In Defense of (Real) Blondes: An Open Letter to Men’s Health and Men Everywhere
Sent August 23, 2004

 
I occasionally pick up Men’s Health and one or two other men’s magazines (GQ, Esquire) just to check out what they’re telling men about women — and to see whether or not I think what they’re saying is true (as I’m still dating, forewarned is forearmed). Imagine my severe annoyance when I discovered that Men’s Health is still parroting — and reinforcing — the same old anti-blonde stereotypes (“Head-to-Head: Blonde vs. Brunette,” September 2004 issue). Nothing but blonde jokes could be more offensive, and being a lifelong blonde (yes, I have baby and grade-school pictures to prove it) I’m particularly pissed that they used so-called experts to justify their prejudices, without ever citing or questioning the actual sources (how do we know they’re experts? Who sez??). Whatever happened to proper attribution? I felt like giving the entire editorial management and most of the quoted sources a thump in the head.

As a journalist and policy analyst, I’m frequently in the position of being a debunker of popular myth. Clearly, I have to do it again if I ever want American men to take blondes (and me) seriously. Here in Chicago, we journalists have a saying: If your mother says she loves you, check it out – and Men’s Health should have been much more conscientious about checking out and questioning its sources. Let’s get specific.

A referenced survey by askmen.com found that men prefer blondes for dating. I’m not necessarily questioning askmen.com’s survey results, although I do want to know about their process; these were, apparently, self-selected respondents, not a random sample. That the respondents favored blondes is no surprise: that result feeds on popular myth about blondes (e.g., blondes are more desirable, blondes have more fun, blondes are hotter, etc.).

Consider the classic American stereotypes/icons than U.S. men have lodged in their memory. They fall into two categories: first, the classic sirens like Mae West, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and more recently, new sirens that include supermodels and celebrities as well as actresses: Sharon Stone, Kathleen Turner, Madonna, Claudia Schiffer, Heidi Klum, Cheryl Tiegs, Melanie Griffith, Christie Brinkley, and so on. I won’t even go into how many brunette actresses, models or celebrities have blonded themselves to trade on that mythology, as some of the aforementioned did; I’m sure you can count those yourselves.

Second are the cool, calm, collected, elusive Hitchcockian-style ice blondes: Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, Sharon Stone (yeah, she seems to straddle both types, depending on the role), Kim Basinger (think L.A. Confidential, where she does a Veronica Lake turn), half the interchangeable blondes on the international catwalk today (most of whom are failed Deneuve-wannabes), and nearly every anonymous blonde background model/dancer in music videos.

Much more rarely does anyone think of the really smart, funny, or wise-ass knockout blondes who can think their way around any man without an eyelash out of place: Lauren Bacall, Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close (think of her cunning queen in Mel Gibson’s Hamlet), Joan Allen (particularly in The Contender and the latest Bourne film), Michelle Pfeiffer, Charlize Theron, and Gwyneth Paltrow (and consider how many of those ladies blonded themselves to dine off the myth and make headway in Holywood).

Then there are a few kick-ass blondes like Peta Wilson (lives there a man who didn’t want to be held captive by La Femme Nikita?). Forget the ridiculous Charlie’s Angels, in either version: Nikita’s real antecedent was the mother of all kick-ass female icons, fellow blonde Honor Blackman, who played the notorious Pussy Galore in Goldfinger and Cathy Gale in the hip British cult series The Avengers (Blackman’s Gale was predecessor to Diana Rigg’s wonderful Emma Peel and so many imitators threafter). TV’s Alias and Uma Thurman’s Bride in Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2 owe as much or more to Wilson’s and Blackman’s ground-breaking roles as they do to Bond movies in general or to Hong Kong martial arts films. Thurman, of course, is another icon who blonded herself to join the roster (remember: she was brunette in Henry and June). I could go on.

The point is, this is one hell of a bench as icons go. On the other side, brunettes have bombshells Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren, Jane Russell, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Cindy Crawford, Salma Hayek, and … who? There are plenty of comely, impressive brunettes who nevertheless don’t qualify as bombshells. Julia Roberts? Sandra Bullock? J-Lo?? Oh, please. The sexy girls next door, maybe, but not bombshells.

The Greta Garbos, Ingrid Bergmans, Helen Mirrens, Cate Blanchetts and Nicole Kidmans of the world don’t count because their hair color was/is either between blonde and brunette to start or changes depending on the role (and yet, aren’t their blonde roles among the most memorable in men’s minds? Think about it). Not unlike Meryl Streep, they are phenomenal chameleons in service to their art. And of course, men project their own desires and expectations onto blonde mythology and the women who depict it.

