Seems that Carly Fiorina dissed Barbara Boxer’s hairstyle, which trivial incident is worthy of a front page article in the New York Times, which appears dedicated to the proposition that the incident is both totally trivial and monumentally important. Personally, trivial or not, I hope it hurts Fiorina, but I’m a partisan hack.
What I find interesting is the length some reporters will go to to get ridiculous “expert” quotes that prove or disprove the meme they are trying to push. What’s amazing about this one is that the reporter in question is a woman. Yet, take a gander at this:
“If you are dissing their hair, you are dissing their personality and their lifestyle,” said Billy Lowe, a celebrity stylist who owns a hair salon in Los Angeles. “It is probably the one thing a woman spends most of her time on every day. It’s always on their minds. Your hair is your personality.”
Of all the people in California to ask about women’s relationship to their hair, who does she pick: a high end hair stylist who makes a living off of narcissistic women who may, in fact, have the money and idle time to obsess about their hair. His customers self select. It’s all he sees so he extrapolates and tars all women.
I don’t know a single woman who obsesses about her hair. My wife is a woman. I can’t get inside her head, but judging by her words and actions she spends “most of her time” thinking about her job, her kids (they’re gone but she still worries), politics, her garden, organizing political functions, etc. Hair is unlikely to make the top 100 on her list of concerns, and I’m sure she’s not alone. Most women, as opposed to those who go to celebrity stylists, are struggling to get by in a world that the husbands of women who go to celebrity stylists have rigged against them. They don’t have time to think about their hair, which is one of the accidental benefits of being in the class of people who are getting screwed by the people who have wives who can afford to obsess about hair.
2 Comments