I feel fine with it. I do get some warmer highlights in it, so it can appear blond-ish in some lights, but it's a different situation after 60.
posted by mumimor at 8:31 PM on December 29 [1 favorite]

tiny metal eyeglasses akimbo

What does this mean?
posted by biffa at 2:19 AM on December 30 [1 favorite]

Loved this.
Watched The Teaches of Peaches recently. You should, too.
posted by signal at 3:46 AM on December 30 [3 favorites]

I was blonde when I was a little kid. No one made a big deal of it. Soon enough, I settled into medium brown with a little reddishness.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 9:40 AM on December 30 [2 favorites]