April 10, 2018

"Caucasians are able to jump around, and it’s not a big deal for them to be blond, a redhead or brunet, whereas those same rules don’t apply to us"

"It would be so empowering to be able to just try anything the way the rest of the world seems to be able to without any problems.... Maybe this is one part of unlocking the standards we’ve been imprisoned by... It may seem like a silly, frivolous act, an act of vanity, but Asians and Asian-Americans have a history of being marginalized and ignored, so whatever the political statement is, maybe by having blond hair, it’s a very simple declaration: 'Here I am. Pay attention to me. See me.'"

Said Greta Lee, an actress, quoted in "Why So Many Asian-American Women Are Bleaching Their Hair Blond" (NYT).

Why is blond hair so important? I googled that and ended up in the obvious place, Wikipedia, which has a really long article on the subject. Excerpt, under the heading "Sexuality":
In contemporary popular culture, blonde women are stereotyped as being more sexually attractive to men than women with other hair colors.... Some women have reported they feel other people expect them to be more fun-loving after having lightened their hair. The American novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler offers an appraisal of the blonde as social criticism in his novel The Long Goodbye (1953):

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo's rapier or Lucrezia's poison vial.

There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn't care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them. And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.

78 comments:

Bay Area Guy said...

Wow. Raymond Chandler - the dude could write.

Paco Wové said...

To paraphrase Drew Carey:

"Oh, you hate your life? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar."

J2 said...

Nina Van Pallandt

Ignorance is Bliss said...

Caucasians are able to jump...

Woody Harrelson begs to differ.

rehajm said...

It's your thing, do what you wanna do, but you just look goofy. Michelle Wie looks goofy...


Those Chandler women sound fun and all but never existed. Don't even try...

rhhardin said...

Blonde hair brings the Asian IQ back down to 100.

Fritz said...

The three traits of blond hair, fair skin and blue eyes emerged separately but almost simultaneously in European populations fairly recently; since the end of the last ice age, say about 6000-10000 years ago. Fair skin is fairly easy to explain using vitamin D and folic acid. Vitamin D is more easily made in fair skin, and folic acid is destroyed by sun on the skin (one of the reasons for the universal prevalence of dark skin in people near the equator and in higher elevations).

Blue eyes are reputedly easier to track by other people, making communication somewhat better, also important an evolutionary pressure.

Blond hair may have partially followed fair skin due to lower melanin production, but that doesn't explain it all because it's quite possible to have very fair skin and very dark hair. It probably has a large component of sexual selection. Men like women with blonde hair and probably vice versa, although I can't speak for women.

Bill Peschel said...

Jordan Peterson summarized this feeling well, that we all want to be judged. Meaning we all want to be noticed. If we're noticed, then ipso facto, we matter. We exist.

Those who fear doing anything about it and so do nothing live lives of quiet desperation.

Some overcompensate and make themselves memorable.

Some dye their hair.

Whatever works.

the 4chan Guy who reads Althouse said...

On 4chan you can see a lot of pictures of Asian chicks with their hair dyed all different colors, it's pretty nice. And it's a pretty good place for them to be seen: a lot of dudes on 4chan have a thing for anime, so they like the Japanese chicks, even if most of the cute anime-looking Japanese chicks aren't posting pictures of themselves spreading their ass cheeks and showing their assholes.

But there are anime cartoons of anime chicks doing that, so that is good, and some of them get into that weird-ass Japanese tentacle shit, which is pretty weird-ass, I think, but a lot of people like it I guess, so who am I to say.

So I was reading around on the Internet, and I cam across this:

"Anime Hair Colors: Do They Carry Any Significant Meaning In Japanese Culture?"

And it has, like, the following:

"Keep in mind that anime follows a complex visual language, where seemingly innocuous elements carry deeper meaning. And hair color is among the first and foremost, especially when dealing with female characters.

Meaning, in most cases, the color of an anime character’s hair does not reflect some natural hair color or a racial stereotype – instead, it is supposed to be a hint towards their personality and their role in the plot...

