With flaming locks of auburn hair
So, I've been listening to the radio kind of a lot, both in the shower every morning, and then frequently on the way to and from work. Now, when I was unemployed, this was great, especially since 91x has this "Resurrection Lunch" thing that frequently coincided with my showers, in which they play older stuff (including, for some reason, the same Psychedelic Furs song every day, but I digress) rather than their normal uneven and repetitive fare. I swear to God, I've heard that insipid Peter, Bjorn and John song so damn many times I think it's actually starting to grow on me. Wait. I'm still digressing. The main thing I was going to say is that morning DJs are terrible. They even have DJs on the Jack station! What the hell is that? I refuse to believe that anybody actually likes listening to these people, and must conclude that their existence is the result of some massive conspiracy to inflict suffering on an unwilling audience.
Consequently, I've been listening to a lot of jazz lately.
Another thing I'd like to talk about today is red hair. What is the deal with red hair, anyways. There is lots of evidence that red hair is not well-regarded on dudes. Hitsch, Hortascu, and Ariely went through data from an online dating service and found that males with red hair get fewer first-contact emails, and I remember seeing some survey in which 0% of respondents preferred redheads to dudes with blond or brown hair. That is not a lot of percents.
Anecdotally, however, it seems like lots of people actually do like my hair. Assuming the studies are correct, this leads to three explanations that I can think of: 1) while their hair may be nice, redheads are unpleasant in other ways that offset this (...freckles?), 2) my experiences, memories thereof, and/or the people I encounter are severely unrepresentative, or 3) you people are lying to me about liking my hair :-(
Consequently, I've been listening to a lot of jazz lately.
Another thing I'd like to talk about today is red hair. What is the deal with red hair, anyways. There is lots of evidence that red hair is not well-regarded on dudes. Hitsch, Hortascu, and Ariely went through data from an online dating service and found that males with red hair get fewer first-contact emails, and I remember seeing some survey in which 0% of respondents preferred redheads to dudes with blond or brown hair. That is not a lot of percents.
Anecdotally, however, it seems like lots of people actually do like my hair. Assuming the studies are correct, this leads to three explanations that I can think of: 1) while their hair may be nice, redheads are unpleasant in other ways that offset this (...freckles?), 2) my experiences, memories thereof, and/or the people I encounter are severely unrepresentative, or 3) you people are lying to me about liking my hair :-(
posted by Evan at 10:19 PM
4 Comments:
God damn it I had a very witty, informative post about study control and gene covariance, but apparently I did not click Submit quite enough fucking times for fucking Blogger. I swear it was like 200 words. The point is that redheaded guys frequently have other traits (paleness, speckledness) that I'm pretty sure that study, being focused on racial characteristics in general, may not have adequately controlled for. And that talking too much about redheaded attractiveness makes me think about ex-girlfriends.
God dammit the original post was better.
Man, is the academic-philosophical style as eye-glazing as that, or am I just used to it by now? I wanted to read that paper, or at least some of it, but danged if I couldn't pay attention for more than a few seconds at a time ...
Er, I'm just going to come right out and admit to having read very little of the article, having gotten the Cliff-notes version from Freakonomics. This blog picks out a few excerpts
Hear, Hear! Man, Evan- I hate morning DJs so much that you have driven me to make my first ever blog comment. I am tempted to rant on here about the sheer awfulness of each and every one of them and how much i resent their uncanny ability to put me in a bad mood and raise my stress level to the point of inducing a migraine after mere minutes of exposure... but i will not. instead i will just say- right on!
also- i really do think you have pretty hair and in general believe myself to be slightly partial to redheads of either gender. but then, i have certainly been accused of being non-representative before.
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