Content warning for stereotypes, sexist jokes, and suicide.
Today, I walked around one of the lakes and saw two baby ducks. It’s late August. Oh, sweet babies. I wanted to take them home. I used to really stress about everything…now, I have to chill or I’d lose my mind.
Back in the day, a campfire burned in the woods, and we were gathered around it. The Minnesota family. Uncle, Aunt, two cousins, my little daughter and I, and some strangers from other campsites. Most everyone was in RV campers, a few popup trailers. My little daughter and I were the only tent campers in the entire Turtle Lake campground in Wisconsin. My little daughter and I were jettisoned in the night–our tent filled with rain water too deep to sleep in, so we slept on the couch and the floor of Uncle and Aunt's RV.
Then.
Wind. And a tornado warning.
We were all drinking hard as usual.
Hank (let’s call him), a friend of the Minnesota family. Big. Very very drunk. Said, his face fire lit, “I’ve got a blonde joke for you.” I interrupted. I interrupted fast and hard. I saw my little blonde daughter’s face and felt the red-hot in my own. We were used to this. She was six. I said, “Why are blonde jokes so short?” He was drunk-confused. I was a fierce young feminist in his face. “Mm…uh…I don’t know,” he said. I said what I said. Slow. Triumphant. “So that men can understand them.”
The campfire sitters erupted in laughter. Hank smiled. Humble acceptance. Very Minnesotan since we were dealing in stereotypes right now.
My little girl, though. I wondered how this was for her. Huddled next to me. Cold. She never complained. She never did. Like. Ever. Was never a complainer. I did enough of that for both of us, though. Such a talker.
She and her oldest cousin went fishing one day and caught a carp. She was smiling in the photo.
Aunt Barb (may she rest in a humor-filled heaven of cigars and whiskey) said, “You sure took care of Hank.”
Uncle John (may Aunt Barb rest in a heaven free of him) said, “We looked at each other and wondered if we should warn you about him,” and Aunt Barb said, “We thought, No, let’s just let it happen.”
That was my family and how we were. My aunt and uncle divorced. My aunt died not that long after. Her heart gave. My uncle. Decades passed and he never died until very recently. Vietnam didn’t get him, hard drinking didn’t get him, hard life didn’t get him. Cancer did (may he rest, free of pain). Then the youngest cousin, their second son of two, who was there on that trip, he died (may he rest in a heaven free of firearms and booze).
I didn’t visit the Minnesota family much unless I had to or my conscience got the best of me. I was afraid after years of other kinds of non-support and outright hostility to go to most Minnesota things.
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The thing about stereotypes is that we are in this bias-driven techno-rage era and the United States could fall into an American Christo-Fascism which may not be recoverable for some time to come. I realize that for huge segments of the population, this could feel like the same old, same old. In some ways, it’s what is up with me…hopefully, that’s clear without saying, and it’s what inspired me to keep writing. If only to free myself of all that undercurrent that’s always been there.
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“If beliefs are less important than belonging, what, then, if it were culturally permissible to interrogate a belief at any time? What if a desire to seek actual facts weren’t seen as such a betrayal, and a certain thinker being right about one thing didn’t make another wrong about everything?”-Emily St. John Mandel is quoted from her post apocalyptic novel Station Eleven as read in Amanda Montell’s Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality.
In this era of the race to the bottom of the brainstem, with the Outrage Cottage Industry full of its Identity Entrepreneurs works within the Monetized and Incentivized Eternal Scroll Mongering for our brain’s attention*. Stereotyping is crucial to the attack on our identities which goes right to the amygdala and keeps us focused on our place in the human family, shown here in this brutally ironic video of Bezosphere living.
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If you're a blonde woman, you'll understand what I mean when I say that societal and cultural expectations often label us as either dumb or mean but mostly both. I’ve had my hair pulled a lot. When I was a little girl, recess was excruciating. And it went on, through my early 50’s. Weird but true. Other blonde women with similar experiences in public places where people gather abound. ie literary arts spaces will know.
It’s important to note this, that Black and Brown women have the overwhelming experience of having their hair touched, too.
Maybe every girl gets their hair pulled a lot. It’s a thing men find erotic during sex. Etc.
The thing is, here, that I’m wanting to get into is that one woman’s pain isn’t another woman’s non-pain as in, I want the pitting against each other to stop, not so I can feel better about myself but so we can defeat all this capitalist christo-fascism. Ya know?
