Straight vs. curly

I ran across this article today, wherein the author attempts to theorize about why men prefer straight-haired girls to curly-haired ones.

Um... first of all, who said they do?

She references an article that implies that they might. I know the article she means, even though she did not provide a link to it. It's this one. Please do read it because the upshot is that men are initially drawn to straight hair but in the end, hair doesn't much matter to them.

This noncommittal attitude was recently confirmed by my boyfriend. I read the article about the woman who conducted her own little test, and then I asked my boyfriend what he believed men's feelings to be about curly hair. He looked at me a little sheepishly and said, "Honestly, most of us don't care. We're looking at other attributes."

Spoken like a guy, no?

And I believe this to be true. Even the woman who conducted her own test ultimately came to the same conclusion: initial attraction may be to straight hair, but in the end, how a woman carries herself determines whether men will sniff after her.

But honestly, this whole debate irritates me because it not only generalizes about an entire gender, it assumes all curly hair is created equal. Preposterous on all counts.

All women supposedly think Brad Pitt is to die for. I'd like to state for the record that I can take him or leave him. So, we've now blown a nice hole in any argument that begins with "All women like...." And I think we can do the same with the "All men like...." generalization as well.

In the Box of Chocolates article, the writer posts photos of Jennifer Lopez and Scarlett Johansson with straight as well as artificially curled hair. Hello? These women could be bald and they'd still be beautiful. What kind of lame argument is that?

Let's look at all the variation there is in curly hair. There are loose curls, tight curls, crazy curls, and tame curls. But most of all, there are conditioned curls and dry, frizzy curls. BIG difference. A woman who takes care of her hair is going to feel more confident, look better, and attract more interest than a woman who doesn't.

So, here's a photo of straight hair. Make you wanna touch it? Yeah, I didn't think so.

When are we going to just embrace what we have and make it the best it can be? These foolish debates are just designed to create a "winner" and thereby simultaneously create a "loser." Do we have debates about whether white women are prettier than black women? Of course not -- it would be the height of stupidity and ignorance. We are born as we are and it's completely unproductive to debate the relative merits of what we got because in the end, it's what you do with what you've got that matters.