While idly surfing the internet, I came across an item that began “This reminds me of the joke of two blondes sunbathing in Missouri.” I immediately knew that the ‘joke’ would be based on the stereotype of blonde women being stupid and/or ignorant. And sure enough, here is the full item.
This reminds me of the joke of two blondes sunbathing in Missouri. One of them looks up and sees the faint outline of the Moon in the blue sky.
One asks the other, ”Which is closer, the Moon or Florida?”
“Obviously the Moon. Can you see Florida from here?”
The joke is not particularly funny in and of itself. Any purported humor that it has would be at the expense of attractive young blonde women. Note that the set up did not explicitly say that the people involved were young or women or attractive or ignorant. The listener is expected to infer this since sunbathing tends to be something associated with attractive young women, and the state of Missouri is often portrayed as being home to ignorant people. If you replace ‘two blondes sunbathing in Missouri’ in the set up with just ‘two people’, the humorlessness of the joke becomes manifest. Any humor that the listener finds in the original formulation would be because their anticipation of what the joke would be about based on the stereotype would be confirmed by the punchline. There are others. Any story that begins “A Florida man …” tend to be followed up with him doing something mind-bogglingly reckless.
Some stereotypes have a kernel of truth that is taken to extremes but this particular one has been studied and seems to have no basis whatsoever. So how did that hardy dumb blonde stereotype come to be? Wikipedia has of course a page on this, discussing the varieties of blonde stereotypes. One of these is the ‘dumb blonde’. The other is the ‘blonde bombshell’, a stunningly attractive woman who often plays the role of a femme fatale, luring besotted men to their doom. Its section on the ‘dumb blonde’ says:
The notion of “dumb blonde” has been a topic of academic research reported in scholarly articles and university symposia, which tend to confirm that many people hold to the perception that light-haired women are less intelligent than women with dark hair. It is believed the first recorded “dumb blonde” was an 18th-century blonde French courtesan named Rosalie Duthé whose reputation of being beautiful and dumb, even in the literal sense of not talking much, inspired a play about her called Les Curiosités de la Foire
Oddly enough, I rarely notice things like hair color. This is because in Sri Lanka, everyone’s hair is black unless it gets grey when they get old. So I have a kind of ‘color blindness’ when it comes to people’s hair so that if you ask me to tell you what the hair color is of someone I had met once or just a few times, I would be at a loss. I recall people at my university sometimes trying to get me to recall someone who had been present at some function and would mention their hair color. That would not jog my memory in the least. Strange, I know, but there it is. It just shows that we tend to ‘see’ the things that we are trained to see or are used to using as the basis for discrimination.
The reverse is also true. I, like many South Asians, can tell people apart based on shades of brown skin color that to white people can seem indistinguishable. This is because there is a great deal of skin color prejudice in the South Asian community with lighter skin being valued, so people learn to notice it from a young age.
A Florida man wants to eliminate vaccine mandates for school children.
I grew up with a father whose go-to dumb person joke always involved a Polack.
I’m not sure when I realized that the word meant a person from Poland.
I always assumed the “dumb blond” referred to those women who bleached their hair blond in order to appear more attractive (according to at the time social norms), thus preferring superficial looks to more deeper attributes like intelligence.
@2 Kay DeFlane
Same experience here. Even as a child, I sensed there was something inherently wrong about it. “Dear Old Da” though never could.
Growing up in Cleveland in the 60’s, there was a late Friday night tv show that showed B-movie SciFi and Horror movies cut with jokes and skits by the hosts. They originally made a lot of Polack and Parma jokes (the western suburb of Parma had a lot of Polish people including some immigrants after WW2). They eventually had to change it to jokes about a “certain ethnic”.
As a blonde guy, I wondered about that “joke” as a youngster. But it’s OK I grew up to be a republican and a baptist megachurch pastor.
To be explicit, I always thought it was suspicious that it was mostly a joke about women. Usually ones that were less obtainable(?)
poorly paraphrased, but I think my favorite “blonde joke” from the 80s/90s was “why do blondes have sore belly buttons? Because blonde guys are dumb too”
Not great and all that, but I think it appealed to me because it was marginally less misogynistic in a weird way.
Grew up in rural PA, in the 80s/90s, and also remember the abundance of “pollack” jokes. Occasionally replaced by “Gypsy”, “Jew”, various racial slurs, etc., but that seemed to be the go-to caucasian ethnicity that was always ok to portray as comically dumb.
On a related note, I feel like there was also a trend of “dead baby” jokes in the 90s, that were maybe less stereotyping, but mostly just reveling in edginess and bad taste…
The joke example does actually specify that it’s about women, at least in written form, if you’re an English absolutist. A male would be described as “blond”, not “blonde”. Yeah, English is always full of weird rules.
The dumb blond(e) stereotype might be influenced by the fact that hair-color tends to darken as a child matures. My sister was born blonde, but was brunette by the time she graduated high school. Blond(e) could thus be linked with immaturity. I’m not suggesting that the previously suggested explanations aren’t also part of the stereotype, just suggesting that these things can have multiple influences.
