Good piece. It's nice to

Good piece. It's nice to have something playful & light-hearted to leaven the serial exhortations that are published here.

I have no idea why women are made the passing victims-and-beneficiaries of a full spectrum of abstract assumptions and projections by perfect strangers.

We project absolute characteristics and sometimes even pseudo-divinity onto women in a manner that has no masculine analogue. Women with a gentle disposition are beatified, and women with a hint of crustiness or impatience (effectiveness?) are demonized as witches 'n bitches. Women are made into symbols by strangers dozens of times each day of their lives. It's part of the blessing & the curse of being a woman, I suspect.

The blond thing seems to be as old as the hills. The most peculiar thing about it is that there seems to be some truth to the dichotomy, although I'm sure that's just a case of an individual's personality being shaped by external appearances, media saturation, and the ambient expectations & social rewards attached to those characteristics and the behaviours that go with them.

Blond hair definitely works - many, many times have I watched with exasperation as all the male attention in a room is siphoned away to a single late-arriving bombshell with the sudden whoosh of air being sucked out into space, leaving only a vacuum. If you want to see the look of pure hatred, tear your eyes away and scrutinize the other women. Men aren't supposed to see that. It's as if women have internal barometers, and know without even looking when the pressure drops and their relative market value takes a sudden a plunge.

The socially constructed blonde

I think the blonde mystique, as it were, is fed by popular media which so loves to take a stereotype and run with it: The dumb blonde, the classy brunette, the sassy redhead. I also believe that many a plain woman dyes her hair blonde with the intent of putting herself herself in the crosshairs of those men who are drawn to .... those stereotypes. I suggest it is not her blonde hair per se that draws the man to the blonde, (especially the cheap overprocessed straw blonde), but what the woman is telling men about herself. She is saying she is willing to become Barbie to please him, to conform to that bubblehead ideal to attract him. It is not so much that the dumb blonde caricacture is true, as it is that the brunette or redhead [or whichever] who dyes her hair blond is dumb. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying most woman who dye their hair blonde are dumb, but there is most definitley a sub-group that embraces the dumb blonde ideal with all it's attendant behaviour to get the attention of men.

Blondeism a subset of sexism?

Good article; I've seen this stuff in action. Seems to me that in the big picture, though, blondeism is a subset of sexism.

There was a v interesting interview on CBC's The Current two mornings ago with Robert Jensen, author of "Getting Off - Pornography and the End of Masculinity" (South End Press). You can listen to it here: http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/media/200711/20071114thecurrent_sec3.ram
or to an interview on WORT-FM here: http://lists.wort-fm.org/archive/permalink/wort_070309_120401apafri.mp3

Jensen's analysis of the destructive impact of pornography on men, as well as on women, is very sobering. In this sense, blondeism degrades male perpetrators, too; what's really "dumb" is oppressive behaviour!

Kelly's comments are

Kelly's comments are interesting. I can't decide whether I agree or not. I don't think it's *entirely* socially constructed, but then I wouldn't go so far as J.B. in terms of biological determinism.

As for women dyeing their hair blonde...doesn't it come down to personal priorities? If you like big jocks, free drinks, and you know that's how you get both, doesn't that just make those women smart (some of them)? They know what they want, they know how to get it, and they're taking the initiative while playing every susceptible man in the room. It's men who are being led my their noses (or some other appendage) here.

I can't believe someone used the word "perpetrators" to describe men who fall for "blondeism" (another funny word). That's so, like, 1980s-womynz-studies. Besides, what about all those white boys I see who can't take their eyes off any half-decent asian girl. No blondism there - just a touch of infantilization, hyper-femininity, leavened by decidedly small and downright boyish hindquarters. But that's a whole other article! ;-)

Blondeismo

Fair enough, Nightbloom, in my 1st posting I probably should have put quote marks around "blondeism" to be ironic, and I shld have used a different word than "perpetrators". At the time I was thinking of pornographers and porn junkies more than men who simply let their blonde fantasies and delusions guide their thoughts and actions. Sloppy writing on the run :-o

How about the term blondeistas?

As for white men fixated on Asian women: there's a long history of "exoticism" in western perceptions of the east, and certainly lots to write about. (Which is what makes the photos of CD Hoy http://www.civilization.ca/media/docs/fshoy1e.html very interesting: a non-western "gaze" of all sorts of folks.)

