mbaker@rosevax.UUCP (Mark Baker) (07/13/86)
In article <376@bucsb.bu.edu.UUCP> ilacqua@bucsb.bu.edu.UUCP (Elizabeth Lear) writes: > > I've heard a lot about "dumb blondes", but what > generalizations come to mind with the thought of red? I thought that this would be a good time to enter this discussion! I've been following it closely since I am currently engaged to a natural redhead. A while back she gave me (in fun) an article entitled "A GUY'S GUIDE TO A GIRL'S HAIR" and I thought that it would be fun to enter excerpts from this article now. (Reprinted without permission, Mademoiselle Magazine, Dec. 1985) ________________________________________________________________________________ A GUY'S GUIDE TO A GIRL'S HAIR by David Seeley Have you ever known any breast men? Disgusting, pitiful creatures. And leg men? Warped, twisted weirdos whose fascinations with gams dates back to some obscene gutter event in their early adolescence. No, the only true connoisseurs of women are men stirred by a wave of golden hair glinting in summer sunlight, or a soft set of bangs rustling in an autumn breeze. Don't call them "hair men" -- that sounds nasty. They are just guys, from small towns and big cities, who spend their idle hours dreaming lazily of blondes, brunettes and redheads, of idyllic girls with lustrous locks and smiles as wide as rivers. We put a bunch of these men in a very large room and got them to hammer out a sort of guide to women's hair types. What they came up with is a survey that can pinpoint exactly what a woman is like based on the cut and color of her hair. The opinions contained in this article, though arbitrary and in some cases wholly made up to fill space at the last minute, are completely accurate and guaranteed. THE BASICS: YOUR BASIC BLONDE Not to be trusted. Alleys, skid rows and centers for the homeless teem with hollow, broken men who were successful venture capitalists ... until a delicate-looking blonde with sweet blue eyes and a perfect tan skin said hello to them at a party -- a hushed, drawn-out "Hello" as soft as an evening breeze -- and then dumped them after a three-week affair filled with horrific American Express charges and cancelled dates. Blondes tend to be aloof, are easily distracted and have narrow waists. They can be sexual dynamos when it suits their purposes, but for the most part they would rather go shopping. They keep appointment books in their purses, have their laundry done for them and brush their teeth with Ultra Brite. Let me tell you about the naturally blonde -- they are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that -- unless you were born blonde, or are skillful in the use of L'Oreal products -- can be difficult to understand. Deep in their hearts, they think that they are better than we are. We, after all, had to discover ways to compensate, like being extra nice to people or developing personalities. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. Or at least that they have more fun. YOUR BASIC BRUNETTE The kind of girl Mom wants you to marry: warm, intelligent, faithful, romantic. Brunettes are down-to-earth and companionable, women you can make love with, then stay up all night talking to. Spend a few months with one, thought, and something becomes apparent: Brunettes are a little, well, BORING. If, after a while, you should spend an accidental drunken night with a blonde or redhead, you won't mind not having someone to talk to all night. The sex will have reached such Olympic proportions, you'll be too exhausted even to say, "Thanks." But, though you may occasionally indulge in flings with golden girls, you'll find your heart keeps tugging you back to that sweet wonder woman with soft brown locks. She's got a mind of her own, a career that's taking her places you want to go and a knack for making gingerbread pancakes on cold December mornings that makes you practically weep with joy. At times she may be predictable, even dull, but she's SOLID. She has faith in you and knows that with her help you will be the best you can possibly be. Remember Jimmy Stewart in "It's a wonderful life"? Whom did he choose to marry -- that hot, saucy blonde, Violet Bick? No Way! He went for Mary Hatch, the steadfast, admittedly somnolent brunette played by Donna Reed. Okay, so he ended up trying to jump off a bridge. You can't blame haircolor for everything. YOUR BASIC REDHEAD Dangerous. Redheads have a reputation for being