"Blonde is beautiful" mystique

cloudy said:
I'm not sure if I'm going to express this well or not, but here goes...

Maybe, when the original was made, blonde was just the epitome of beauty, as it still seems to be.

Racial undertones, sure....I see that, as well, but I think, in the context of the time when it was made....

I'm not saying this well. Never mind.

I understood.
 
cloudy said:
I'm glad someone does. :D

Interestingly, I can count on two fingers the number of non-brunette men I've been with ... and ZERO, the number of non-brunette women. I wasn't aware I had such a bias, and I'm ... stunned.
 
impressive said:
Interestingly, I can count on two fingers the number of non-brunette men I've been with ... and ZERO, the number of non-brunette women. I wasn't aware I had such a bias, and I'm ... stunned.

My first husband was a blond - that's it, the one and only blond I've ever been with.

ETA: Oops! I lied. The Danish guy was the second....so two.
 
cloudy said:
I'm glad someone does. :D


I do as well. There were many blonde bombshells in movies back then.

I just remembered that last year, my son made mention of a girl in his class who had "golden" hair... *shakes head....he was only 8 then.
 
Funny thing is, I live in a nation of pale strawberry blondes, and here the beauty ideal in ads and magazines tend to shift more and more away from that, towards mediterranian and oriental looks.

Which is fine by me, I've always had it in for olive skin.

This made me think back at the people I've been seriously attracted to, (Most whom I naver had the opportunity - or balls - to ask out. Oh well.) ...and I think I have the whole gene pool of races represented. Two almost albino blondes, one black as straight coffee, one Japanese, one Indian, and one "regular" white brunette....what else? Ah yes, a genuine Irish redhead.

And my gf is Greek.

So I'm not quite sure how to intepret my own racial bias. :confused:
 
Liar said:
Funny thing is, I live in a nation of pale strawberry blondes, and here the beauty ideal in ads and magazines tend to shift more and more away from that, towards mediterranian and oriental looks.

Which is fine by me, I've always had it in for olive skin.

This made me think back at the people I've been seriously attracted to, (Most whom I naver had the opportunity - or balls - to ask out. Oh well.) ...and I think I have the whole gene pool of races represented. Two almost albino blondes, one black as straight coffee, one Japanese, one Indian, and one "regular" white brunette....what else? Ah yes, a genuine Irish redhead.

And my gf is Greek.

So I'm not quite sure how to intepret my own racial bias. :confused:

"Allätare". :D
 
impressive said:
Interestingly, I can count on two fingers the number of non-brunette men I've been with ... and ZERO, the number of non-brunette women. I wasn't aware I had such a bias, and I'm ... stunned.

I think we need to get this girl on a redhead... ;)


actually, I was thinking about a different redhead...no really...a female one...I swear...ah, what the hell; if she's willing I am....
 
There's a woman I have seen in a movie, and in a catalog ... in the movie she was just in a walking-past part, but I knew instantly it was her.

She is the most stunning woman. I hardly ever remember people visually, but she has such a thoroughly beautiful and memorable face.

I'd guess she's about fifty. It's hard to say. Her hair is long and white, and her face has the most wonderful shape and character to it.

To hell with what other people find attractive. If I was in a bar crammed with a hundred crop-topped, bare-bellied, drink-happy local twenty-somethings, I'd fight my way through the lot of them to make a fool of myself to her.

(Edited to add: Just remembered. The SO is actually the first blond I ever became involved with. It wasn't the blondness that did it, however.)
 
BlackShanglan said:
She is the most stunning woman. I hardly ever remember people visually, but she has such a thoroughly beautiful and memorable face.

The way I feel about Alek Wek. *nods*
 
Another guy chiming in.

Most of you have seen pictures of my wife, including the fact that she has redish hair. (No not from a bottle either.) Depending on how much she's in the sun it can be darker or lighter red, but the red is still there. Personaly I think she is stunning. (And no she isn't a stick figure either.)

The second most beautiful woman I have ever met is my wifes best friend. Guess what? She's Hispanic with Raven Black Hair.

I actually don't like Blondes. I find them to usually be slightly stuck up, (I know stereotypical of me.) Maybe it's because of what our society expects of them, but there it is.

Cat
 
[I said:
cloudy]Yui and I have sort of had this conversation - about how when we were little we wished we were blonde, and pink, and "pretty."

Thoughts?