The second point is that nobody thinks of most of the above-mentioned blondes, including the temporary or recently converted ones, as stupid or ditzy — calculating at times, untouchable, provocative, shrewd, even unfathomable, yes, but not stupid. So how is it that whenever men think of the intelligence level of blondes, they don’t think of, say, AIDS activist and researcher Mathilde Krim, CBS’s Leslie Stahl, or PBS-turned-CNN anchor Judy Woodruff but of the dim-witted images of Lisa Kudrow, Goldie Hawn, or Jessica Simpson? (Uh, any original blondes in that last bunch? I think not. And I’m not saying they actually are dim; we’re talking perception here.)

Please note that Scandinavians, Swiss, Czechs, or Dutch, for example, don’t automatically consider their blondes — of either gender — to be dim or ditzy. Attitudes are a bit different in Europe: it’s assumed that all educated young women are and should be serious, and that doesn’t seem to detract one bit from their sexiness or desirability. Watching the 2006 Summer Olympics, I found the blonde roster impressive: Heather Bown of our own volleyball team; Inge De Bruijn, the fastest woman sprint swimmer, who out of her swim cap bears a more than passing resemblance to Peta Wilson; bubbly Swedish heptathlete Carolina Kluft, whose enthusiasm is infectious and who came to the Olympics to have fun as well as win a gold medal or two; runners Jolanda Ceplak of Slovenia and Yulija Nesterenko of Belarus, who are all business on the track; there are too many blondes to mention, and none of them strike me as dumb. Far from it: you can’t reach that level of international competition by being a bubblehead.

Yet psychologist Tony Fallone, quoted in the Men’s Health piece, reports that men generally consider blondes more flaky. Even if that much were true, 1) this may or may not be a representative sample of all men (how do we know? It’s not like he told us his methodology — he may refer to a self-selected sample of men who decided to use his services) and 2) Fallone still reports only the perception among men, not the reality for blonde women.

To what, exactly, do men attribute their perceptions about blondes’ intelligence? Not hard data, clearly. And conventional ‘wisdom’ is often suspect. Dippy bubbleheadedness is more a symptom of youth and inexperience — or perhaps a sign of Valley Girls, that epitomy of silly American teens — than it is a result of hair color. As a Mensa dropout (yup, I got bored there, and most of the men when I was a member in Chicago were either spoken-for ambitious proto-yuppies or geeky nerds with poor social skills), I can testify to at least the local truth that brunettes weren’t disproportionately represented among the membership when I was a member. But I was in my early twenties then. By now, some of the female members may have blonded themselves, skewing the numbers slightly; apparently, aging brunettes prefer to go blonde rather than gray.

Anthropologist Hans Juergens (also mentioned in the offending article) found that brunettes looking for husbands received twice as many replies to their personals ads as blondes did; this also doesn’t surprise me. But I don’t automatically draw the same conclusion that Fallone did, and neither did Juergens (I’ve seen that study; Juergens is much more cautious than Fallone about extrapolating the reasons behind his results). But Men’s Health foolishly didn’t provide particulars or at least a citation for Juergens’s study so that the readers could analyze it for themselves. We aren’t even told where the anthropologist works, or whether he’s an academic or affiliated with a polling organization.

Stupidly, Fallone asserts that “blondes tend to be bigger risk takers and more likely to want to play around,” then doesn’t bother to offer any data to support this assertion. Nitwit. Gee, could he possibly be parroting men’s beliefs instead of fact — or rationalizing men’s reasons for being tempted by blondes in the first place? (More myth: men chase blondes because you think we’re more likely to fool around, therefore more likely to fool around with you in particular, supposedly increasing your chances of getting laid. Fat chance. Show me the data, you dope! Either that, or shut up already. (Oh, and Men’s Health decides to underscore this contention in a less than subliminal way when on page 154 of the same September issue, they use a blonde model to illustrate an article on the 6 ways men can tell if their women are getting ready to cheat on them. What, couldn’t they find a suitable redhead instead?? Just kidding, all you lovely strawberries out there.)

As you can tell by now, I’m losing patience with this inane scenario. Even if — and that’s a very big if — Fallone were able to cite any hard studies to support his ludicrous assertions, I’d want to know several things about such studies before I granted their results any validity. First, the sample size: some people call an informal poll of 20 people on the street a “study” even though that clearly doesn’t compare with the well constructed ones conducted by sociologists, anthropologists, and sexologists who have to publish and survive peer review. Pepper Schwartz and crew at the University of Washington or the folks at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, for example, will freely tell you their sample size, methodology, margin of error, and question list for the surveys and studies they conduct.