fiery, emotional, jealous, deceitful, bad-tempered and passionate. They often complain about this and say they're really ordinary people, but they're just being defensive. All those things are true, and so is this: Redheads are, almost without exception, completely flipped off their rockers. They may seem sedate, even tranquil. You may encounter one at, say an antique store, polishing a chipped bureau and brushing an auburn lock from her eyes. Like the odd mismatched furniture, she'll seem quiet and unprepossessing, but if you scratch the surface you'll discover a long history of chaotic, Hitchcockian events that left the Shaker tables with wobbly legs and the redhead with an emotional equilibrium just a tad less shaky than the San Andreas Fault. Redheads are unpredictable in the extreme. If you have a date with one, you can't be sure she'll show up on time, or even in this century. One moment she may be running her long, pale fingers through your hair, professing her undying love for you, and the next she may hit you from behind with a stool and confess to a torrid sex affair with a Shiite Muslim named Max. Redheads are frustrated and frustrating, but they are universally credited with being magicians in the sack. THE HAIR TYPES: LONG, STRAIGHT, FINE BROWN HAIR Usually named Susan, and habitually late. Not only for dates, lunches, and their own surprise birthday parties, but with their spectacularly erratic menstrual cycles. "I went out with a Susan once," says Dean, a lineman for Pacific Bell. "I saw her driving by in a Mustang convertible, like the girl in those TV ads, except her hair was straight, shiny and soooo pretty. I just had to meet her. Three days after I did, we became, um, involved, and on the sixth day she said, 'Dean, we need to have a talk.' She has these false alarms every month. She's got an entire shelf in her bathroom stocked with E.P.T. kits. The strain is beginning to get to me, but whenever I try to break it off, she tugs off my workshirt, pushes me down on the floor, sort of whips me with her long hair, and then kisses me on my chest and says, 'Look, this is really an okay time, I'm sure of it." I mean, what would you do?" BLONDE OR BROWN PAGE BOY Wears kneesocks when jogging. Usually called Cathy, these women have very thin lips, closets full of wool business suits and a habit of pulling their hair back over their ears with their index fingers. Fresh from M.B.A. programs at eastern universities, Cathys have good, demanding jobs and pathetically small one-bedroom condominiums they bought as investments. The typical Cathy is something of a nervous type: She's cursed by a pale, flaky complexion that is helped neither by getting sun nor avoiding it, and that flushes at the slightest provocation. Her favorite thing: her BMW 318i, which she takes to the Executive Car Wash four times a week. While it's being washed, she stands in an air-conditioned waiting room, her purse pinned to her waist by her elbow, gazing out the window at the finely muscled, working class brutes rubbing down her fenders with fat, sopping wet sponges. By the time she steps into her car, her face looks like a traffic light, and even her bangs are shaking. "I once dated a Cathy," says Hank, a greeting-card copywriter. "But I had to split up with her, because I found out I was allergic to plaid." LONG, FRIZZY RED HAIR Frequently named Monique, frizzy haired redheads are wild and erotic, with slight accents of indisting origin. They are often vague about their backgrounds, asserting one time that their parents are French and Russian, then claiming a week later that all their cousins are Lebanese. Eventually, you'll discover the entire family is from IOWA. Nonetheless, Moniques are magnificent conversationalists and famous night owls. Always in a rush, they run straight from noontime showers to artsy jobs at galleries or foreign book stores, barely pausing long enough to pull on slinky silk shifts. Their hair is in dazzling, messy tangles, just like their love life. To be involved with a Monique is to accept a life of broken dates. When you finally share a night together, you'll inevitably wake up, with your arms around her, to hear her whispering into the phone, "Mark, I KNOW I was supposed to meet you last night, but my Aunt Hilly broke her hip ...." SPIKY BLACK HAIR Generally Named Trish, these women lead fast-moving chaotic lives and are great dancers. They smoke menthol cigarettes