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Dolly sings about it and then she’ll also say she’s a dumb blonde in a self-deprecating kind of way and laugh at herself. That’s a real defense I understand, too. This way we all have of making fun of our identities while also expressing them.
You know that real sore place where people who like to poke will poke you? Not everyone likes to poke, but the people who do, they’re some kind of jabbing hot pokers.
My sore place moves around and I won’t tell you what the core of it is, but it’s got a lot to do with being considered dumb.
Stupid.
Dumb blonde.
Here’s a dumb blond joke: Why do blonde girls have bruised bellies? Cuz blond boys are dumb, too. (Note: when I heard this one at pool, I laughed hard. When I told a blond boy the joke, he was disgusted, said, “That is fucked up.” So, there you go).
There are always all kinds of ways to deal with sore spots. You can lean into it…you can work real hard to make sure people don’t say it about you…but of course, they’ll say other stuff to drop their lemon and salt into your gooey core. You all know. You have your own sore spots.
Some people will laugh thinking Dumb Blonde is NBD. Sure. And you. You’re in my next book. I’m super excited about this book. I wake up every day to it.
Dumb blonde soreness came roaring when I was a young woman and hadn’t learned to let that shit go, not because it isn’t worth calling it out as misogynistic (it’s not about dumb blond men, the above joke notwithstanding) but because, mostly, people who think I’m dumb won’t be convinced otherwise by my rage. I think that sucks. Of course it sucks that rage isn’t always convincing unless it comes with some form of violence. Which is writing material.
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And sure maybe it was all NBD. But, I’ll tell you that my cousin who’s dead now. He was mean. Drank hard, so so hard. Shot himself in his car leaving three young children. An ex-wife. The other cousin in this story said he’d never have anything to do with the Minnesota Marshalls which made the remaining Minnesota Marshalls (my uncle plus his new girlfriend and my brother and his wife) laugh. I couldn’t laugh. They hate that about me. I struggle to laugh at the things they think are funny but can’t. Mostly. Just can’t. I’ve tried to contact that cousin, but he never responds. I imagine he sees me as a Minnesota Marshall because sometimes, I did go to family things in Minnesota. Maybe it’s because my brother is a Minnesota Marshall in all ways and my brother and I used to be close.
And that’s the why, when you ask me if I’ve read a particular thing and I haven’t, I feel a kind of way if you keep at it when I let you know I have read a lot of things but not everything. Or if you ask if I know of a certain so and so or if I’m familiar with a such and such. How can anyone read or know everything anyway?
If you keep at it and you’re a poker, maybe that’s how you feel better about yourself but you should know that I might feel like a dumb blonde, like someone in a kind of a family...and that you are writing material.
Sometimes our sore spots make no sense to other people, and it’s not that I want sympathy or even empathy, I’m doing just fine, thank you. Ferociously fine. And I do want all kinds of reformation of government to keep out the horrifying white supremacist-based shite-o-rama. But most white people have brown eyes and most white people don’t have blond hair. And you can include the Nazi’s and Germany, in general. So, there’s that. And also, focusing on principles over personalities will have a greater effect in the long arc of progressive activism. And I’ll say something controversial here, but gender apartheid is global.
Here, too, I just want to say that everyone’s got these sore spots. I like not pushing on these soft spots. That’s my revolution. My retaliation in a world where dumb blonde jokes are seen as progressive (yes, writing material). And it kinda sorta makes sense of course (see federal politics in particular and also book banning movements)…anyway, that’s more writing material.
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Here’s that dumb blonde joke scene in a little more detail.
One of my pool mates, he said, “I have a dumb blonde joke…” and he’s faster than I am, much better pool player. I sighed…
He said, “Why do blonde girls all have bruises on their bellies?”
I twiddle my pool cue on the floor. “I do not know.”
He said, “Cuz blond boys are dumb, too.”
And, oh, man, I laughed. So hard.
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I hope the baby ducks get bigger by the first snow.
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If you’re looking for a quick summer-turning-to-fall read, message me and I’ll send you my payment info and you can pay what you wish and I’ll send you a copy of Soft Hearted Stories: Seeking Saviors, Cowboy Stylists, and Other Fallacies of Authoritarianism. You could message me here, too.
Thanks for being here and not asking me if I’ve read this or that…or for telling me a blonde joke. Appreciate.
Notes:
Chapter Six of Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus.
Page 182 The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montel.
*Further reading: The Battle for Your Brain by Nita Farahany and of course, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff (seminal text that sits on my desk even as I write romance after romance novel).
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Dumb Blonde