ON BLONDES

London Times journalist Pitman examines with verve and style the changing significance of blondness from ancient Greece to modern times.

The author launches into her subject by writing of her own experiences as a temporary blonde, which confirmed her thesis that blondes have been viewed differently than ordinary mortals by both men and women throughout the centuries. She breezes through those centuries, plucking examples from paintings, poetry, advertisements, and pop culture to illustrate the potency of blondness around the world. Beginning with the statue Aphrodite of Knidos (“the world’s original model of sexual fantasy and power”), she moves on to Roman courtesans and the harsh measures they took to turn their naturally dark locks into golden ones. Blondness came to symbolize both wantonness (e.g., the temptress Eve and the unchaste Mary Magdalene) and purity (e.g., the Virgin Mary) to the Catholic Church, Pitman argues, while Queen Elizabeth I used it to create her own image of goddess-like immortality and uncorrupted virginity. The author finds the Victorians obsessed with blondness, associating it both with the innocence of storybook heroines like Alice in Wonderland and with wicked temptresses like Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp. In the 20th century, she notes, blondness took on a more dangerous significance as the Nazis idealized a fair-haired, blue-eyed Aryan master race. Pitman chronicles the rise in 1950s Hollywood of the “dumb blonde,” exemplified by Marilyn Monroe, the emergence of the “punk blonde” in 1970s London, and the 1990s apotheosis of the “power blonde” (Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton). Disturbingly, blonde hair has apparently become a core part of the standard image of female beauty to people of color around the world, leading Asians, South Americans and African-Americans to the peroxide bottle.

Slick and rather too reliant on hyperbole, but it raises some serious questions about ethnicity and status in the world today.