Red hair - adored or despised?

                 

Beachgoers in California, 1984

by Joel Meyerowitz,
The Times

Red: A Natural History of the Redhead by Jacky Colliss Harvey (Allen & Unwin 2015) is a book written for me! At 20 I decided I was going to marry a red head and have babies with gorgeous hair, but there weren’t too many Jewish men in Melbourne in 1969 who qualified. Then I saw a handsome redhead from Sydney who met all my important criteria - Joe was single, could play bridge well and had left wing politics. 45 years later his red hair is a bit faded but one of our sons still has reddish hair and two of the grandsons have stunning red hair.

Needless to say, my art historian eyes are always attracted to red heads in art work, particularly the Pre-Raphaelites. William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti sought out women like Elizabeth Siddal as their model because her long red tresses were stunning. And the Post-Impressionists, especially Edgar Degas and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, regularly highlighted the red hair in many of the women they painted.

Strangely to me, Colliss Harvey established that the world was ambivalent about red hair throughout history. This ambivalence might have started with the redheaded penitent whore Mary Magdalene, as Western art and literature created her. She was “the single most important reason why Western religious attitudes toward redheaded men and redheaded women diverge so thoroughly".

But, Colliss Harvey added, the antagonism may be racist as well. "If you want to look for reasons for the continuing and increasing antipathy towards redheads in medieval Europe, in particular red-headed men, look no further than its anti-Semitism”. Judas was often depicted in medieval and Renaissance art with red locks. I had to pay close attention here because I had never heard that in medieval Germany, freckles were called judasdreck/dirt. Did this view of the Biblical Judas spark a long-standing association between Jewish people and red-headedness, or did the association in real medieval life alter how Judas was depicted?  In the mid 19th century, Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Fagin was described as a shrivelled Jew with a villainous-looking face that was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair .

Colliss Harvey's book cover
La Ghirlandata (Alexa Wilding), 124 x 85 cm
Guildhall Gallery, London
painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1873

I was less interested in the scientific information in the book, but my husband liked it. Red hair is a recessive gene that occurs in only 2% of the world’s population. Red heads may have a stronger immune system than ordinary dark haired and blond compatriots, but they run greater risks of melanomas and endomet­riosis, are more sensitive to extremes of temperature and are more sensitive to pain. Are red heads more fiery and sexually alluring? Apparently redheads do produce more adrenaline than others and their bodies access it more rapidly, so the fiery temper and the transition to the fight-or-flight response seem to be pheromonally caused. Red heads are more likely to be stung by bees, and, as my husband will say, are much more likely to be bitten by mosquitoes.

Examine the Redhead Map of Europe in the book. Perhaps there is some controversy over the accuracy of such maps, but what it shows is the Red Centre is the Udmurt population on the River Volga in Russia and the relatively high frequency (10+%) of red hair to the north and west i.e Scandinavia, Iceland, Britain and Ireland.

One of my grandchildren

Colliss Harvey was most useful when she acknowledged that while red hair has always been seen as Other, it was always a white-skinned Other. In the aristocracy of skin, discrimination was rarely overtly practised against those with white skin. Yet we still have biases against red hair in language and in attitudes of unthinking mistrust that would not be tolerated against a religious group or a gay group. And these expressions of prejudice slip under the radar; it is as if prejudice against hair colour does not count. Is it worse that red hair in men equals Bad while in women it equals Good, or at least sexually interesting, perky (Anne of Green Gables) or winningly cute (Little Orphan Annie)? How bizarre! Culturally, the author notes, it seems we can get our heads around red-haired men as both psycho­pathically violent AND as unmasculine and wimpish.

In typical Australian style, a long standing slang tradition is to take a word and perversely use it as the opposite of its intended meaning. No better known illustration of this is the word Bluey, a nickname for someone with red hair. 1969 has come and gone but the older generation still calls my husband... Blue!