By David Futrelle
Do you want to convince small children that you’re some kind of magical being, while at the same time repelling the absolute worst men in the world? This blurry screenshot from Tumblr might have the answer for you!
I think Amby Jane is onto something here. As anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time already knows, misogynistic douchebros have a lot of strangely intense feelings about women’s hair. They all seem to love long hair, hate short hair, and grow positively apoplectic when women dye their hair “unnatural” colors (most of which are actually perfectly natural).
“Always in search of the next way to destroy their nature-given beauty, Western females have begun to dye their hair at alarming rates,” warned the pseudonymous Winston Smith on Return of Kings, back when that blog was still a going concern
It has to be stopped. …
[A] girl having hair dyed with a non-traditional color is a leading indicator of instability, mental illness, and an inability to function within a healthy relationship.
In Smith’s backwards brain, women with brightly-colored hair aren’t just unattractive to him; they’re objectively ugly, according to SCIENCE.
“[H]umans have hard-wired attraction preferences for the physical appearance of their mates,” he asserted.
In the same way that we are uncontrollably disgusted with the sight of an obese person, our lizard hindbrains make a split-second judgment against women with dyed hair because unnatural looking hair (whether it’s short, falling out, or unnaturally colored) was a symptom of disease and infirmity in our ancestral habitat.
These guys love making up stories and calling them science. There are plenty of people who are not only not “uncontrollably disgusted” by fat people; they actually prefer their partners plump. And I rather doubt there were a lot of blue-haired diseased people in our species’ environment of evolutionary adaptation, given that there is literally no disease out there that turns people’s hair blue, unless I slept through that day in biology class.
Meanwhile, the self-described Men’s Human Rights Activists over on A Voice for Men are convinced that blue hair is enough of a threat to the fundamental rights of men that they created a special tag for it: “Sluts With Blue Hair.”
Amazing human rights advocacy there, fellas!
It isn’t just Return of Kings writers who think that science backs up their hatred of blue haired women. So-called Red Pilled dudes regularly compare dyed hair to the natural adaptation called “aposematism,” in which potential prey animals warn predators through signals like brightly colored skin that eating them won’t be much fun.
In a discussion several months ago in the Ask The Red Pill subreddit, a Red Piller called VasiliyZaitzev explained that he sees brightly dyed hair
as a form of aposematism, in much the same way the certain coloration on frogs warns predators that the frog is poisonous.
Even guys who claim to be “Going Their Own Way” away from women get angry when these women dye their hair. In the MGTOW2 subreddit a month ago, a guy calling himself Robotmasher argued that dyed hair is a
signal to you that you should keep a healthy distance from them, and not give them any attention. They are in essence doing you a favor.
None of these guys seem to realize what a massive self-own this argument is. If blue hair is a form of aposematism designed to ward off predators, and it wards you off, what exactly does that imply about you?
As a male-human-predator-repeller, dyed hair seems to be doing the trick, at least to some extent, in that it really does seem to scare off the sorts of guys who turn to sites like Return of Kings and the various Red Pill subreddits for advice about women.
In a recent discussion of the blue hair strategy in the WitchesVsPatriarchy subreddit — yes, this is a thing — a number of women noted that the brightly-dyed hair thing was working for them both as a predator-repeller and a child-delighter.
“When I added a chunk of purple to my (already short) hair, I got fewer catcalls AND my niece is obsessed with it, so, yes,” wrote a Redditor called pamplemouss.
“I’ve had fewer catcalls, but lots more kind compliments,” wrote a self-described Sapphic Witch with blue hair.
And, of course, little girls everywhere stare in awe at me, then immediately ask their parents if they can have hair like mine.
Alas, the strategy is not without some possible downsides. Several women in the WitchesVsPatriarchy discussion reported that while they repel the dudebro they now got more creepy attention from “guys who seem to almost fetishize ” brightly-colored hair.
“Do not recommend burgundy/purple if you want men to leave you the fuck alone,” wrote one annoyed hair-dyer.
I recently dyed my hair and I’ve gotten so many freaking men using it as a jumping off point. Some perfectly polite and pleasant, some definitely not so. But whatevs, I like this color and I guess cat calls aren’t gonna stop me?