Yellow hair: The most widespread meaning is simply “someone special”. This holds especially true for shoujo (for girls) manga/anime titles, where you can pretty safely bet that the most important female lead will be blonde...

Blue hair: ...typically signifies a quiet, soft-spoken, intellectual, sometimes even introverted character – albeit often one with a surprisingly strong will. In addition, such characters tend to get portrayed as refined, tradition-oriented and feminine, quite often even as examples of the Yamato Nadeshiko ideal.

Red hair: …strongly suggests a tomboyish, inconsiderate, loud, often headstrong, “leader” archetype. This character will often charge ahead and/or speak her mind without holding back. In the extreme case, this behavior will go all the way to the point of acting rash or even stupid...

Pink hair: Originally, this color was rare, and reserved for a select few childlike characters. But then… the moe phenomenon happened. And made this color the industry standard for dozens of “cutesy-moe-female-leads”. Today pink hair is pretty much everywhere… yet some of the attributes have carried over. Even today, pink characters still tend to be not very bright, somewhat innocent, naive – and often idealistic to the point of being silly..."

And I think this is pretty true, at least for the shit I see on 4chan. And now that I think about it, a lot of the cartoon anime chicks spreading their ass cheeks and showing their assholes have pink hair, so it's not just hot, but it has meaning too and shit. I guess I like smart shit about dumb things, I don't know, maybe it's just me.

I post my shit here.

Fernandinande said...

Asian-Americans have a history of being marginalized

+1 for creativity!

and ignored,

Like when a fancy "news"paper prints your nonsense about your hair.

so whatever the political statement is, maybe by having blond hair, it’s a very simple declaration: "We want to look like you because you're better than us pitiful marginalized people."

I heard about some other people who dyed their hair all green 'n' shit, after which they were marginalized for some mysterious reason.

Wince said...

And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.

Now I know where the writers of "Police Squad" got that repetitious use of hard-boiled noir simile that makes Frank Drebbin such a funny charater.

Virgil Hilts said...

In the book "Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters" (great fun; not sure what % of it's valid, but some of it is) some evol. psych.s theorized that anything signifying youth in a woman had evolutionary advantages since women lie about their age and you don't want to shack up with a 27 year old who may be dead from old age in 5 years. If you saw a woman with big erect firm boobs, she was probably young; a cute woman with small boobs? - she could be in her last 10 years of life. Similarly blond hair tends to fade to dark as people get older and so if a woman is still very blond she is probably young and worth having kids with. If she's blond with big erect firm boobs, then she's the perfect mate.

Bob Boyd said...

"If she's blond with big erect firm boobs, then she's the perfect mate."

Unless she's a hunchback.

wild chicken said...

I'm proud to say I never did the headache thing. It's such a cliche.

RichardJohnson said...

I am reminded of my visits with an old classmate. Her natural color was auburn to red. When I saw her 10 years ago, she had a full mane of gray-black hair. She reminded me of Sophia Loren. (She got her reddish hair from her northern Italian mother.) When I last saw her several years ago, she had pink strands in her hair. Oh well.

Virgil Hilts said...

A friend commented in my youth that many true blonde women have very average faces which do not age well (on average) relative to their brunette counterparts. I always thought this generalization was true, but it may be that the blonde hair just mistakes us into thinking that a very average looking is more attractive than she really is. On the face thing - what blonde male actors have aged well? And why are there so few blonde male actors, and look what happened to Robert Redford's face.

Fernandinande said...

Bill Peschel said...
Jordan Peterson summarized this feeling well,


LOL

that we all want to be judged. Meaning we all want to be noticed.

I woulda thunk that "judge" and "notice" were two different actions and that you'd have to be noticed before you could be judged - I'm glad the guru du jour cleared that up.

If we're noticed, then ipso facto, we matter. We exist.

Boy, that's a relief!

That's probably why criminals wear those orange suits: so a judge will notice them and judge them and then they'll know they exist.

