0:01 [SPEAKER_00]: Does blonde hair make you dumb? 0:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, actually blonde hair does make you dumb, but not in the way that you think. 0:09 [SPEAKER_00]: As you know the basic idea behind the dumb blonde stereotype, is just that women with blonde hair tend to be less intelligent and more air-headed than non-blons. 0:20 [SPEAKER_00]: They are uneducated eye candy, useless for anything more sophisticated than turning the heads of the men who desire them. 0:29 [SPEAKER_00]: While other women have to work for success, this mythical blog simply attaches herself to a successful man and giggles her way through life as dumb as a bag of hammers and as deep as a mud pup. 0:43 [SPEAKER_00]: The sophisticated version of this ridiculous stereotype. 0:47 [SPEAKER_00]: is that blondes are more naturally desirable and because of this have less incentive to develop other parts of their personalities. 0:56 [SPEAKER_00]: They basically coast through life with little to no effort, while men for money at them wanting nothing but fair-haired beauty in return. 1:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Some psychologists have suggested that some of the associations we make with blonde hair have to do with the fact that most white children are born blonde. 1:13 [SPEAKER_00]: which subconsciously invokes connotations of childlike innocence and underdeveloped intelligence, who knows. 1:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Historians tend to trace the idea back to a famous French prostitute from the 1770s, named Rosalie Dooth, who was sometimes referred to as the first dumb blonde. 1:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Dooth was famous for being gifted to the French king Louis Philippe, the first, when he was 16, by an uncle, in order to quote, teach him the facts of life. 1:45 [SPEAKER_00]: Young Philippe, unsurprisingly, became quite attached to his favorite tutor, and she was known to accompany him everywhere, even in the royal carriage. 1:55 [SPEAKER_00]: The French aristocracy, for all of its intolerance, found all of this supremely annoying. 2:02 [SPEAKER_00]: It was perfectly good in healthy, free man to have a mistress or two, but the thought of a notorious courtesan, constantly writing shotgun with the future king in broad daylight, on the public dime, was a bridge too far. 2:14 [SPEAKER_00]: The general public resented tooth and mocked her relentlessly. 2:18 [SPEAKER_00]: And they popping a play from that time called the curiosities of the Saint Germain's Fair, Rosalie, was lampooned as evacious, simple-ton, only capable of providing pleasure. 2:32 [SPEAKER_00]: She had an unusual habit of pausing for long periods of time before responding to questions. 2:38 [SPEAKER_00]: And then this play, she appeared confused and disoriented at the slightest provocation. 2:44 [SPEAKER_00]: In reality, this popular prostitute may have just been naturally quiet or socially awkward. 2:50 [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, it's also possible she was exceptionally unintelligent. 2:55 [SPEAKER_00]: But the work done used to just mean mute or unable to speak, and because Rosalie was born, 3:02 [SPEAKER_00]: This odd speech habit made her the first so-called dumb blonde in the history of western pop culture. 3:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Now whether a single French prostitute from the 18th century, however famous, has impacted the modern stereotype. 3:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody knows. 3:20 [SPEAKER_00]: The golden age of the dumb blonde, as we know her today, is probably the 1950s, when toe-headed bombshells like Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe in Mammy Van Doren, to Hollywood by Storm. 3:33 [SPEAKER_00]: These women, in an in-number of other fiction-way vacant icons, rose to fame not because of their acting abilities, but through beauty pageants, and talent agents who knew what men really wanted on the silver screen. 3:47 [SPEAKER_00]: This doesn't mean that they couldn't act, just that they're acting with secondary, to their ability to satisfy a very specific male fantasy. 3:56 [SPEAKER_00]: The simple-minded, subserving it to stun her. 3:59 [SPEAKER_00]: With two little personality to disturb the many fantasies, male fans might project upon her. 4:05 [SPEAKER_00]: Marilyn started out as a script girl, before he produced or realized the most attractive woman on his set was not a member of the cast. 4:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Mimi was discovered as a theater usher, and Mian's field was a beauty pageant dynasty of one, while in college at the University of Texas. 4:21 [SPEAKER_00]: She racked up a long effortless list of pageant titles, including some timeless honors, as Miss Magnusium Lamp, Miss Photoflash, and Miss Fire Prevention Week. 4:32 [SPEAKER_00]: She even got to the point where she was turning down titles that might hurt her image, like Miss Rocky Fort Cheese, and Miss Prime Rib. 4:41 [SPEAKER_00]: It may sound like I'm making those last two up, but they're real. 4:44 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1950, America was a spectacular, wonderfully problematic place, and one I'd like to revisit with a series sometime this year. 4:53 [SPEAKER_00]: But none of these women were actually dumb blondes, and Marilyn and Mansfield weren't blondes at all. 4:58 [SPEAKER_00]: They believed they're naturally dark hair in order to satisfy the biases of the industry. 5:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Again, this trope was simply a male mythology, and fantasy, not a female reality. 5:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Hollywood knew what men really wanted from female movie stars, and it wasn't character development, or the dimensional nuance of mid-century femininity, just good all-fashioned TNA. 5:24 [SPEAKER_00]: So, when Miss Magnesium lamp appeared in films, like two hot-to-handle, in promises promises, her role hardly changed from her beauty surged past, 5:36 [SPEAKER_00]: She was there to look pretty, and anything she might say was simply an excuse to keep her on screen. 