'Blonde is beautiful' mystique
By Sheryl McCarthy
Thu Jan 19, 7:15 AM ET
USAToday
"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.