Other women reported that men now came up to them to pester them about their hair. “When I had pink hair,” wrote rileyfriley,
I didn’t get hit on hardly at all, but every man felt the need to tell me that men don’t like weird colored hair. So it was an added bonus that I routine got to tell men that women don’t like when they speak.
So the blue hair thing is far from a perfect solution, at least for women who want to avoid harassment from men entirely. But if your aim is to piss off some of the worst dudes in the world, dying your hair blue will almost certainly do the trick.
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I clicked through to the Return of Kings (although, as it turns out, the kings returned and then disappeared again — sob) and found this ad:
These Hotties Are Crazy About Mature Your City Men
I suppose I could be called mature. I’m definitely not a man. But I’m certainly in my city! Two out of three is pretty good.
Bring on the hotties! I hear they’re crazy about me — as in head over heels in love! It’s nice to be appreciated.
Ooooooo “biology”! That´s a favorite of mine, here comes Gatecrasher!
I must admit that I never took the Dudebro Biology course, but I have understood that studying or generally reading up on topics are for suckers anyway.
If I have understood this version of biology correctly it works like this:
1. Take an opinion you already have. Never forget that your opinions are always super important!
2. Use you creativity to make a (more or less) plausible evolutionary explanation for your opinion.
3. Your opinion is a universal Fact, supported by SCIENCE.
Nice! Sounds like fun, I want to try to, using my own opinions about stuff!
1. I think people with overweight can be very beautiful.
2. In the stone age, there were likely to be times with little or no food. People with energy efficiently stored in their bodies were more likely to survive, and the children with these good energy storing-genes, too.
3. It is objectively beautiful to be overweight.
1. I think dyed and/or short hair looks nice.
2. Back in the days only rich people (or high ranking tribe members) had the time and resources to spend/waste on making advanced hair styles. Surely a cave man would go for the woman with resources in such an abundance! Or vice versa. Lots of resources = lots of babies with high chances of survival.
3. Dyed and/or short hair is objectively beautiful. Who knew?
1. Hm, but isn’t it a good thing to be able to ward of predators?
2. If I where a cave man, I would definitely want to mate with the woman with blue hair, to give my children her amazing defense colours and thus increasing their chances of survival!
3. I was right AGAIN.
I really like this. It is a game you win every time.
Also, like David said, it is quite interesting that they identify themselves with the predators, not as a fellow animal looking for a mate.
I dyed my short hair blue back in 2017 as a way to celebrate surviving my hemorrhagic stroke the year before. Mr. Parasol thought it was neat. I got several compliments from women my age, and my friends were all supportive.
I haven’t dyed it again, largely because I want lower-maintenance hair.
Apart from all the other objections, why should your split-second lizard impression be the end of the story? There you are, sunning yourself on a rock or something, when you spot blue hair. Your lizard hindbrain immediately pings “ugh, poison! Scuttle away!”. But then your higher functions catch up, and say “no, that’s someone with the self-confidence to stand out from the crowd, and that’s kinda hot”.
But, ok, if you function only at the lizard level, continue your search for a woman who looks like a tasty fly.
@Gatecrasher
Those are some brilliant arguments!
Let’s see how I do:
1. I really, really enjoy alarming manospherians.
2. It’s fun to alarm manospherians!
3. I resolve to step up my game of Alarming Manospherians in the New Year.
Uh-oh, it looks like my argument isn’t coherent. Still, it’s more logical than anything any manospherian has ever written.
Therefore I too was right!
I’m willing to bet these turds just love it when a woman bleaches her hair blond. Blond is a totally unnatural hair color for most people on the planet.
I’m reminded of a co-worker who loved it when his wife got blond streaks in her light brown hair. He said it turned him on.
All this talk about Technicolor hair is pushing me closer towards dyeing my own hair. I’ve got all the supplies at the ready. I’m only lacking the nerve. Why should young people have all the fun? I’m tending towards lipstick red fading into pink.
What if guys were to wear blue hair, or even sea green hair? How would they react?
@rv97:
Let me guess: it would be taken as another example of feminism destroying western civilisation by creating emasculated beta cucks.
@Alan
It’s been a while since my last bio course, but I believe it goes something like this: Yes, some of the colorful critters will get eaten, but some of them will just get bitten and survive. Or the colorful critters will have reproduced before they are attacked, because natural selection isn’t about whether you-the-individual survives to a ripe old age. Natural selection “cares” about you living long enough to reproduce and thus contribute to your species.
