The Houston Chronicle has a review of a new book, The Roots of Desire, which book purports to be about “The Myth, Meaning, and Sexual Power of Red Hair”.
The review starts out strong, making me think I need to buy this book:
Redheads make up only 2 percent of the American population. I would have guessed more. But that just goes to show how much symbolic freight red hair carries, far more than attaches to brunet hair or even to the much-coveted blond. Redheads are passionate, fiery, strong-willed, maybe a little dangerous, maybe a little bad. They loom disproportionately large on the cultural landscape.
Now, I may currently be more of a pink-head than a red-head, but let’s ignore that. “…maybe a little dangerous, maybe a little bad”. I like that. It makes me feel like Lady Caroline Lamb would write interesting things about me in her diaries.
I probably should have stopped reading the review there, because a little later on things get much less positive for my ego:
As Roach rightly observes, red hair’s meaning divides — radically — along gender lines. In men, red hair is bad news, not just ugly but slightly contemptible. Opie had red hair. Bozo the Clown had red hair. In Shakespeare’s day Shylock was played in a red wig in order to paint him risible as well as evil, according to Roach.
Red-haired men nowadays are commonly viewed as “diminished beings, lesser than other men and certainly less powerful than their female counterparts,” the author writes. Ouch.
Is that true? If it is the conventional wisdom is that red-headed men are “lesser than other men”, then I’ve been living in a bubble of ignorant bliss for 32 years now.
My ego may never recover.
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