and pretend to know how to red palms. Actresses, they can be found waiting tables at the hippest clubs and restaurants in town. Trishes are given to wearing lightning-bolt earrings, loosely knit cotton sweaters and dazed expressions. They often drink too mush -- Glenlivet with a water back, ordered and shot at the bar. "Girls with spiky black hair have more problems than any other kind of girl," says Jack, a high-school physics teacher. "Half the time when you see them, they look like they've been crying, which would be a pain, except they'll never tell you what the matter is. They just want to forget it, and by midnight or so we'll be dancing all loosened up on some dance floor. I guess you ust have to know how to handle them." 1977 FARRAH FAWCETT BLONDE Primarily named Jobeth, these girls are found in such outlying areas ad Paducah, Texas, and Chugwater, Wyoming. Sweet-natured, friendly, and great at baton twirling, Jobeths have the unfortunate distinction of being several years behind on every trend. For them, Leif Garrett is the current teen heartthrob, and Ecstasy is something you feel when you make varsity cheerleader. They like to ride horses, watch movies at the drive-in and sew their own clothes. "I met a Jobeth last summer, while driving cross-country," says Chris, a reggae disc jockey. "I'd pulled up to a Dairy Queen in this Podunk Oklahoma town, and there she was, waiting to take my order. She had that soft, puffy 'Charlie's Angels' hair and light blue eye makeup. I stood at the counter, talking to her while I ate my burger, and it occurred to me that -- well, I'd just broke up with a girl back in boston, and here was someone who was so innocent, so fresh and naive, I began to have faith that I could fall in love again. I would have stayed a day or two and asked her out, but she turned out to be just 16 years old. And anyway, she was already married and had three kids." UNKEMPT, STRAIGHT BROWN HAIR Usually named Rainbow, these young women eat natural foods, are opposed to nuclear war and have incredible amounts of body hair. When seen from a distance wearing shorts, they are often mistaken for Grizzly Adams. They wear Earth Shoes, live in abandoned school buses and brew herbal tea in huge washtubs for their "families". Rainbows never come into contact with anything manmade, particularly if it runs on electricity, and they have no concept of such things as upward mobility or financial management. (They think money-market funds are what you use to buy soybean bacon strips at the Whole Earth Food Mart.) They do have one great weakness: They will sell their bodies, kill their grandparents and possibly even eat a beef taco in exchange for a backstage pass to a Grateful Dead concert. SHORT, GEOMETRIC 80'S CUT Having rid themselves of names like Karen and Julie to adopt styligh monikers like Ghia, these poor young women pay up to $200 to have their hair butchered like cattle. Hair "stylists" accept their money and gleefully assault them with electric shears, tubes of enamel paint, pizza cutters and Krazy Glue. The results provide heart-wrenching metaphors for their lives -- lives driven to the edge of sanity in a ceaseless search for something ... different. Ghias, you see, are actually ordinary women who, 30 years ago, would have worn their mousy brown hair in tired buns as they shuffled from their secretarial jobs to their lonely, unheated apartments. In the '80s, their lives are exactly the same, except for the fact that they have ticktacktoe games carves into their black-and-green scalps. LONG, FLUFFY BROWN OR BLACK HAIR A mystery, and one worth solving. Generally named Sharon, they are girls of few words and dark eyes who exude a sensuality they're barely aware of: Merely by removing T-shirts from a laundromat dryer, they can do things with their fingertips and the backs of their knees that can make healthy men double up at the waist and collapse. Sharons are involved in things few people understand: They are foreign agents, or night persons who never seem to work. They don't have a wide circle of friends -- usually just one very close one, a man who is a faithful confidant and, at certain times, a lover. If you date a Sharon you find out a little more: Her apartment is nearly empty. In her freezer is a bottle of Stolichnaya. As she dresses, you walk toward an open window; a breeze pours in. Sharon appears at your side in a backless black dress, a glass of