Red haired women may also be attributed stereotypical personalities.
@9, Michael Sutkis: born white-blonde (had no visible eyebrows until I was 12 or so), stayed blonde as an adult but the white darkened to yellow. But it’s very true that young Caucasian children might be blonde and then darken as they get older. So, just like Epstein and Trump, old pervs chasing children might also see them as dumb (as compared to adults). A lot of Epstein’s sex slaves were blonde, likely to appeal to his customers. Blonde and hairless, like the children they actually were, but even adult women are pressured to be blonde and hairless to be considered attractive.
The idea that blonds are stupid is much older than the 1980s. There was a WWII security poster with a smiling blonde and a soldier in uniform on it, and the caption to be careful what you say to strangers because “she might not be as dumb as you think.” Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s had to dye her hair blonde and pretend to be stupid to be a star. Julie Brown parodied this in the 1980s movie Earth Girls are Easy in her song “Cuz I’m a Blonde!”
Or men thinking of blonde women as dumb might be a way of denigrating someone “out of their league”.
This. It’s always come across to me as kind of a sour grapes thing -- “they may be beautiful, but they’re dumb as a rock”. Sure, because that totally puts you off them… right?
Does remind me of the old joke: why would the average woman rather be beautiful than clever? Because the average man can see more clearly than he can think. I’ve experienced women presenting as less intelligent than they turn out to be when I got to know them (even, bafflingly, at university, where you would think that their mere presence there indicated a certain baseline level of smarts far above the average). This wasn’t limited to blondes, but there was a preponderance of blondes doing it, especially the ones who weren’t naturally blonde. I assume they’re aware of the stereotype, and they’re also aware that some men are insecure around intelligent women, and they’re furthermore aware that men sometimes express insecurity through violence. I suggest that the “dumb blonde” stereotype is somewhat self-perpetuating because of the appalling behaviour of #notallmen.
For what it’s worth as a single data point, the smartest girl in my school, who even forty years on I’m reasonably confident in saying was the smartest person I’ve ever met, was blonde. And I’ve never had visible eyebrows, which is something my wife makes fun of me for.
I believe that there is a very real world practical answer to this.
As someone who is blond but who has dyed my hair other colors, IME it’s the eyebrows. People don’t really look at you but they do look at your eyebrows. They take their emotional cue from this. You can be blond and paste/dye/pencil your brows with black and people will take you more seriously. You can be dark brown (my hair won’t take black for more than two days for some reason) with barely visible eyebrows (as long as the sun isn’t shining at an angle making them glow) and you will be treated like a baby. Or as if you are uncertain or confused.
Babies’ brows are less visible. Uncertain and confused involve the brow not being where it is expected and rather than y’know paying attention to your words your tone where your brow actually is the rest of your face your body language etc? They will just note that there is a disconnect. The brow that they can’t see where they expect it is somewhere else. Obviously, your fault. This makes you seem dumb, but it also allows you to say more serious things without picking a fight (red hair) or feeling like you are being mean (dark hair).
@13; Interesting observation that invisible brows might upset people and lead them to conclude there’s some defect in the person. I’ve also played around with hair dye, including firehouse red, but often colors actually found in nature. If I’m looking to get business, the blonde gets me in the door but going darker gets me listened to. My hair is muted yellow but my eyebrows are “dirty dishwater” colored--I occasionally go with a medium brown for meetings with leadership-types.
As a woman in tech, I’ve found working with techie men to be pretty refreshing because they’re generally interested in competence, not hair color. Marketing and leadership types are quicker to leap to conclusions based on their own prejudices.
Growing up in Canada in the 1970s, the target of our ‘ethnic’ jokes were Newfies (Newfoundlanders.)
The favoring of blondes goes back really far. Per Wikipedia, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a 1953 American musical comedy film (snip). The film is based on the 1949 stage musical of the same name, which in turn is based on the 1925 novel of the same name by Anita Loos.”
In it, the ditsy blonde played by Marilyn Monroe has nearly caught herself a rich husband, while her brunette friend played by Jane Russell is not only Monroe’s caretaker, but also can only attract a poor man’s attention. It was written in a time when a woman’s only hope in life was to marry well, because the only jobs women were allowed to do were unpleasant and didn’t pay. Because Monroe’s character was given the advantage of blonde hair, that had to be punished by portraying her as a gold-digger--when that was the only common-sense thing a woman could do.
I also wanted to point out the Nazi preference for blonds--both male and female--as the perfect humans.
Mostly things like this make me grin a bit because I realize how stupid the joke itself is and to some degree, how gullible the person telling me about it is. While I don’t believe it ever mentions this particular stereotype, the novel Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus works as a great counter to it and similar nonsense. Both the author and her novel’s main character are intelligent blonde women and the novel highlights backwards ideas about intelligent women in general.