5:43 [SPEAKER_00]: She was misprime-rated after all, perraiding herself as a slab of choice meat, not because she was one, but because, to quote the title of a Marilyn Monroe feature, gentlemen, preferred lawns, and the dumber, the better. 5:57 [SPEAKER_00]: To be fair, some of these women were quite comfortable with a stereotype. 6:02 [SPEAKER_00]: in Mansfield was one of them. 6:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Among her many accomplishments, she was an early pioneer of what we know today as the wardrobe malfunction. 6:11 [SPEAKER_00]: She was so well known for her 44 WD bust size that Billy Graham once said, quote, this country knows more about Jane Mansfield's statistics than the second commandment, in quote, in Mansfield did everything in her power to keep it that way. 6:26 [SPEAKER_00]: She had a habit of wearing dresses that suddenly fell to her waist and bikinis that failed to contain her anatomy. 6:35 [SPEAKER_00]: Others like Maryland struggled more with their hyper-sexualized tropes, but these things were hard if not impossible to escape. 6:43 [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, Maryland never did escape them, dying at 36 of a barbatrate overdose as arguably the most famous woman in the world. 6:53 [SPEAKER_00]: Her life was sad and short, and tragically confined by this stereotype that constantly cheated and undermined the intelligence and complicated woman she was. 7:04 [SPEAKER_00]: I was a huge Elton John fan growing up, and this episode has me listening again to Candle on the Wind. 7:12 [SPEAKER_00]: This song could just as easily apply to Meansfield, who died at 34, or a more recent dumb blonde, like Anna Nicole Smith. 7:20 [SPEAKER_00]: And parts of it are fitting for the myth itself, all of these women change their names and identities for fame. 7:28 [SPEAKER_00]: And being taken seriously as human beings, became for them, at some point, an incongruable challenge. 7:34 [SPEAKER_00]: I set up the beginning of the episode that Blontheir does make us dumb, and this is scientifically proven. 7:42 [SPEAKER_00]: I say it like that intentionally. 7:45 [SPEAKER_00]: Blontheir makes us dumb, not blondes. 7:50 [SPEAKER_00]: A team of French researchers at Paris-Nantare University showed a large group of men photographs of women, of all different haircolors, and then had these men take general knowledge tests 8:03 [SPEAKER_00]: The men-shown blondes scored lower across the board. 8:08 [SPEAKER_00]: One of the researchers, Professor Terry Meyer, joint author of this study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, said the team's findings proved that people confronted with stereotypes, generally behave in line with them. 8:21 [SPEAKER_00]: He said blondes have the potential to make people act in a dumber way because they mimic the unconscious stereotype of the dumb blond. 8:29 [SPEAKER_00]: In other words, 8:33 [SPEAKER_00]: and so often what we see is itself a projection of our biases. 8:38 [SPEAKER_00]: We superimpose an unfair judgment on the world around us, and then we become that very thing, even as we ridicule it. 8:45 [SPEAKER_00]: According to this study, the Dumb Blonde stereotype is almost a kind of magic that conjures stupidity in people who believe it. 8:53 [SPEAKER_00]: The Dumb and you think Blonde's are, the Dumber, you will behave in their presence. 8:57 [SPEAKER_00]: The Lush you believe this myth, the Loss susceptible, you are to its power. 9:02 [SPEAKER_00]: There's a kind of beautiful cosmic justice in this whole idea, and I wonder if it applies to other forms of prejudice and bigotry. 9:10 [SPEAKER_00]: This deep unconscious impulse is hardwired into our brains, and it's always causing us to reflect and imitate what we see, not just when we're looking at blonde hair. 9:20 [SPEAKER_00]: So, I'm asking myself. 9:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Does projecting harsh, uneducated judgments onto the world around me? 9:27 [SPEAKER_00]: Change me to be more like them? 9:29 [SPEAKER_00]: Does assuming racism and sexism and other people have a way of making us racist or sexist? 9:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Do our minds re-align themselves for loaded encounters like this everywhere in life? 9:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Do we begin to subconsciously imitate mental habits we despise? 9:46 [SPEAKER_00]: If approaching a blonde with dumb blonde biases makes us dumber, why wouldn't these other biases have the same effect? 9:53 [SPEAKER_00]: And the more I reflect on this, the more that it rings true to life. 9:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Think about it. 9:58 [SPEAKER_00]: Aren't the people in your life who are the most convinced that the world is a jaded and cynical place? 10:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Themselves, some of the most jaded and cynical people you know? 10:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Aren't the conspiracy theorists you know? 10:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Themselves, the most likely to launch conspiracies of their own. 10:15 [SPEAKER_00]: And those people who are excessively suspicious of others don't they begin to seem at some point, especially worthy of suspicion? 10:23 [SPEAKER_00]: Wherever you land on questions like these, they're worth exploring in some other discussion. 10:29 [SPEAKER_00]: All I mean to say in this discussion is not only our blondes not dumb, it turns out they have a lot to teach us. 10:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Even as they reflect our biases and expose some of our own natural stupidities.
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