American Blondes

In an essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 43, “Fixation,” Arielle Gordon asks: do blondes really have more fun?

By Arielle GordonDecember 26, 2024

• LARB Lit

• Nonfiction

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 43: Fixation. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

¤

I NEVER KNOW HOW to react when someone tells me I “don’t look Jewish,” but at this point I have come to expect it, even in New York, even in 2024. I usually say “thanks” because it makes my charming conversationalist feel uncomfortable. They then say it “wasn’t meant to be a compliment,” or they simply look at me very nervously, waiting for the moment to pass. I guess maybe they expect me to respond, “Oh, my father is Irish, actually,” or “I was found in a basket on the banks of the River Nile and taken in by the pharaoh’s daughter, actually.” But my aunt Leslie took a DNA test a few years ago and it turned out she was 99.9 percent Ashkenazi Jewish. The disappointment in the air as she read the results was uneasy and thick; I think we all secretly wanted her to say that we were one-quarter Irish, actually; that we weren’t like the other families restlessly fidgeting in the pews of our shul; that we were in fact rescued from the River Nile.

I never ask, but maybe I should: what about me seems goyishe? Perhaps it is my ability to name the towns going up the crook of the shore in Barnstable County. Maybe it’s because I am of the belief that the nation-state of Israel is a settler-colonial project, or that I dated several gentiles in my early twenties (though both facts, to me, scream “Semitic” and “very cool”). I won’t entertain schnoz talk, but to clear the air, mine’s somewhere between pre-op Jennifer Grey and the American Girl doll Molly McIntire, so it’s impossible to tell if that’s the culprit. Instead, I think strangers often assume I believe Jesus Christ was the son of God because I am blonde.

So I am in fact Jewish, but something I have really come to appreciate about the Christian faith is the concept of hairshirts. They’re kind of a shade of blonde (somewhere between “sandy stone” and “butterscotch”), but mostly the hair is meant to be unseen, worn under clothing so that the fibers can scratch your skin all day and remind you of all the bad things you have done. I learned about them while writing, for this magazine, about the 15th-century Christian mystic Margery Kempe. She wore hairshirts and wept pretty much constantly; in the few paintings that do show her hair, she appears to be sporting a lovely shade of “honey” blonde—get me her colorist! Repentance was already on my mind because I had sinned during the period of עשרה ימי תשובה, the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when you are supposed to throw bread that represents your evildoing in the water so that the ducks can eat it. I couldn’t wear a hairshirt, though, because it would mess with my whole no-bra look. I searched for contemporary analogues. I decided to watch all of the movies of the film actress Tara Reid.

Tara Reid is not Jewish; she is of Irish, Scottish, Italian, French, Hungarian, and English descent, actually. She’s from Bergen County, the part of New Jersey where Meadow Soprano grew up. She is my height, and she is a Scorpio. She briefly dated the frontman of an Israeli psytrance band called Infected Mushroom. But mostly, Tara Reid is blonde. As a child, Reid acted in commercials for Jell-O and the Australian telecommunications company Dodo Services, so it’s easy to tell that she is an actual factual, dyed-in-the-womb blonde. It’s also easy to tell she is a natural blonde because in most of her movies, she acts very dumb. In Josie and the Pussycats (2001), there is a moment where we hear the internal monologue of the titular pussies in a moment of crisis. Here is Reid’s: “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands” (in the fan fiction I’ve written where I’ve inserted Margery Kempe into the Pussycats, Kempe looks up, looks at her hands, and continues weeping). I watched The Big Lebowski (1998), where Reid plays Bunny, an adult film actress living off of the titular Lebowski’s largesse. She is painting her toes when we first see her, and she asks the Dude to blow on them, because she “can’t blow that far.” A few minutes later, she offers to suck his cock for a thousand dollars. Somehow this feels like a step up. In Van Wilder (2002), Reid’s character is actually supposed to be very smart, but I really can’t recommend that movie to anyone.

I was hoping, through Reid, to find a reflection of my own experience. To me, blondeness has always felt like both a special power and a strange curse, a fountain of youth and beauty from which I once happily drank in greedy gulps, but which now runs drier each year. In pictures from my early childhood, I sit shrouded by a mess of golden threads wrangled into a butterfly clip or a hair elastic, beaming with my Chiclet teeth, eyes huge and searching and slightly glazed over with an undiagnosed astigmatism. In later photos, from around kindergarten, I am posed uncomfortably in my chair, mouth pursed tight like a scar, tiny metal eyeglasses akimbo, eyes searching desperately now, begging for a future where the pain I was already experiencing as a six-year-old reject would amount to something. I can’t look at many pictures from the years beyond that. I see the girls at school telling me to keep our after-school playdates a secret; I see myself screaming bloody murder, tripping up the stairs to my bedroom to avoid open palms on bare asses. Somehow the blondeness protected me from the brunettes—my school bullies, my terrifying mother. Somehow it lent a moral certainty to the whole situation, a Cinderella narrative that fortified my brittle sense of self. Surely, someone whose hair reflected the sunlight like that wasn’t meant for this stupid, provincial bullshit. Surely, it would all sum to something immense. Surely, there was a holiness in me manifesting through the expression of recessive traits atop my oversized head.