Are the Asian chicks in Asia dying their hair yellow? Cuz that'd really get them noticed and judged, unlike in the US where yellow hair is common and doesn't stand out and having yellow hair might even be a way of blending in.

Heartless Aztec said...

And then there's the Althousian blonde with an intellect so rapier sharp you want to take up fencing to protect youself. Makes you wonder if she's really a blonde...

the 4chan Guy who reads Althouse said...

There was a movie with Natalie Portman where she was a stripper with a blue wig. But she really didn't get naked, even though she was a stripper in the movie, so the movie wasn't very good. Because if she isn't getting naked then why did you bother to make her a stripper, it doesn't make sense. Like, I wasn't expecting her to be spreading her ass cheeks and showing her asshole, but there weren't even any naked tits, okay?

But she did look kinda anime, now that I think about it. And the guys on 4chan love her, even the ones that say they hate the Jews. Because she was in 'Star Wars', and she was also in that film with the bad-ass French hit-man, and she was pretty hot in that, even though she was, like, twelve. I mean, Hollywood, you're making the twelve-year-old girl sing Madonna's 'Like a Virgin' and being all hot and shit? Like, I read 4chan, but even then I still see that as kinda wrong.

But Natalie Portman has those big eyes, and the little mouth, so she is kinda anime, which is cool. She's also supposed to be pretty smart, so she's kinda Japanese in that way, too. No offense to Japanese people: being smart is cool, no need to get uptight about it.

I post my shit here.

Etienne said...

I think looking at a woman in terms of her sexual attraction is deplorable.

See, I'm learning the new language.

dbp said...

I am surprised that the NYT left out Dichen Lachman in their Asians going blonde piece.

True, she is only half Asian, but as you can see from the image search, she looks very Asian when she has dark hair and looks more like an exotic Eastern European as a blonde.

Gahrie said...

since the end of the last ice age, say about 6000-10000 years ago.

The ice age did not end 6,00-10,000 years ago. the ice age is still active. 12,000 - 10,000 years ago the Earth began to warm, and we entered an interglacial period of warming called the Holocene, which is still active. One day the Holocene will end and the ice will return.

Dust Bunny Queen said...

But but but.....what about cultural appropriation??.

White chicks are excoriated and even beaten for braiding their hair because Blacks and American Indians claim it is THEIR culture. Nevermind that there are 40,000 year old carvings from the ice ages of women in Europe in braided hair. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that it is just a good way to keep your air tidy.

Since Asian women....I mean from really Asia and not the Middle East.
Asia like China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam are never blonds, unless they are albinos......Why isn't it cultural appropriation to take on characteristics of European women?

Does the cultural appropriation stick only swing one direction. Beating up on white people. Duh !! Of course! It is only whites who get the stick.

J2 said...

4Chan That movie is "Closer" with Jude Law and Julia Roberts and that guy whose name is spelled a lot differently than it's pronounced.

Ann Althouse said...

"Caucasians are able to jump..."

No, it's "Caucasians are able to jump around..."

We do it very well in Wisconsin.

William said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Bushman of the Kohlrabi said...

I've heard the theory that Virgil mentioned above about blondness being a marker for youth. Seems to make a certain amount of sense to me. However, I think it is mostly a figment of the female mind.

Speaking for myself, I've always been an equal opportunity admirer of women. Blonde, brunette, red, it's all good. I even think Asian chicks with black hair are pretty hot.

Ann Althouse said...

"Makes you wonder if she's really a blonde..."

Althouse was a natural redhead, but it's too hard to get from white back to red and the blond is much easier. I've considered going to the white, but the blond is what I've had for a long time, and I tend to keep things the same and not change. I couldn't stop the red from going white though, and when it was in transition, it just stopped looking red and seemed very dull, and that was a challenge to my self-image because I'd always thought my unusual hair color was my best feature and it went from best to nothing.

William said...