'Blonde is beautiful' mystique
By Sheryl McCarthy

"Is it politically correct for us to see King Kong?" a friend joked when the latest version of the movie classic opened. A movie clip that shows Kong staring mesmerized at the fair Ann Darrow, played by Naomi Watts, caused me some uneasiness because it's hard not to see the subliminal racism in a story about a big black beast falling tragically in love with a pale blonde beauty.

But lured by reviews touting the special effects and the dramatic story, I went to see the movie anyway. While it certainly has racial overtones, I was more disturbed by its gender message: that fair-skinned blondeness is the essence of female beauty, so powerful an aphrodisiac that it can tame a savage beast.

King Kong is just the latest ripple in a cultural tidal wave of celebrations of a certain kind of Caucasian beauty. Pick up a newspaper or magazine, or watch the entertainment shows on television, and you're bombarded with a profusion of blondes: Paris, the Nicoles (Ritchie and Kidman), Scarlett, Charlize, Ashlee, Gwyneth, Mary-Kate and Ashley, to name a few. Even the African-American hottie of the moment, Beyonce, has golden skin and flowing blonde hair, while Halle Berry, the African-American actress most celebrated for her beauty, is fair with white features. Even in movies with predominantly black casts, the female objects of desire are consistently fairer than their male counterparts.

A step backward

"We move forward on things, and there are ways we keep stepping back," says Kathe Sandler, an African-American filmmaker whose 1992 documentary, A Question of Color, explored African-Americans' hang-ups about skin color, hair texture and facial features. Lately, she has noticed the extreme sexual objectification of women in popular music videos and the "European premium" placed on the women of color in them. "They've got to have really long hair, and I've never seen so much wig-wearing going on," Sandler says.

Jean Kilbourne, who has studied female images in advertising for 30 years in her film series Killing Us Softly and her book Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, says the emphasis on being pretty and sexy, even for young girls, is worse now, the result of companies' desire to sell products and the media working in the service of the advertisers.

The images are impossible for most females to achieve, but they sell products and make girls feel negatively about their own looks. Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston found that the more adolescent and pre-adolescent girls read fashion magazines, the more likely they were to diet and to feel unhappy about their bodies. Researchers at the University of Michigan and Boston College found that while African-American girls ignored images of skinny white female bodies on television and elsewhere, they were concerned about their inability to match white standards of hair and skin color.

Decades after the women's rights movement expanded the view of a woman's worth beyond her physical appearance, and long after the "black is beautiful" movement asserted that African features were also attractive, we seem to be regressing.

It's politically incorrect to admit it, but to some extent we're still color struck. I think of my former colleague, a white blonde, who talked about feeling "rewarded" for her looks every time she walked into a room. I also think of Indian families who tout their daughters' fair complexions in marriage ads, of southern African women who are ruining their skin with bleaching creams, and of the little white, African-American and Asian girls, who despite their parents' assurances that they are beautiful as they are, long for long blonde tresses.

Values unchanged

"Just because you have this movement that expands the image of beauty in women and a 'black is beautiful' movement, doesn't mean people have necessarily changed their minds," says Beverly Greene, a New York psychologist who has plenty of African-American clients. She hears them talk about good hair and bad hair and express concern about their babies' hair texture and color. Nor do these messages all come from the media. They also come from family members, loved ones, trusted figures, who tell females about the extremes they need to go through to make themselves beautiful, and the consequences if they don't.

Beauty standards are driven by racial and gender politics, by Caucasian image-makers who promote their own physical attributes as symbols of their superiority to other groups, and by male fantasies of what makes women desirable. When women are being highly sexualized in the popular culture, it's not surprising that the old standards of beauty hold sway.

I'm glad Kong found true love with Ann Darrow, even though it ended badly. But I'd love to see media outlets promoting more varied images of female beauty, to see black actors and directors who have clout push for the casting of female love interests who aren't just brown-skinned versions of white women.

Parents certainly need to try to mitigate the messages their children get from the media, although they're hard to overcome. And while most of us probably can't do much to change Hollywood's beauty standards, we can talk about them, about how damaging they are, and how important it is not to buy into them.

Sheryl McCarthy is a freelance writer and columnist forNewsdaynewspaper in New York.
[/I]


To the thread starter Cloudy...although the discussion has drifted to the subjective, as it always does, personal opinion and personal preferences, I refer to a science channel program that attempted to objectively define human beauty in both men and women.

The amazing thing was that in research conducted all around the globe, all ethnic groups, all ages, both sexes, there was an almost unaninimous agreement on what human 'beauty' actually was.

The key is symmetry, they even defined a mathematical relationship between those found to be 'beautiful' and came up with a ratio or proportion of facial and bodily features.