Have you seen Sharknado (2013)? The premise is pretty interesting: a tornado (actually, in the movie, it’s really a hurricane and then a tornado) full of living sharks terrorizes Santa Monica. The best way to kill these sharks is to shoot them with a high-powered gun. In all six films in the franchise, Reid plays April, the nagging ex-wife of bar owner and local surf legend Fin (Ian Ziering). When we first meet her, she is so stupid that she insists that she and their daughter live “100 miles” away from the ocean even though they live in Beverly Hills. When the sharks take to the city sewers, Fin comes to rescue her and brings his flirtatious barkeep, Nova (Cassie Scerbo), who is beautiful and has perfect aim. We are meant to understand that she is April’s foil, practical and loyal and 10 years her junior. And brunette.

Gentlemen prefer brunettes, actually. When I was at Jewish summer camp in 2005, I read a copy of Seventeen that said men responded in a survey that they wanted to sleep with blondes but wake up next to brown-haired women because they were “more sensible.” I wanted to cut my hair off after that, but the only girl who would talk to me at camp told me I’d look like a lesbian if I did, which was even worse than looking like a bimbo. I read Betty and Veronica and let out a big sigh of relief. Blonde Betty was a sweet and generous angel, while brunette Veronica was a privileged bitch! I didn’t fully understand why these two queens couldn’t get along, but I knew it had something to do with hair color.

Do you have a special talent? Mine was being blonde. When I walked into hair salons as a little girl, I’d always hear the same thing: “My clients would pay top dollar for natural highlights like yours!” The neighborhood ice cream truck guy, a really sweet old man of Slavic origins, always greeted me the same way when I ran up to his window to purchase a Choco Taco: “Hello, Blondie!”

Twenty years later, I’m doing my other special talent, hogging the spotlight at karaoke singing “Fuck the Pain Away,” originally made famous by a fellow blonde, the Canadian electroclash artist Peaches. Everyone looks pleased as punch as I wow everyone with my animated Sprechgesang: “Calling me all the time like Blondie / Check out my Chrissie behind.” What else is in the teaches of Peaches? Reinvention, perhaps—from Merrill Nisker to Peaches, from brunette schoolteacher to blonde bombshell. Perhaps she knew that in crossing the bleach-lined Rubicon to blondeness, she’d be cast aside as a floozy, a sidepiece—might as well embrace it, babe.

Sydney Sweeney cried when she went blonde. She wasn’t getting roles as a natural brunette, but her hair couldn’t handle the heat, and it immediately recoiled to half its length when the hairdresser removed all the layers of tinfoil. In a recent interview in The Strategist where she recommended items such as Kit Kat ice cream cones and an antioxidant drink with her face on it, Sweeney said she was no longer dying her hair, that she was “on a hair-health journey.” But who is Sweeney when she’s not blonde? Is she a bombshell? Is she a ditz? Is she an all-American girl? As if to preempt an inevitable slip from prominence, she wore a black wig to the Met Gala this year, and she did, indeed, look “unrecognizable.” Maybe sensing the negative reaction, her current shade is a well-blended blonde, her roots fighting a losing battle against her agents. For now, at least, she’s the everygirl—not so blonde as to enter into the “edgy” territory occupied by Debbie Harry or Amyl and the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor or Peaches, not so brunette as to fade completely from view.`

This isn’t why we broke up, but my ex-boyfriend was the first person to break the news to me that I was not blonde, actually. “I don’t know—like a light brunette?” I was horrified. I hadn’t been struck by such an existential threat since I learned that my family descended from poor, petty peasants, and not some grand lineage of German intellectuals as I’d originally thought. Instead, I was common: hair like dirt, built for the shtetl, destined for an average life. To be blonde is to be American. To be blonde is to be a woman. To be blonde is to be loved. I got my friend’s colorist. I made an appointment the very next day. Bleach, tinfoil, bleach, tinfoil. The hairdresser took off my wraps. I looked at the sunshine reflecting off my strands and I thought about my Slavic ice cream man. Blondie. I cried.

¤

Featured image: Titian. Venus and the Lute Player, ca. 1565–70. Munsey Fund, 1936, The Met Museum (36.29). CC0, metmuseum.org. Accessed November 19, 2024. Image has been cropped.