I don't know what the precise dynamics are that make blonde women more attractive, but they exist. I suppose the dynamics are evolutionary but hair color no longer is. A woman's hair is more artisanal than artificial. Truly natural hair is probably stringy or clotted with tangles. It takes some ability and some taste to make it attractive. . Dyed blonde, pixie cuts, luxuriant manes. It's all good as gold and a woman's crowning achievement when done right.

Nancy said...

Oh a redheaded woman makes a choochoo jump its track
Oh a redheaded woman, she can make it jump right back.
We'll, she's just Nature's child,
She's got something that drives men wild,
Oh a redheaded woman's gonna take you whether you're white, yaller, or black!
(Sung by black character Crown, in "Porgy and Bess")

MadisonMan said...

I'd always thought my unusual hair color was my best feature and it went from best to nothing.

For me it was the thick curls I had. Then my hair thinned a bit. Suddenly the excellent head of hair was just Meh.

Rick said...

I noticed long ago blondes are on average less attractive. I attribute this to women of marginal looks grasping at this straw and dying their hair.

Naturally many blondes are attractive - they just have a larger percentage of disappointments

gilbar said...

"Althouse was a natural redhead, but it's too hard to get from white back to red and the blond is much easier"

Prof, i wondered about that; I assumed that Henna would stain anything red, but it sounds like you've tried different things?

I've known several women whose Flaming Red Hair turned down through red to brown to white. I always thought that they should be staining their hair back red with Henna.

n.n said...

Lower color contrast, reduces perception of surface imperfections.

chickelit said...

Prizing the most common hair phenotype (dark) isn’t very selective, is it?

Mating is all about selectivity, duh!

n.n said...

This is an actual, real, unadulterated example of white, not majority (a.k.a. "White"), privilege.

Heartless Aztec said...

@Althouse: I knew you were a redhead. But I was doing my Chandler writing impersonation...

Fernandinande said...

"Why So Many Asian-American Women Are Bleaching Their Hair Blond" (NYT).

"So many" turns out to be not very many at all.

Google image search "asian women"; keep scrolling and scrolling until finally there's a blonde Asian women ... and it's the picture for this NYT fake news article.

halojones-fan said...

If "Long Goodbye" were a person it would be old enough to retire. Why are people still citing it as an exemplar of contemporary Western thought?

Michael said...

I thought it was evolutionary. Blondes don't stay blonde much past 30. In the era before Clairol and Maidenform, blonde hair and perky breasts were proof that a woman was young and fecund. Probably more pop-Darwinism.

YoungHegelian said...

She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late

What? There's no Hindemith piece that uses bass viols, much less six of them. Hindemith was a pioneering scholar in the recovery of Early Music, and did write for at least one archaic instrument, the viola d'amore, but not bass viol that I know of.

Okay, I'll stop being pedant now. But just for a little while....

Robert Cook said...

Feh. Blonde hair is the least appealing to me. I grew up in sunny Florida, where everybody seems to be a sun-bleached blonde, so it has never seemed distinctive or interesting to me.

YoungHegelian said...

@RC,

Blonde hair is the least appealing to me. I grew up in sunny Florida, where everybody seems to be a sun-bleached blonde,

Same here, except I grew up in northern Alabama, where the default setting was "dirty" blond hair.

I Have Misplaced My Pants said...

I couldn't stop the red from going white though, and when it was in transition, it just stopped looking red and seemed very dull, and that was a challenge to my self-image because I'd always thought my unusual hair color was my best feature and it went from best to nothing.

I have an older friend whose hair, when young, was flaming red, and now it's white with one patch of red up front framing her face. It's completely natural and looks magnificent. I love red -> white hair and hope that's in the cards for the one of my daughters who has bright red hair. Probably not, though, as both my sister and mother's matching natural gorgeous red hair has faded into a nondescript brownish on one and grayish blond on the other.

