When I opened up Yahoo to check my mail today, I happened to see this article on Yahoo's front page from their Women's Lifestyle blog Shine. I generally don't pay much attention to heterocentric how-to articles, but this post just seemed to pique my curiosity for some reason.
The video post was titled "What Guys Love About Your Hair." Instead of talking about a variety of women's hair, they only really spoke highly about women who have long hair and that short hair should only be worn by women who are a little more 'edgy.' In addition to that, the excluded hairstyles for African American women altogether.
Way to speak for the whole straight male population by reinforcing gender stereotypes and attacking the self esteem of women who don't fit your stupid Shine criteria. The make guest speaker then continues on about being "true" to yourself when choosing a style. He then ends up saying, "don't over-do it, you wanna be okay with who you are" regarding crazy hair colors. This passive aggressively suggests that women who dye their hair unconventional colors aren't confident in their natural hair color and need to dye their hair extreme colors in order to feel okay about themselves.
Just look at their "Dos and Don'ts"
Dos
•Extra-long feminine hair is sexy and romantic.•Ponytails
•Pixie cuts if it goes with an edgy personality
•Loose braids
• Fresh-out-of-the-shower hair
Don’ts
•Reality TV hair (Snooki, for example)
•Pigtails
•Haircuts that don’t fit your vibe or your clothing choices
• Extreme (i.e. dirty) bedhead
I understand that Shine is a heteronormative women's blog network; its their job to churn out features like this. This video was posted merely intended for "insight" into the male mind
and that's completely fine but the part that bothered me the most was
the fact that it was smack dab on the main page of Yahoo--which made certain it reached thousands of different kinds of people. It's just disheartening to know that some girls might have watched this video and actually took it seriously.
Photo is a screenshot of the video
