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