I know what you mean about losing your best feature. It's unnerving. I've always felt my hair was mine, as it's a nice bright blond with natural highlights, and I feel lucky that it looks the same now as I approach 40 as it did when I was a teenager. But it's thinned noticeably over the last couple of years and I'm sure the color will start to dim one of these days. I took it for granted for a long time and now here we are.

Jupiter said...

Blogger Ann Althouse said...
"...it just stopped looking red and seemed very dull, and that was a challenge to my self-image because I'd always thought my unusual hair color was my best feature and it went from best to nothing."

I used to have beautiful long blond hair. Then it got scraggly and thin, so I got some dog-clippers and whacked it off. I don't believe it was "a challenge to my self-image", but maybe I'm wrong. Is there an easy way to tell?

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

"And why are there so few blonde male actors...""

There are a lot of blond male actors (but no "blonde male actors"; blonde is the feminine form of the word), if you count Chris Hemsworth, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Chis Pine, etc. They generally have what the British call "fair hair", that is, not quite blond (depending on the movie, of course), but not as dark as what we usually mean by "brown hair".

Most "blondes" probably have similar coloring, but lighten it to get attention, and to bring it back to what it probably was when they were children. Even many true blondes boost it a bit. Dark-haired women who go blond are usually very obvious, with a mismatch of hair/skin/eye coloring.

"...look what happened to Robert Redford's face."

He doesn't go for cosmetic surgery that so many other older actors get. However, his hair kept its color remarkably well. His face aged quite a lot over the years, and his sideburns became grizzled, but he's still a strawberry blond, and blonds tend to go gray sooner than others.

Virgil Hilts said...

Char Char Binks - yeah I saw the same list when I googled blond male actors, but when you google blonde actresses, you get stuff like "top 100 blond actresses!", etc.
Also, I cannot remember any other actor being as blond as Redford. I think boys tend to lose blond hair more rapidly and frequently than girls. You see lots of 8 year old boys with beautiful blond hair, but not very many 18 year olds who still have it.
Thanks for the clarification re blond versus blonde. I swear I had never heard that before!

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

I'd say Steve McQueen was blonder than Redford, or at least less ginger, but he went very gray very quickly.

Blond/blond is like brunet/brunette, or editor/editrix.

mccullough said...

I like Chandler. In all his novels, the woman is the murderer (the main one). Feminists decry this as misogyny but it’s the opposite. Same with The Maltese Falcon.

Friedrich Engels' Barber said...

Don’t Stop the Carnival (Wouk): the protagonist approaches a blonde woman who is seated on a bar stool looking away from him. She hears him coming and turns to see him. He makes the point that he knew before he saw her face that she was going to be beautiful because she started to turn immediately. If she had delayed, she would be letting him enjoy the promise of her blonde hair before encountering the disappointment of her face. (Sorry I would direct quote, but do not have the book .)

MadisonMan said...

Wasn't Brad Pitt blond?

I was quite the blond until about age 8 then pffft. Brunet-ville. Same with my brothers and cousins.

Seeing Red said...

Isn't this cultural appropriation?

FullMoon said...

YoungHegelian said... [hush]​[hide comment]
What? There's no Hindemith piece that uses bass viols, much less six of them. Hindemith was a pioneering scholar in the recovery of Early Music, and did write for at least one archaic instrument, the viola d'amore, but not bass viol that I know of.


Took the words right out of my mouth !

Balfegor said...

Re: Fernandistien:

"So many" turns out to be not very many at all.

Google image search "asian women"; keep scrolling and scrolling until finally there's a blonde Asian women ... and it's the picture for this NYT fake news article.


Well, it's not that many, but it stands out when you see a girl with her hair like that because it's a kind of a trashy look. Both here and in Japan/Korea -- the popularity of hair dye among the general population, other than a little bit of brown or dark red-brown, seems to be way down. You just don't see a lot of people in Tokyo with green or blue or pink hair, other than maybe cosplayers wearing wigs. That's like an 80's thing.

