Blonde-haired stereotypes

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Blonde hair is the starting point for a variety of cultural interpretations ( Amber Heard , 2009)

Under the heading Blond-haired stereotypes , several can topoi and stereotypes summarize that in the cultures of the Western world on blond-haired people - in particular women blonde ( " Blondes are based -"). These include the stereotypes of "blond innocence ", the "blond poison", the "blond sex bomb ", the "cool blond", the "dangerous blond" and the blonde jokes.

Blonde angel

Madonna and Baby Jesus ( Rubens , 17th century). In European painting, too, “blond” traditionally stands for innocence and gentleness.

Since almost all blondes develop a darker shade with increasing age, “blond” is inevitably associated with youthfulness. As a result, it often also stands for purity, innocence, virginity and virtue. These associations are then also transferred to cultural areas, for example most fairytale princesses (with the exception of Snow White ), fairies , angels and Barbie dolls are depicted as blond.

As early as the 1910s , Mary Pickford repeatedly represented the blonde innocence in Hollywood cinema, who had to be protected and saved from evil attacks. In Jean Cocteau's fairytale film La Belle et la Bête (1946, with Josette Day ), the good-hearted blonde girl falls into the hands of a beast - a motif that experienced its quirkiest variation in Merian C. Cooper's King Kong (1933, with Fay Wray ). A more modern version was the sunny, but prudish type of woman who Doris Day embodied in many of her films, for example where she had to defend herself against the frivolous offers from Rock Hudson .

The fact that the stereotypical connection between blond hair and naivety does not have to be restricted to women is shown by B. George Pal's sci-fi film The Time Machine (1960); in this film appear the Eloi , a people living in a kind of Eden of ideal, but ignorant, light-blond youths of both sexes.

Other associations that were already widely associated with blondes before the 20th century include gentleness, sentimentality and depth of mind. The literary scholar Marina Warner has speculated that being blond - as well as being fair-skinned - is associated with being indoors, both literally and metaphorically. In literature and in film, pure, deep blondes are often contrasted with sensual, cultured brunettes, as in Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe (1820), which was filmed in 1952 under the same title with Joan Fontaine and Elizabeth Taylor . The brunette is the forbidden object that seduces the male hero to venture out into the world; the blonde, on the other hand, is the port to which he returns. In American literature, this image gave rise to the stereotype of the All-American girl in the second half of the 19th century . The motif of the blonde rivaling a brunette for a man can be found in popular media to this day.

The cliché of the “blond angel” also continues to the present day. The word made headlines in the international press in 2013 when police officers in Greece discovered a blonde, blue-eyed preschool girl raised as a child by her apparently unrelated Roma parents. While the foster parents' lawyer stated that the couple raised the child abandoned by their birth mother out of pity, the press had talked about child robbery.

Blond hair from a racial perspective

Various authors have also interpreted blondness as an ideal of racist societies. For example, the film theorist Richard Dyer wrote in 1986: “ Being blond , especially platinum ( peroxide ) blond, is the ultimate sign of whiteness .” Even in Victorian England , blond hair was regarded as the Saxon legacy , with which the British have been since the Napoleonic Identified wars far more strongly than with their - now perceived as barbaric - Norman heritage.

Authors such as Gobineau founded the Aryan myth in the 19th century, a race theory that traced light skin and blond hair back to the descent from a noble “ Aryan ” conqueror and cultured people and associated it with spiritual and spiritual superiority. In his work on the genealogy of morality , Nietzsche coined the word " blond beast " in 1887 . Finally, under National Socialism, the Aryan myth provided the justification for the Holocaust .

Confident blondes

Around the same time as the stereotype of blond innocence, a second type of blond appeared in literature, which was diametrically opposed to the pure, soulful blond. In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), the virtuous heroine of the title was contrasted with a blonde cousin Georgiana Reed - a spoiled, impudent woman. Brontë's sister Emily did a similar thing in Wuthering Heights (1847), introducing stubborn and unfriendly Cathy Linton as a blonde. William Thackerays then created in his novel Vanity Fair (1847/1848) for the first time a blonde female main character, Becky Sharp, who was not innocent and lovely, but on the contrary, highly complex, sexy, clever, ambitious and guilty. Both the Brontë and Thackeray sisters despised the literary cliché of the lovely blonde, admired only for her beauty. The Brontës deliberately created dark-haired heroines who were more attractive than their blonde counterparts, not because of their beauty, but because of their intelligence and talent. Thackeray's novel was a direct response to Scott's Ivanhoe .

Simone Signoret embodied a similar type of sinner as Becky Sharp in 1952 in Jacques Becker's jealous drama Casque d'or .