Funny how these dudes talk about women with bright hair being “poisonous” when they likely wouldn’t go down on a woman with natural colored hair either.
In the immortal words of Destiny’s Child:
I don’t want no scrub
A scrub is a guy that can’t get no love from me
Hangin’ out the passenger side
Of his best friend’s ride
Tryin’ to holla at me
Also, it’ll be a herd thing I guess – any predators who eat one poisonous snack and survive a subsequent period of feeling like death warmed up will avoid eating the same kind of snack again, so the poisonous species as a whole benefits even if a few individuals got chomped.
VP, is that because being poisonous also goes hand-in-hand with tasting foul? So predators would be less likely to continue chomping after the first bite (as well as categorising your entire species as 0/10 would not chomp again), and so more of the prey species might survive for that reason too, is that how it goes?
I just think it’s awesome that in Star Trek Online that there are roughly 8000 styling options for short hair and only about 3 for long hair (not counting ponytails and hair buns).
That’s right, Number One, you will now wear a neon pink shaved mohawk and like it and matching VISOR and like it!
Just wish the other factions had more variety. It did kinda stretch credulity that every Romulan had exactly the same bowl cut.
http://www.startrek.com/legacy_media/images/200303/tng-240-troi-finds-herself-amo/320×240.jpg
I can already see the reaction of alt-Right Picard:
“I don’t know if I trust her, Number One… she has short hair…..”
@opposablethumbs
Yeah, some poisons either taste bad or give a chemical burn effect. Pain is a great motivation to stop eating whatever unpleasant thing you’re tasting.
(Is there a real biologist in the house who can speak with more authority on the topic?)
We need more cats… ROYAL cats!!!
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2019/01/02/larry-the-cat-downing-street-brexit-anna-stewart-pkg-vpx.cnn
…
Hey, if it works…. I would contend, however, that this fashion statement will manifest itself in sexual selection. If the “look” hinders the potential for reproduction, we will see less of it. If the “look” enables reproduction, we will begin to see babies born with blue, green, even pastel-hued hair…. No, wait, that’s not how any of this works….
…
but… I don’t have enough hair…. 🙁
I’m only going to dip a toe into the issue of whom I believe would be fun to eat vs whom I would like to take out to eat vis-a-vis dyed hair. I don’t believe I ever did identify with the predators, but in any case, I’m sure I would really, really suck at predation…. I live in a college town. Ok, I live in a rich, white, liberal (“white liberal”, really) expensive college town, and the sheer number of young, conventionally attractive female-identifying people is overwhelming, so… predator’s paradise, here. A lot of those people have “unnaturally dyed” their hair, and if it’s for protection from being eaten… it ain’t workin’ on me. Ok, I’ve dug way deeper into this end of the subject than I’m comfortable with…. I’d rather ask if the woman with the burgundy hair with green highlights wants to go to the coffee shop and talk about paleoanthropogy and leftist politics….
Victorious Parasol and opposablethumbs have the general idea right, but natural selection doesn’t give a shit about the individual benefitting their species. Or more formally, it just can’t work that way, because if a feature is not an individual advantage – in terms of the number of relatives the individual is likely to have in subsequent generations – natural selection will not tend to increase the prevalence of that feature within the species, however much it would benefit the species if all members had it. Since manufacturing a poison is likely to have some metabolic cost, if “benefit to the species” were the only benefit, natural selection would probably act against manufacturing it.
It’s usually much more productive to think about within-species competition (but see below for a caveat). In that framework, there are two possible advantages of being poisonous:
1) If the predator just manages to nip off a small bit of you, but you survive and it gets sick – or just doesn’t like the taste (most natural poisons taste bitter), it will avoid trying to eat you in future.
2) Even if it gets you, members of your species it encounters in future are more likely than the average species member to be close relatives of yours, just because your relatives will tend to live close by.
Both these effects will tend to increase the prevalence of the feature (being poisonous) within the species.
Once you are poisonous, it’s clearly beneficial to be easily recognised (and conversely, if you’re both easily recognised and easily caught, you’d damn well better be poisonous). The two features probably evolve together.
The advantages of aposematic colouration are presumably greatly enhanced if your main predators are from species that teach their young what is and is not suitable prey.