Anyhow, even if I can't really sympathise, I do understand that a lot of Asian Americans want to counter-signal against the Asian stereotype (i.e. quiet, boring, chaste, studious, played violin/piano as a child, good at math, and maybe "probably knows martial arts" too). So, you know, if you want to send that signal, dying your hair yellow is one way to do it.

Balfegor said...

Re: Dust Bunny Queen:

Since Asian women....I mean from really Asia and not the Middle East.
Asia like China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam are never blonds, unless they are albinos......Why isn't it cultural appropriation to take on characteristics of European women?


By and large East Asian Asians don't seem to care much about "cultural appropriation." Some Asian Americans protested protested a "wear a kimono" event in the US, but Japanese businesses in Japan love inviting tourists to try out kimono or yukata. You go to a lot of tourist spots in Kyoto, and probably 80% of the young people walking around in kimonos taking photos of themselves are actually Chinese tourists (who get a kick out of the same thing). There are a few areas (like quasi-religious sumo) where Japanese object, and I'm sure you have the same for Chinese (you used to have for Koreans, back during and before Japanese rule), but the "rules" are very different from the nonsense rules in the US. Partly -- no doubt -- because each of the East Asian states undertook a very deliberate and centrally-planned program of cultural appropriation in the late 19th century when they each tried to modernise. Much of that was technological (and military), but some of it was very deliberate imitation of European fashions in dress and hairstyle, e.g. the danpatsurei of 1871, whereby samurai were encouraged to cut their topknots and wear their hair short, Western style.

Bad Lieutenant said...

Char Char Binks said...
I'd say Steve McQueen was blonder than Redford, or at least less ginger, but he went very gray very quickly.

Blond/blond is like brunet/brunette, or editor/editrix.

4/10/18, 11:31 AM

Neal McDonough is as blond as can be. Too blond, perhaps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_McDonough

William said...

I never went bald. I'm grateful for that. There's no upside to being bald. I suppose if I had gone bald, I would have learned to live with it. I've faced greater challenges than baldness.......I offer this as words of encouragement to all girls who are not blonde. It's a negotiatable handicap. Be brave.

JaimeRoberto said...

I'm going to marginalize another Asian by ignoring her article.

My wife dies her hair blond because it does a better job hiding the gray. Just don't tell her I said that in public, because she'd kill me.

Original Mike said...

”In contemporary popular culture, blonde women are stereotyped as being more sexually attractive to men than women with other hair colors....”

I believe this is a myth created by blondes.

traditionalguy said...

Talk about appropriation,one particular Asian appropriated far more than other cultures. He took everything everywhere he went, especially the women. And Genghis Khan's great grand girls still have his dark asian hair, brown eyes and magnificent brains.

They usually do blonde highlights.

jaed said...

Three things:

1. @I Have Misplaced My Pants, try taking biotin for your thinning hair! I've had good experiences with it and so have several friends.

2. "I couldn't stop the red from going white though, and when it was in transition, it just stopped looking red and seemed very dull" — Exactly this happened to me. It didn't look like it was going gray or white—it just turned mousy brown. And kind of dry-looking and puffy, and I suddenly understood why middle-aged women who don't take steps to prevent it all have that mousy, dry-looking hair. I ended up dyeing it and using a leave-in conditioner. Much better.

3. "Brunet"? Are we going to start seeing "cigaret" again next? (Not to mention that this author is a woman, not a man—"brunette" is correct here, even if you're pedantic enough to keep the archaic masculine/feminine distinction for this word.)

Original Mike said...

Blogger William said...”There's no upside to being bald.”

Of course there is. Hair’s a pain in the ass. Life is easier without it.

gilbar said...

someone needs to mention
Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair
i've always assumed that Light Brown was what we'd call dishwater blonde ymmv

Ann Althouse said...

"Prof, i wondered about that; I assumed that Henna would stain anything red, but it sounds like you've tried different things?"

The problem has to do with the obviousness of the roots. With very light blond, you can't even see where the roots are.

