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Aposematism in action?
By David Futrelle
Do you want to convince small children that you’re some kind of magical being, while at the same time repelling the absolute worst men in the world? This blurry screenshot from Tumblr might have the answer for you!
Image may be NSFW.
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I think Amby Jane is onto something here. As anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time already knows, misogynistic douchebros have a lot of strangely intense feelings about women’s hair. They all seem to love long hair, hate short hair, and grow positively apoplectic when women dye their hair “unnatural” colors (most of which are actually perfectly natural).
“Always in search of the next way to destroy their nature-given beauty, Western females have begun to dye their hair at alarming rates,” warned the pseudonymous Winston Smith on Return of Kings, back when that blog was still a going concern
It has to be stopped. …
[A] girl having hair dyed with a non-traditional color is a leading indicator of instability, mental illness, and an inability to function within a healthy relationship.
In Smith’s backwards brain, women with brightly-colored hair aren’t just unattractive to him; they’re objectively ugly, according to SCIENCE.
“[H]umans have hard-wired attraction preferences for the physical appearance of their mates,” he asserted.
In the same way that we are uncontrollably disgusted with the sight of an obese person, our lizard hindbrains make a split-second judgment against women with dyed hair because unnatural looking hair (whether it’s short, falling out, or unnaturally colored) was a symptom of disease and infirmity in our ancestral habitat.
These guys love making up stories and calling them science. There are plenty of people who are not only not “uncontrollably disgusted” by fat people; they actually prefer their partners plump. And I rather doubt there were a lot of blue-haired diseased people in our species’ environment of evolutionary adaptation, given that there is literally no disease out there that turns people’s hair blue, unless I slept through that day in biology class.
Meanwhile, the self-described Men’s Human Rights Activists over on A Voice for Men are convinced that blue hair is enough of a threat to the fundamental rights of men that they created a special tag for it: “Sluts With Blue Hair.”
Amazing human rights advocacy there, fellas!
It isn’t just Return of Kings writers who think that science backs up their hatred of blue haired women. So-called Red Pilled dudes regularly compare dyed hair to the natural adaptation called “aposematism,” in which potential prey animals warn predators through signals like brightly colored skin that eating them won’t be much fun.
In a discussion several months ago in the Ask The Red Pill subreddit, a Red Piller called VasiliyZaitzev explained that he sees brightly dyed hair
as a form of aposematism, in much the same way the certain coloration on frogs warns predators that the frog is poisonous.
Even guys who claim to be “Going Their Own Way” away from women get angry when these women dye their hair. In the MGTOW2 subreddit a month ago, a guy calling himself Robotmasher argued that dyed hair is a
signal to you that you should keep a healthy distance from them, and not give them any attention. They are in essence doing you a favor.
None of these guys seem to realize what a massive self-own this argument is. If blue hair is a form of aposematism designed to ward off predators, and it wards you off, what exactly does that imply about you?
As a male-human-predator-repeller, dyed hair seems to be doing the trick, at least to some extent, in that it really does seem to scare off the sorts of guys who turn to sites like Return of Kings and the various Red Pill subreddits for advice about women.
In a recent discussion of the blue hair strategy in the WitchesVsPatriarchy subreddit — yes, this is a thing — a number of women noted that the brightly-dyed hair thing was working for them both as a predator-repeller and a child-delighter.
“When I added a chunk of purple to my (already short) hair, I got fewer catcalls AND my niece is obsessed with it, so, yes,” wrote a Redditor called pamplemouss.
“I’ve had fewer catcalls, but lots more kind compliments,” wrote a self-described Sapphic Witch with blue hair.
And, of course, little girls everywhere stare in awe at me, then immediately ask their parents if they can have hair like mine.
Alas, the strategy is not without some possible downsides. Several women in the WitchesVsPatriarchy discussion reported that while they repel the dudebro they now got more creepy attention from “guys who seem to almost fetishize ” brightly-colored hair.
“Do not recommend burgundy/purple if you want men to leave you the fuck alone,” wrote one annoyed hair-dyer.
I recently dyed my hair and I’ve gotten so many freaking men using it as a jumping off point. Some perfectly polite and pleasant, some definitely not so. But whatevs, I like this color and I guess cat calls aren’t gonna stop me?
Other women reported that men now came up to them to pester them about their hair. “When I had pink hair,” wrote rileyfriley,
I didn’t get hit on hardly at all, but every man felt the need to tell me that men don’t like weird colored hair. So it was an added bonus that I routine got to tell men that women don’t like when they speak.
So the blue hair thing is far from a perfect solution, at least for women who want to avoid harassment from men entirely. But if your aim is to piss off some of the worst dudes in the world, dying your hair blue will almost certainly do the trick.
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