The caveat mentioned above: it could be that species in which it is individually advantageous to be poisonous are less likely to become extinct than otherwise similar species in which it isn’t. But the individual advantage has to be present for this even to be a possibility.
A correction to my last post: if you’re both easily recognised and easily caught, you’d damn well better be poisonous, or look very much like something that is. A lot of poisonous species have mimic species which closely resemble them – in some mimic species, there are even variants within the population that mimic different models!
Maybe not blue hair, but I’m pretty sure messing around with pigments was one of the earliest human things? So early humans would understand things not being the colours they are in nature juuuuuust fine.
When I was living as a woman I never dared do anything to my hair. Since transitioning I’ve loved shaving it to the scalp every summer, and this year I decided to dye it in the football team’s colours for the new season. Got lots of comments from friends, but not much in the way of cat-calling unless you count some horrible little girl who knows my daughter saying I looked like a clown
@Weird Eddie: I like Larry, but it’s Palmerston who’s captured my heart. I think it’s so funny* that there’s a UK government employee – I assume – opening the front door to number 10 when Larry wants to go in or out. I would say the White House should have a Chief Mouser, too, but Not. At. This. Time.
*No offense to any UK citizens.
@ Nicholas C Kiddle:
No doubt! And, while behavior is one of the harder elements to document (doesn’t fossilize well…), my reading has led me to opine that this pigmentation was being used waaayyy before the patriarchy social mutation spread…. Probably for spiritual use, then later, when such fashion started to become associated with social status, it was hijacked for sexual selection.
@ Dormousing:
We have a chief with the brains of a mouse… does that count?
@Weird Eddie: You have a point.
Biology major here.
Everyone here has pretty much ninja’d me on poisonous animals, but a thought occurs. Being poisonous need not be a metabolic cost if the toxicity is a ‘side effect’ of the species’ normal metabolism, ie there are metabolites normally present in the species which just happen to be poisonous to predators. Can’t name any examples at the moment though.
This sounds like one of those alarmist, direct-to-amygdala headlines: KILLER BEES HEADED FOR U.S.! IMMIGRANT CARAVAN BRINGING UNSPECIFIED CRIMES AND DISEASES! WOMAN ARE DECIDING TO EXERCISE BODILY AUTONOMY!
And now he sounds like the villain in a Rankin-Bass Christmas special.
Of course, it doesn’t bother these guys that Fox News anchors dye their hair blond, or that their hallowed president has a distinctly fake tangerine hue, or that humans have been shaving, plucking, ornamenting, and dying their hair for thousands of years (maybe even longer). It’s one of the few physical characteristics that can be changed easily, so why wouldn’t people want to tinker with it?
No, they’re mad because dyed hair makes it harder for them to evaluate feeeemales like cattle and make snap judgments about their fertility.
@Moggie:
But don’t forget, if it weren’t for these Hyper-Rational Alpha Male Saviors, we’d all still be sitting around picking grubs out of the mud with no White Civilization™ in sight….and…..um…..
Wait, are animal instincts good or bad?
(Disclaimer: not a biologist, but do have a science degree with some upper level biology.)
A lot of evolutionary biology is just just-so stories that eventually get some coroborating evidence (or not), but here is an example for how aposematism *might* evolve: You have a delicious green frog species. Some of the dgf’s start producing a toxin that makes them both yucky and slightly redish (mutation, or change in diet). Predators start picking out the green dgf’s, and passing over the red ones unless very hungry. Now the redder a frog you are, the better chance of living long enough to spawn. So each generation, there are less green dgf’s and more red ones. Eventually, virtually the entire population has the red/yucky trait, as all the green ones have been eaten or spawned with red partners. And they are likely to becone redder and yuckier over time, since being redder equals more likely predators will avoid you, equals more likelyhood of reaching spawing age. I suppose we’d have to start calling them red yucky frogs at some point, instead of delicious green frogs.
http://www.buywomencostumes.com/pimages/large/adult-monarch-butterfly-wings.jpg
“… like a chicken on a june bug….”
@moregeekthan
Like the samauri crab’s markings then?
Makes sense.
@Kevin
Another example of minimal metabolic cost would be the poison dart frog – it doesn’t create it’s toxins, but sequesters them from it’s diet. Much more efficient than building them itself.