Dangerous blondes

Adam and Eve ( Antonio Molinari , 1701/1704)
Hedda Vernon, the Loni in Hubert Moest's film Blondes Gift

Malicious blondes had existed in literature and painting even before Thackeray and also before the Brontës, for example in Coleridge's famous ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798):

Her mouth is red; she looks freely;
Her hair is golden in waves;
Her skin is white, like leprosy!
It's night time, the bride of the dead, makes
human blood so cold!

In Germany, Paul Langenscheidt published a novel Blondes Gift in 1912 , which was filmed in 1919 under the same title with Hedda Vernon ; The title character was a femme fatale who carelessly ruined several men. Vernon was one of the first film actresses to have her hair bleached hydrogen blonde. The process was developed by Eugène Schueller in France in 1907 .

The racy, daring type of woman had always been embodied there by dark-haired actresses such as Alla Nazimova , Theda Bara and Gloria Swanson (in German-speaking countries: Fern Andra and Pola Negri ). In the United States, De Sacia Mooers ( The Blonde Vampire , 1922) and Laura La Plante ( The Dangerous Blonde , 1924) appeared as dangerous blondes. In Germany, Brigitte Helm appeared in Henrik Galeen's horror film Alraune (1928) as a light-blonde whore. In 1930, the medium-blonde Marlene Dietrich followed in The Blue Angel .

The type of femme fatale went down in Hollywood with the film noir in the 1940s . One of the last blonde femme fatale actresses was Barbara Stanwyck with a blonde wig in Woman Without a Conscience (1944).

It was only New Hollywood that brought dangerous blondes to the screen again: Faye Dunaway's appearance in Arthur Penn's gangster film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) established the type of blonde who is not only intelligent, refined and sexy, but also full of criminal energy. This was followed by Glenn Close ( Fatal Attraction , 1987) and Sharon Stone ( Basic Instinct , 1992).

Gold digger and "sluts next door"

In the United States, Jean Harlow, who was dyed peroxide, had her career breakthrough in 1930 in Howard Hughes ' war adventure Hellflieger . Films like Platinum Blonde (1931) and Bombshell (1933) followed later . Harlow is considered to be the first film actress who was typecasting to the type of an energetic, down-to-earth, tongue-in-cheek blonde with overwhelming sex appeal. Her characters were not dangerous seductresses, but rather of the gold digger type (ambitious girl looking for a rich man) or “slut next door”. Both Harlow and Mae West , who soon followed her, displayed an unconventionally offensive female sexuality. The English noun blonde ("blonde") took on a connotation of "sexy" at this time.

The American pop star Madonna has tried again and again to redefine “blonde” culturally , for example in her Blond Ambition Tour (1990).

Candace Bushnell , author of the book for the television series Sex and the City , published an episodic novel Four Blondes in 2001 , in which she tells the stories of four modern gold diggers.

Blonde sex bombs

Marilyn Monroe (serigraphy by James Gill)

Anita Loos , who published a novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1925, is considered to be the "inventor" of the stereotype of the naive, superficial blonde . A silent film version from 1928 with Ruth Taylor in the lead role is considered lost. In 1949 the material was adapted as a musical and filmed in this form in 1953 by 20th Century Fox with Marilyn Monroe in the role of Lorelei Lee . Monroe, who had played a calculating femme fatale in Henry Hathaway's Niagara , became the quintessential sex symbol of white America with this appearance in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , and from then on always appeared in her most successful films as a blonde naive , who made her sensational sexual charisma offered with the innocence of a child. Unlike the dream women who have represented actresses like Rita Hayworth and Elizabeth Taylor , Monroe's characters appeared highly needy, welcoming, and approachable, and her male partners ( Tommy Noonan , David Wayne , Tony Curtis ) represented average types, especially in the box office. with which any male viewer could easily identify. Actors like Jayne Mansfield , Mamie van Doren and Barbara Lang tried to imitate Monroe's recipe for success. In the 1950s United States, the naive blonde bombshell stereotype was inextricably linked with luscious breasts.

Hair color and glamor

Lauren Bacall (1944)

In the “Golden Age of Hollywood” (1917–1960) the concept of glamor , a kind of magical enchantment, arose from the aesthetic exaggeration of female film stars in particular. Glamor requires expensive and elegant clothing, precious jewelry, careful makeup and lavishly treated and well-groomed hair. Although many “Hollywood goddesses” were red or dark haired ( Claudette Colbert , Vivien Leigh , Rita Hayworth , Elizabeth Taylor ), blonde - particularly hydrogen blonde - was the hair color associated with glamorous movie stars. Well-known examples were - apart from the "sex bombs" of the 1930s and 1950s - Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo , Carole Lombard , Joan Fontaine , Lana Turner , Lauren Bacall , Anita Ekberg , Brigitte Bardot and Julie Christie . In the current jargon such women are also referred to as " It-Girls ".