Do you sometimes wonder when men have a generic recipe for what's "hot" based on hair or race or body shape(s) etc., some weird recording might be operating? Makes it kinda hard to connect with the individual inside; so much for intimacy.

I think it all comes down to

I think it all comes down to exoticism. Growing up in Canada, blondes were/are still rarer than brunettes. I remember in grade 6 the girl everyone wanted to be friends with was blue-eyed and had long, straight shimmering blonde hair.

I lived in Asia for several years, and though we all stood out, the blondes got more attention- because they were the most "unlike" the race of people we were living among. That, I think, explains the attraction of Asian women to "white" (I hate that term :) men, and let's not forget, vice versa. I'm always perplexed at how we focus on white men liking Asian women, when it works both way- Asian women are often strongly attracted to, and actively pursue, white men as well. Having said that, as an ESL teacher I have heard it said over and over from Asian men that they would be thrilled to date "Canadian" women~ and I've asked what this means; sometimes it means "white", sometimes just any woman who is not of their race, and so I am starting to believe more and more that it is simply the thrill of experiencing intimacy with someone who is as genetically heterogeneous from you as is possible.

Among my "white" female friends I have one married to a Korean man, one to a Chinese-Cdn, and one marrying a man from India. That's tomorrow, in Kamloops :)

Hey my brother lives in

Hey my brother lives in Norway right now~ wonder if he still finds the women really attractive (as he said he did when he first moved there) or if it is starting to just get plain boring :)

Well I don't think it's all

Well I don't think it's all or even mostly biological determinism. If it were then I am certainly an exception. I think it is mostly cultural. I think exoticism can play a role in attraction, but simple exoticism rarely makes for good long term relationships.

In my case I think it's simply that like all humans, I'm attracted to symmetry, and health (at least on the physical level, personality is a far more complicated story). Skin shade and hair color don't seem to matter to me (I don't think they do anyway), so long as the colors appear healthy.

As for NB's comment that asian women have boyish hindquarters... well you've been paying attention to wrong women (are you sure they were women?). That's certainly not my experience, and sounds far more like yet another stereotype. Boys simply don't have that female hip to waist ratio, for starters.

Quote:Do you sometimes

Yes, I totally agree, Biscotti....with the caveat that men are sometimes sorted by some women in a similarly dehumanizing way.

J.B. - I see it as more than "exoticism" (which in my opinion is a myopic explanation intended to compliment existing race- and sex-oppression narratives). Although exoticism is certainly a factor. I think the near-universal down-grading of the traditional Reubenesque beauty in white and latin North America and Europe (not among African-Americans) in favour of boyish, petite, boy-bummed, waifish, skinny fashionistas is symptomatic of something else entirely.

Humourous article,

Humourous article, interesting comments. As a born to blonde I've gone through through life putting up with and using the the attitudes of others of both genders to my advantage and furiously fought the same attitudes. I am in total agreement with one comment of Ms.Rupp's as I've aged and my hair colour has mellowed I have no interest in returning to a brighter shade any more than I wish to return to relive the lessons of my youth. Cheers.

Blonde

I dye my hair blond simply because that hair colour suits my complexion the most. My natural hair colour is a mousy shade that is neither brown or blond. I've been told by mostly straight women that blond suits me because of my very pale skin. I do not dye my hair blond to get attention from men, to be someone's "Barbie," or to get "the jocks." I am 38 years old and have been colouring my hair since the age of 20. Rarely have I received more attention from men just because of my hair colour. There have been many more occasions when I have gone to bars or parties with my brunette friends and men have hit on them and ignored me completely. I consider myself attractive, I'm tall and thin, well-dressed and well-spoken, but that's not the issue here. The issue is if a blond woman receives more attention from men, it is because of the energy she produces, the way she walks, the size of her cleavage, the way she's dressed etc., and not just because she is blond. Not all blond women colour their hair just to get attention or to be a floozy. They just happen to like that hair colour.

re: the article: Blondes have it better

It isn't only the female blondes who are stereotyped.

In film and television, haven't you noticed that if there is a blond man or blond teen-aged boy in the story, he is always the villain, the mean one, the jerk.

He's the young muscle-jock who kicks sand in the face of the scrawny dark-haired nerd, or the creepy cowboy in the bar who beats up the nice guy who's just trying to mind his own business.

What makes Hollywood want to depict blond males as such arrogant, conceited, and cruel creeps? Are blond males supposed to be more attactive and have more fun,too, so it all goes to their head?

-- A blond male