Ramona Flowers may need been the final cool individual to have blue hair. In 2010, when Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World was launched, Flowers’s blue hair marked her as free-spirited, laid again and horny – a traditional “manic pixie dream woman”, the free-spirited feminine characters that dominated romantic comedies of that period. One other well-known manic pixie, Clementine from Everlasting Sunshine of the Spotless Thoughts (2004), additionally used blue hair to point out her rebellious facet. And earlier than each of them there was Suicide Ladies, a pornographic web site based in 2001 and named after the “social suicide” that supposedly occurs to different women who break societal norms. Its fashions had tattoos and piercings; and plenty of had blue hair. The positioning was wildly profitable. Within the noughties, blue-haired girls may not acquire your mom’s approval, however they is likely to be the mad stranger you’d secretly pine over.
How occasions have modified. Ask anybody now to explain the stereotypical social justice warrior, and so they’ll in all probability say: college age, normally white, a girl, some flavour of queer and, most significantly, blue haired. The blue-haired woman has develop into the excessive priestess of woke within the collective creativeness: she is definitely offended, acts in dangerous religion and is mostly annoying. She may cancel you with a single look and wields BlueSky as a weapon towards micro-aggressions and linguistic missteps. YouTube is stuffed with movies with titles like, “Charlie Kirk Destroys Blue-Haired British Socialist”, “This Is Why Your Children Are Turning Into Blue Haired Libs”. How did the that means of blue hair bitter so shortly?
Like many younger girls, I used to be on Tumblr in its golden age of 2011 to 2014. I reblogged gif units of Ramona Flowers trying effortlessly cool whereas strolling within the snow. Emma, the blue-haired lesbian in Blue is the Warmest Color, was a daily characteristic on my web page, among the many roses, cigarettes and Anais Nin quotes.
Dyeing your hair is a straightforward option to insurgent. It’s much less committal than a tattoo; extra noticeable and cheaper than a piercing. You are able to do it with associates in a match of giggles over a sink in a scholar flat. Ladies needed to emulate pop idols like Gwen Stefani, Grimes, or Hayley Williams, and at college they had been now not beneath the watchful eye of mum and pa. So it made sense that springs of blue haired girls appeared to dominate campuses.
However teenage women on Tumblr hadn’t solely been taking a look at melancholic-yet-pretty footage. The manic pixie dream girls-in-waiting had been growing a type of internet-led class consciousness. With like-minded girls, who additionally listened to the Smiths and browse Sylvia Plath, they raged towards misogyny and commenced to construct a brand new feminist motion.
The aesthetics and the politics had been an ideal storm. With a hipster’s need to love one thing earlier than it’s cool, and a teenage woman’s propensity for black-and-white pondering, they created a brand new, radical ideology. College students experimenting with progressive concepts is, after all, nothing new. However this time, there was a Day by day Mail reporter lurking within the corners, able to complain about this new breed of woke younger girl.
The panic about “woke” college students started within the 2010s. The Rhodes Should Fall marketing campaign gained prominence in Oxford in 2015; across the identical time, college students began speaking extra about campus “rape tradition” within the lead-up to #MeToo. And sure, a few of these college students had blue hair.
However “woke” has modified that means now. The time period is used extra to complain about any left-seeming insurance policies: new company etiquette and variety quotas, not radical change. This definition of “woke” contains the Nationwide Belief implementing land acknowledgements and an insistence on asserting pronouns in a Zoom assembly. And this ideology doesn’t have an apparent picture, as a result of it’s largely a bureaucratic, nameless train. Whereas on the web there’s an growing animosity in direction of HR departments, a multi-part system is far tougher to focus on than an annoying, blue-haired feminist. So she stays the face of woke.
There’s a whiff of misogyny at play right here. The blue-haired girl is the topic of cringe compilations posted by the likes of Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson, warbling unconvincingly about decolonising a curriculum. Her beliefs are sometimes inconsequential to the purpose of being outlandish. Maga has its iconic crimson hats, and it appears the left has been assigned blue hair.
It’s, after all, an inaccurate stereotype. As of late, as social media churns by means of tendencies and subcultures disintegrate, blue hair doesn’t even imply somebody is essentially progressive. The unique blue-haired feminist shared a lineage with hippies, bikers and emos all of whom aesthetically rebelled towards a established order. The younger girls attempting on a seapunk blue rinse for per week for a TikTok doesn’t.
And the fitting can be quietly attempting to reclaim different aesthetics. Previously blue-haired MTW tattoo artist Kat Von D has not too long ago claimed Donald Trump is the “new punk rock”. Overly on-line younger males of all political stripes thirst for a “goth gf”, referring to a sure look reasonably than an encyclopedic information of Siouxsie and the Banshees b-sides.
One in all my favorite teams on Fb is “Goths In opposition to Cancel Tradition”. One goth posted that he was dying his hair blue in defiance. He noticed blue hair as a reclamation of the libertarian spirit on the coronary heart of being a goth. Lots of people within the group agreed with him. “My hair is blue,” one commented. “However my tablet is crimson.”
[Further reading: CMAT’s subversive hoedown]