The pop-art artist Andy Warhol , who liked to play with the cultural codes of his time (here: hydrogen-blonde hair as a code for glamor), wore a mostly hydrogen-blonde wig since the 1950s.

"Hitchcock Blondes"

Alfred Hitchcock presented in his thrillers since 1935 a type of blonde female main characters who were cultivated and controlled in an elegant and refined way, but hidden unscrupulousness, courage and an unconventionally offensive sexuality beneath their external lovely coolness and untouchability; for example in Hitchcock's masterpiece North by Northwest , in which Eva Marie Saint (as agent Eve Kendall) maneuvers the gangster-chased Cary Grant (as Roger Thornhill) to protect him, much to his surprise, in her sleeping car compartment. Early "Hitchcock blondes" were Madeleine Carroll and Ingrid Bergman . Hitchcock generally preferred subtle, complex characters, and from 1954 onwards, in response to films like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), featured "cool blondes" like Grace Kelly , Kim Novak , Janet Leigh and Tippi Hedren in almost all of his films. The type of "cool blonde" was not entirely Hitchcock's invention. B. had a precursor with Marlene Dietrich in the 1930s.

Blonde jokes

The valley girl stereotype spread throughout the United States in the early 1980s; the stereotype connected the image of young women belonging to the upper middle class with the idea that they spoke a characteristic slang common in the San Fernando Valley and saw their meaning in shopping and fashion. After actresses like Carol Wayne and Goldie Hawn repeatedly played giggling, naive blondes, in the late 1980s in North America - and soon in Western and Central Europe too - blonde jokes began to emerge based on the strongly sexist stereotype that blond-haired young women were naive , unintelligent and interested in nothing but ( promiscuous ) sex. Many American blonde jokes were reformulated Sorority girl jokes (jokes about members of female students' associations ) and Essex girl jokes (jokes about young women from Essex , is attributed those stereotypical promiscuity and lack of intelligence). Others were based on older jokes about "stupid Swedes" or "stupid Poles". In the German-speaking area, East Frisian and manta ray jokes were previously circulated. In response to the stereotype, films such as Legally Blonde (2001) and self-productions such as Paris Hilton's were made . Country singer Dolly Parton had already appeared in 1967 with an ironic song Dumb Blonde .

In American slang, stupid blondes are also known as " bimbos ". The fact that blond hair is not only associated with stupidity among women, at least in North America , can be seen in the stereotype of the surfer dude , a blond young man who typically lives in California and who has little on his mind besides surfing . In addition, the stereotypes of the dumb jock (athlete type with high popularity, but low intelligence) and the hick or redneck (social loser in a rural living environment with white skin color, stubbornly conservative values ​​and without education) also exist in the USA, although the hair color doesn't matter.

Ironizing and deconstructing the dumb blonde stereotype

“While a self-deprecating tone was heard in the films in Monroe's role in Some Like It Hot , the stereotype of the stupid blonde is deconstructed virtuously in the comedy Legally Blonde (2001), as the blonde main character Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) outwardly all of them Corresponds to clichés, but at the same time completed her law degree at Harvard with great intelligence.

Among the German celebrities try u. a. Daniela Katzenberger on a similar contradicting strategy in her biography Be smart, act stupid (2011). She also uses the stereotype of the hydrogen-blonde sex bomb with romantic prudish family ideals. "

documentary

  • The color blonde - cultural history of a hair color. Documentary, 90 min., Director: Albert Knechtel, Arte . Germany 2006.

literature

  • Ralf Junkerjürgen: Hair colors. A cultural history in Europe since antiquity. Böhlau, Cologne et al. 2009, ISBN 978-3-412-20392-4 .
  • Kathy Phillips: Blonde. Glamor, glamor and bright minds. Translated from the English by Ulrike Becker. Nicolai, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-87584-817-9 .
  • Joanna Pitman: On Blondes. Bloomsbury, New York / London 2004, ISBN 1-58234-402-7 (English).
  • Ellen Tremper: I'm No Angel. The Blonde in Fiction and Film. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville / London 2006, ISBN 978-0-8139-2521-9 (English).
  • Thilo Wydra: Hitchcock's Blondes. Invention of a type of woman. Schirmer / Mosel, Munich 2018, ISBN 978-3-8296-0835-0 .

Individual evidence

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  2. ↑ Joanna Pitman: On Blondes . Bloomsbury, New York / London 2004, ISBN 1-58234-402-7 , pp. 5 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  3. ↑ Kathy Phillips: Blond. Glamor, glamor and bright minds . Nicolai, Berlin 1999, ISBN 978-3-87584-817-5 , pp. 27 ff .
  4. ↑ Joanna Pitman: On Blondes . Bloomsbury, New York / London 2004, ISBN 1-58234-402-7 , pp. 132 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
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