Which brings us to the second area of concern: what was asked and how the questions were worded. Anyone familiar with survey research or opinion polling will tell you that how the questions are asked or worded can skew the answers, as can the way the sample was selected. Keep this in mind, fellas: it’s an election year, and you’ll be hearing a lot about poll results without being told what the questions were, word for word. Be skeptical.

Third — and this I consider the most important factor, in this case — before we go making sweeping conclusions about what blondes are or aren’t more likely to do, let’s separate the deliberately and artificially blonded brunettes from the real blondes when we set up the survey sample. That way, one can control for the attitudes and behavior of those women who specifically became blonde so that they could live the myth from actual blondes who may feel no need to do so (and may, in fact, be tired of fighting the myth and its automatic, oppressive expectations of them).

Did any of the studies that Fallone might be tempted to cite (or any studies of blondes versus brunettes, for that matter) actually do this? If not, their results may be seriously skewed — therefore erroneous and irrelevant, not to mention grossly misleading. After all, it might be the converts who make blondes as a group seem more promiscuous or dumb; they may have blonded themselves to get a little more action and thought that just changing hair color would accomplish this (yeah, that would be dumb). Maybe the intentionally blonded should be in their own sample, with real blondes and real brunettes in two separate control groups. Until someone does this, any statements about who’s more insipid or more likely to cheat are pure speculation.

Finally, let me suggest a more plausible reason for Juergens’s results: men’s awareness of their own and other men’s attitudes toward blondes, these men's manifold insecurities, and the desire to reduce their competition. Men know full well what other men supposedly think of blondes — and when they decide to settle down, many men get territorial about their brides and prefer that they be slightly less attractive to other men (therefore supposedly less likely to get hit on by other men and tempted into infidelity). It’s called protecting turf, not to mention potentially protecting your heart (or so they think), and this attitude may very well lead men to prefer brunettes as brides even though they may prefer blondes as dates — without regard to the merits of any individual women. But again, is such behavior based on actual data, or on men’s perceptions about the women in question? My bet is on perception.

You see where I’m going with this. You think you have troubles being taken seriously, fellas? Try being a blonde, blue-eyed, short female. Add to that a 36C bustline and a pretty face, and nobody takes you seriously unless you come across as a whip-smart, street-smart intellectual from the moment you open your mouth. But of course, if you do that, by the time you close your mouth you’ve scared to death at least half the men in the room. So you backpedal, soften it a bit, and then they miss the point, being immersed in the blonde myth instead. They don’t see you.

And there is no middle ground. Please don’t give me that limp line about being ‘assertive’ instead of aggressive (and which psychobabble advocate thought up that chestnut?), and consider instead my profession. There are no merely ‘assertive’ reporters — you’re either aggressive enough to get the story, or you fail. So I’m aggressive (on the job, anyway), confident, ambitious, accomplished. I have opinions, dreams, aspirations, other talents I’m developing, other interests. I’ve made the most of my education and keep learning new things. All of this would make a man more attractive, yet it seems to work against me. I just don’t conform to expectations: men look at me, see the blonde hair, and are confused. Worse, when men think of trophy women, blonde, competent, stylish, aggressive and whip-smart just doesn’t seem to go together for them.

Is this what Harold Bloom referred to when he wrote that all of Shakespeare’s great heroines had to settle for lesser men (because that’s all they had available to them)?

Some days, there’s just no winning against the blonde myth. It would be so easy to just give up on a love life and focus on my career (more than enough trouble battling the blonde myth there, thank you). Yet, while there’s life, there’s hope, so I hope — I’m perverse that way. There have to be smart, attractive, good-hearted men out there who can and do think beyond stereotypes, yes? Perhaps even a few who have some hair left??

Then I read David Zinczenko’s editor’s note in that same September issue, about finding style icons who “project qualities we’d all like to have: defiance, wit, and sheer, unadulterated cool.” And I smiled to myself: the clueless man is talking about me. And I wouldn’t trade what or who I am for a nanosecond, let alone allow some silly guy to define what I ought to be.

Gentlemen, you do yourselves an extreme disservice by staying stuck in your own prejudices and underestimating blondes. Evolve, already! We have. Time to cut us a break: you’ll never know what you have to gain until you do.

Sincerely,
Policywonk
independent journalist, policy diva, and
whip-smart, street-smart, unrepentant, defiantly intellectual blonde babe