Skin color was important also, with deep black being the least desireable, but over all it was the 'healthiness' of the appearance of the skin that indicated sexual beauty and virility.

Youth also played a factor, and firm limbs, arms, thighs, chest and of course, ample breasts as the physical attributes gave an indication of successful breeding pairs.

The 'beauty' or sexual attraction stems mainly, so they said, from the apparent vitality to produce offspring, both in men and women, but for gender differences of course.

And yes, blondes scored high in all categories, as did light colored eyes and skin that matched the other features.

Scent and 'pheromones' played a not insignificant role, as both men and women were presented with articles of clothing, worn by the opposite sex and were asked to smell them and voice a reaction.

The positive responses all mirrored those individuals that appeared to be healthy breeding stock.

It was an interesting program.


amicus....
 
cloudy said:
Yui and I have sort of had this conversation - about how when we were little we wished we were blonde, and pink, and "pretty."

Thoughts?

I know exactly what you ladies mean, and it really, really sucked back then. I've gotten over it, too, but I'm almost 40.

:kiss: :kiss: for Cloudy and Yui, sisters under the skin.
 
Might we, however, avoid turning this into an ugly backlash in which we gleefully sling negative sterotypes about blondes?
 
Something I don't understand about women:

Can't you just be satisfied that for the most part, you get to decide who you're going to fuck? :rolleyes:
 
[I said:
Huckleman2000]Something I don't understand about women:

Can't you just be satisfied that for the most part, you get to decide who you're going to fuck? :rolleyes:
[/I]


Ah, Huckleman...they sleep with those they find dangerous and marry those that have money...didn't ur momma tell ya?

amicus...
 
Huckleman2000 said:
Something I don't understand about women:

Can't you just be satisfied that for the most part, you get to decide who you're going to fuck? :rolleyes:

And men don't have this choice? Certainly they do, by not approaching the ones they don't want to fuck. Or by turning down the ones they don't want to fuck.
 
Norajane said:
And men don't have this choice? Certainly they do, by not approaching the ones they don't want to fuck. Or by turning down the ones they don't want to fuck.

Choosing who you're NOT going to fuck isn't quite the same thing. ;)

I'm just saying, a reasonably fit blonde, brunette, Asian, African-American, redhead... If they want to go out and get laid to validate their desirability to the opposite sex, it's just a matter of their own standards or preference.

The extremely-attractive members of either sex aren't what I'm talking about. It's the vast majority of us who fall somewhere between gorgeous and ugly. In that milieu, it's pretty clear that women call the shots, sexually speaking.
 
Huckleman2000 said:
Choosing who you're NOT going to fuck isn't quite the same thing. ;)

I'm just saying, a reasonably fit blonde, brunette, Asian, African-American, redhead... If they want to go out and get laid to validate their desirability to the opposite sex, it's just a matter of their own standards or preference.

The extremely-attractive members of either sex aren't what I'm talking about. It's the vast majority of us who fall somewhere between gorgeous and ugly. In that milieu, it's pretty clear that women call the shots, sexually speaking.

It's a vestige of our past - women weren't supposed to fuck, not the good girls, not the ones who wanted to be the "girls you marry" as opposed to the "girls you fuck until you meet the one you want to marry".

For me, it's more about whom I want to let inside my body, whom I trust. Men don't have that concern. It's a different perspective.
 
Norajane said:
It's a vestige of our past - women weren't supposed to fuck, not the good girls, not the ones who wanted to be the "girls you marry" as opposed to the "girls you fuck until you meet the one you want to marry".

For me, it's more about whom I want to let inside my body, whom I trust. Men don't have that concern. It's a different perspective.

Well, that's exactly the point, isn't it? :cool:
 
Huckleman2000 said:
Something I don't understand about women:

Can't you just be satisfied that for the most part, you get to decide who you're going to fuck? :rolleyes:

Hmmmm. When the trade off is dealing with pregnancy? Doesn't seem much of a bargain.
 
Huckleman2000 said:
Well, that's exactly the point, isn't it? :cool:

Yes, and no. My point is that it isn't enough for me to just be able to decide whom to fuck. The guy has to actually approach me, or not turn me down. He selects me as well. And if I'm not blonde enough, I don't get the option to make a choice or not. The fact that I have a choice at all, is due to history and my own concerns about the ramifications of sex.
 
There are people of both genders willing to sleep with anything. There are others of both genders who are more selective. The former can pretty much always find someone. The latter have more work.
 
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