Gentleman prefer blondes (but marry brunettes), women prefer their men tall dark and handsome. There's a band called four non-blondes and an entire genre of jokes dedicated to mocking blondes as dumb and slutty. Dyeing your hair blonde, for a woman, falls in the same category as wearing pink-it's somewhat looked down upon in hip, educated circles, unless you're doing the rockabilly thing. Dying your hair blonde, for a man, makes you a vampire, a rock star, or just plain evil. Why is blondeness so contreversial? So desirable and yet so loathesome? Is blondeness so rife with symbolism that it's no longer just a hair color? And why do I feel like Carrie Bradshaw (a blonde), typing this?
This topic entered my mind yesterday when I was at a book store and saw a copy of "The Silver Kiss" by Annette Curtis Klaus, my favorite book from when I was 12 years old.
It's a book about a lonely teenage girl who falls in love with a smoking hot, vaguely punkish, and yes, platinum blonde vampire boy named Simon. There were other hot, vaguely evil blondes who passed through my life in formative years and gave me a taste for blonde men:
Billy Idol (rock star)
David Bowie (rock star)
James Spader (evil actor)
Rutger Hauer (evil German android?)
Kiefer Sutherland (vampire)
although, ironically the dude I've been messing around with lately looks more like this:
Corey Feldman (and he's way hot).
I blame transitioning into puberty in the late 80's/early 90's for my fascination with blonde men. Worse yet, my first crush (at age 3?) was this man:
Ricky Schroeder, who is neither vampire, rock god, nor evil but whatever, I was three.
It bears mentioning that around the same time I was reading the silver kiss, I had it bad for Billy Idol (that was 1992, but I was lusting for the 1986 edition of Billy Idol and had even cut a picture of him out of one of my sister's old seventeen magazines and hung it in my locker, because this was before the internet). It also didn't hurt that my mom's boyfriend had a son who was nineteen and notoriously slutty who looked like a taller version of Billy Idol and was probably the first dude I fantasized about while jilling off. Howard Butler, it saddens me that I don't have any pictures of you handy for this blog post.
It amazes me that blonde men are constantly overlooked as sex symbols in our current age (I guess it figures, that the height of the blonde man would be the decadent and vaguely evil 80's), and that Hollywood hasn't had any really smokin' platinum blonde starlets since the era of Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe (Katherine Heigl and Gwyneth Paltrow are too girl next door for my tastes).
As for me, I am blonde by birth:
(the last time I rocked my natural color, 5 years ago)
But I've been platinum by choice for a while now:
And I seriously think my choice to be platinum blonde is due to my obsession with blonde boys, just like how I lift weights because I think defined arms are hot (on dudes). I suppose that's some sort of dysphoria, emulating what I think is sexy in the opposite sex?
But hey, sometimes it works:
(that's me being Bowie)
(and Billy Idol, for Halloween!)