Also, it's not just a matter of getting to any red at all but finding the way to the particular red that it was, and it was an unusual color, so to go carrot red or something wouldn't look like the original. I tried to get back to red and ended up with a color that to my eye was the color of an old penny. It seemed horrifying homely and made me value the blond a lot more than I had. The blond had come to seem just normal, but when I saw myself with the "old penny" color, I thought wow, the blond is so glamorous. I've really lost something. I went back to the hairdresser the next day and changed back to blond.

buwaya said...

Articles like this are the result of otherwise intelligent Asians learning to say silly things in US colleges in order to get ahead.

I know it will hurt your balance of trade, but for the sake of global humanity, shut down your non-STEM university programs. They make mankind more stupid.

gilbar said...

thanx Prof!
i hadn't thought about the roots!

The red heads i know that DO dye have all gone to obviously fake reds; so i guess i see what you mean

Ann Althouse said...

"Blonde" is only a noun. That's why you're seeing "blond women."

mikee said...

Sorry, Althouse, but in my experience "blonde" has also been a damn fine verb.
And no, I will not explain, nor will I discuss.

Francisco D said...

"it’s a very simple declaration: 'Here I am. Pay attention to me. See me.'"

Isn't that why people of all ages and races get tattoos?

Jack Burton said...

Here's my "blonde Asian" story.

In 1974 I was stationed in Okinawa while a young 20 year old in the Navy. While there I married another sailor, a WAVE who was part of the military women who were recently allowed to be stationed on the Island. My wife was a little different, though, as she was of Filipina heritage and looked just like the native Islanders, who were closer in genetics to Malayans than to the Japanese who controlled the island for centuries.

Our church had a coffeehouse, ministering to the GIs off BC street, which was the notorious bar/nightclub area outside of Kadena AFB. One night -- several weeks before we married -- we were walking from the base to the coffeehouse and walked by the door of a nightclub where a young, very blonde, Okinawan bar girl was standing on the sidewalk hawking her wares and services.

When she saw Joan and I walking hand in hand towards her she didn't see two sailors, she saw a GI and her competition. So she grabbed my arm and tried to pull me away from Joan and into the bar. Naturally Joan grabbed the other arm and tried pulling me away from her. They were screaming at each other on the sidewalk and I was being pulled in two, or at least having my arms ripped off. Joan won the tug-of-war, and even today, 44 years later, neither of us can see a blonde Asian girl without cracking up in memories of that night.

Scottie said...

I recall running into a Vietnamese lady at a bank that had on 6" platform heels, huge sweater puppies, and blond hair. I told her it looked very natural.

bagoh20 said...

I don't know what women think, but I bet all men know why we like blondes, and I've never heard that reason spoken out loud.

JR said...

I wish they wouldn't represent the fad as some woke social justice statement when it's just a mildly attention-getting fashion statement, like mohawks.

harkin said...

Re: Chandler on blondes, he's one of my favorite writers but Ring Lardner on dogs was thrice as funny.

That being said - consider that an English prof quoting that passage regarding Zulu hair color would quite possibly lose his/her job.

They're going after The Simpsons folks, who's next?

Alec Rawls said...

Few Asian women try blonde because it takes a lot of expensive time and energy to maintain. A whole-head root-job, done by a highly skilled third party, at least once a month?

Those who do dye blonde do it for the same reason that actual non-politically-motivated women do anything related to looks: they think it is pretty and makes them look good. Given the effort required I doubt many who do go blonde think of it as a long term thing, but of course it can be beautiful. Women often have good judgment about what looks good on them.

Bad Lieutenant said...


bagoh20 said...
I don't know what women think, but I bet all men know why we like blondes, and I've never heard that reason spoken out loud.

4/10/18, 7:19 PM

Be the first, waterbag, show 'em what you got.

rcocean said...

"There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn't care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne."

Damn. Why I haven't ever met a blond like that? All I meet is brunettes who want to know my bank account balance.

rcocean said...

BTW,that's a good selection from "The Long Goodbye" - probably Chandler's 2nd worst novel.