Blonde Like Me: The Roots of the Blonde Myth in Our Culture [Paperback]

In this irreverent, unsparing, and witty look at our cultural obsession with blonde, Natalia Ilyin shows us that our apparently modern fixation has truly primeval roots. Highlighting cultural criticism with personal experience, she cites ancient myths, Hollywood iconography, and the daily assault of advertising to reveal why the allure of being a blonde has crossed the boundaries of ethnicity, economics, and age. In essence, she shows us the difference between simply having blonde hair and beinga blonde.Natalia Ilyin has taught courses in American mythic images at Cooper Union and Yale University. Chapter One: The Drugstore Goddess

It started naturally enough. I had the white hair as a child, and the streaming hippie-poetess blonde hair at twelve. But along about that time something started to happen, and it wasn't planned.

My hair got darker, finally ending up dishwater blonde, as my Southern grandmother used to call it. I am naturally dishwater blonde to this day, but even then, deep down in my psyche, I was blonde as sun.

The first thing you need to know about blondes is that you don't know any real ones. Not in your neighborhood, unless you happen to live upstairs from a Finnish tango parlor. Real, adult, fully functioning, totally blonde women are very rare, as rare as albinos. Remember this: Real platinum blondes have ruddy skin and give the distinct impression of having no eyebrows.

The day I finished the first draft of this book, I handed it to a messenger and got on a plane to California. After I landed, and was waiting for a bus, what showed up next to me at the bus stop but a real, honest-to-goodness platinum blonde, the second real platinum blonde I had sighted in all the time I had been thinking about blondes. I took it as a good omen. As the bus appeared, I said, Excuse me, but I just wrote a book about blondes and, well, I just wanted to tell you that your hair is really beautiful. Natural,ls