brandy in her hand. The glass rises slowly, slowly to her parted lips. You wonder for a moment if you've been drugged. And then her face is moving toward yours, her lips wet with brandy... Two members of our panel had been involved with Sharons, but they could'nt talk about it. They just went outside into the dark and smoked cigarettes. BLUE BOUFFANT Often mistaken for '80s girls, women with blue bouffants are actually fiftyish waffle-house waitresses named Trixie who've worn their hair that way since they were 19. They are nurturing types. LONG, TOUSLED BLONDE HAIR WORN WITH BEAT-UP, BLACK-LEATHER JACKET AND SHOULDER BAG, VIEWED FROM BEHIND ON A BUSY DOWNTOWN STREET Several members of our panel warned that, almost without exception, this blonde will turn out to be a 27-year old heroin dealer named Ramon. "You've really got to be careful about these things," says Bill, an investment counselor. "You can see a beautiful girl walking away from you at lunch hour, and you can run up behind her and say all kinds of embarassing things before you realize she's wearing a jock." SHORT, BLACK BOWL-CUTS You don't need a thesaurus to tell you these women are pert, spunky, vital, bouncing, vivacious and hard to keep up with on sidewalks. They don't give their hair much thought -- when it tickles their earlobes, they pop into one of those $6-a-cut places that look like burger King, zipping out in 12 minutes later without so much as a blowdry. If they are secretaries, they won't be for long. They keep running shoes in their big, functional purses, for striding to work and flashing out for quick salads at lunchtime -- they're jogging to the top while lazy old executives lounge in dark, woody downtown booths for two-hour, four-martini lunches. Former cheerleaders, even their names are quick -- Sue or Ann, rarely more than three letters to jot at the end of memos which, when put in motion, can saave companies millions in lost revenues. Somehow, the typical Ann has time for everything: a perfect apartment (mobile, oak-platform bed, Cuisinart), a pefect schedule (aerobics, business brunches, networking parties) and the perfect boyfriend (a novelist). But even the brightest star has a dark side, right? There must be SOMETHING wrong with her life, right? WRONG. THE MOUSSED BLONDE Driven in every area of life, they take out their aggressions each morning by glopping an entire canister of Tenax gel coiffant into their soft, pretty, flaxen hair, rendering it a concrete stalagmitic mess. Generally named Katherine, they tend to be attractive and meticulously groomed, to the point where they appear unapproachable. "I had an affair with one of those overmoussed blondes at work once," says Stan, a tax accountant. "She was hungry for power, just obsessive about it. We went out for drinks. She ordered martinis, explaining in minute detail how they should be prepared. At dinner she managed to wolf down her food while still appearing feminine. After a week or so of this, she finally let go one night and released all her pent-up tensions. I had to grip the mattress for six hours or I might have been killed." Stan broke it off when his Katherine began ordering his life as aggressively as she set her hair. "I felt like she was taking a huge mousse gun and hosing down my apartment, my body, everything," Stan says. "I wanted to be my own man -- so I started dating her secretary." METALLIIC GREEN MOHAWK, SOAKED IN LACQUER TO MAKE IT STAND STRAIGHT UP Usually named Anthrax, these young women are likely to have in their purses two fake IDs, a bottle of amyl nitrate, a pouch of Pakistani clove cigarettes, a Dead Kennedys cassette, Vampyre Blood, a silk scarf shoplifted earlier in the day and several knives. Anthrax types have passionate political convictions, though they never utilize their right to express them in free elections, since they're rarely awake by the time polls close at 7 p.m. They also tend to be 15 years old, which makes them unattractive candidates for serious, lifelong commitments. "Anthrax girls are fine for flings," says Carl, an art director, from his hospital bed at St. Paul's Hospital in Dallas. "But don't try to press them into deepening your relationshipo,. All I did ws ask mine whether I could borrow her skateboard sometime, and she did THIS." ________________________________________________________________________________ Reprinted without Permission from Mademoiselle Magazine, December 1985