Monday, January 23, 2012
I HAVE a crow to pluck with the Taoiseach.
Or maybe not. Let’s see. He described Minister of State Kathleen Lynch as a "doughty fighter."
The accuracy of this description is not in question and will be confirmed by anyone who heard her last week, on Matt Cooper’s programme, lucidly explicating the Government’s plans to force political parties to put a greater number of women on their electoral tickets.
"Doughty fighter", as a standalone descriptor, is not the issue, however. The issue is linking her doughtiness to the colour of her hair. Which is red. Like my own. Yeah, I know. Even as we speak, you’re looking at the picture in the middle of this column and saying to your sceptical self, "This woman is barking mad. A redhead? She has white hair."
I’ll thank you to describe it properly as platinum, and anyway, it’s artificial. By birth and DNA, I am a redhead. But a long time ago the idea of blonde highlights took hold of me and I bought one of those kits that allows you to cook your own lighter strands. The mixture got mixed, the end result applied. Mighty.
I sat down to marinade, filling the time with a good book. A book that was, as it turned out, way too good. The highlights were due to be washed out in 30 minutes.
An hour and a half later, I suddenly remembered the process in which I was engaged and raced to the shower, after which I towel-dried the hair and examined it in the mirror. Not good. Not subtle. Somewhere between catastrophic and comedic, in fact. Time for a second opinion.
I walked into the room where my husband was watching sport. Untypically, he glanced away from a screen filled with rugby players’ posteriors and became transfixed, gazing at me with half-admiring astonishment. "What do I look like?" I foolishly asked. He gave this due consideration.
"Like an aging Donald Duck," was the unequivocal response. What a way with words this man has.
The damage was irretrievable, so the choices were binary: a total Sinead O’Connor shave, for which I didn’t have the face, or going the whole hog. Although that maybe should be "the whole duck." Which I did. Overall platinum.
However, underneath this bleached thatch lives a natural redhead who shares with redheads going back to Queen Boudicca, who led her troops against the Romans, the reputation of being fightin’ folk given to being somewhat short-tempered but good to have at your back in a scrap. Not much scientific evidence supports this linkage of fighting spirit and redheadedness, although some quite interesting scientific studies link gingery hair to extra sensitivity to pain.
But, since no good myth was ever encumbered by facts, for centuries, having red hair has carried the implication that its owner would be good in a fight.
Mythology is only grand if it sits in a book, un-bothered and un-referred to.
Last week, controversy arose because Taoiseach Enda Kenny actually said it out loud. Not only did he link the two, but he got personal as well, referring to the colour of Kathleen Lynch’s own hair.
During the 1920s, a cartoonist named HM Bateman made something of a speciality of portraying monumental social gaffes, those cartoons replete with bystanders reeling back in shocked disarray at those gaffes.
The cartoons had captions like "The Guardsman Who Dropped his Rifle on Parade" and "The Man Who Lit His Cigar Before the Royal Toast".
IF Bateman was alive today he could hardly resist the opportunity to produce a cartoon entitled "The Taoiseach Who Suggested Red-Haired People were Doughty Fighters".
Ms Lynch is probably in therapy ever since. She’ll never get over it, so she won’t.
Imagine, someone drawing attention to the colour of her hair. Bring that woman sal volatile, quick. Even worse, imagine that person being a MAN. Omigod, the repressive implications. Incipient patriarchy. If Enda Kenny is not restrained, sure we’ll be on the slippery slope back to the days when women gave birth and were back working in the fields by sunset.
What’s that you say? Completely inappropriate for him to make reference to a woman’s appearance? Women have to be protected against that sort of thing? You’re right. And men, too. If it isn’t nipped in the bud, you’ll see some unfortunate minister who’s lost his hair being called Baldy…
As the wonderful Olivia O’Leary has pointed out, personal appearance has nothing to do with public performance. Or maybe that should read "personal appearance SHOULD have nothing to do with public performance," given that an interesting little bit of research has just been published which would suggest it’s actually the other way around. The research was done by two Israeli professors who asked whether being physically attractive ensured that US members of Congress got more network television coverage than colleagues who might be just as competent, but less easy on the eye.
"In an ideal democracy, the amount of news coverage representatives receive should be determined by the quality of their work and the originality of their ideas," the two professors pointed out, sadly announcing findings that run resolutely counter to the ideal. They asked students to rate the attractiveness of members of Congress back in 2007, put in all sorts of checks and balances, then measured the network coverage each of the Congressmen and women received. Being physically attractive, it emerged, had a greater impact on news coverage than the frequency of issuing news releases, sponsoring bills or longevity in office. Just for badness, they also measured National Public Radio, where the reverse was the case: coverage bore no relation to looks. Surprise, surprise.
The two professors said the TV networks, by selecting prettier people of both sexes to illustrate political stories, were compromising "the democratic principle of equal access to the public sphere".
They have a point, although I don’t see that point going anywhere, in practical terms, in the immediate future.
This whole area is fraught with inequity. It’s perfectly OK, for example, for media to comment on aspects of Enda Kenny’s appearance, and we do, whether it’s marvelling at how young he looks and wondering if he has a picture in the attic, Dorian Gray -style, or the fact that he’s markedly shorter than David Cameron. We all comment, positively or negatively, about his appearance, but we expect that he won’t even notice anything about another politician’s appearance, including the colour of a minister’s hair, although it’s as much a part of Ms Lynch’s brand as her accent and sunny relentlessness. And if he breaks that rule and links it to an age-old myth in an implicitly positive way, well tsk tsk.
As a natural redhead, I wasn’t bothered by the Taoiseach’s observation. No crow to pluck. Sorry.
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