Dolly Parton And The Label

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I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb. And I also know that I'm not blonde. Today we are investigating the dumb blonde. This is Witches, Bitches, and Sluts. I'm your host, Christina Rose. Let's go down the rabbit hole. Hey, witches, bitches, and sluts. Before we get started, I want to remind you to follow us on Instagram at the.wbs.pod. That's the t-h-e.wbs.pod pod. I post photos and charts there along with episode announcements. And now on to our episode. That opening quote was by Dolly Parton referring to the label society had given her. If you listen to our Monroe episode about Marilyn Monroe, you may have thought this quote sounded familiar because I opened that episode with Monroe's quote: I've often been asked, does it bother you when someone refers to you as a dumb blonde? It never has, you see. I've always known I wasn't. And in 2023, Brittany Spears quotes Dolly's quote in her autobiography, The Woman in Me, saying, I wish back then I'd known the Dolly Parton joke. So clearly, the dumb blonde label has been around a long time. But where did it come from? Why differentiate blonde from all the other hair colors? And why dumb? And if you remember, the studio first tried to market Monroe as a femme fatale. So how does the same woman get read as harmless in one film and dangerous in the next? Same face, same body, opposite label. Because it's not about her. It's about a pattern that was running long before she got there. And researchers have spent

Where Blonde And Vamp Come From

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50 years measuring it. Let's start with where these labels came from. The dumb blonde is the newer of the two, and she's mostly an American invention of the last century. But the blonde part is ancient. Golden hair has been the Western beauty ideal for about 2,500 years. It runs back to ancient Greece, where the goddess of love, Aphrodite, was pictured with golden hair, which tied blondeness to beauty and desire at the same time. Women who weren't born blonde bleached their hair to get there using saffron and sun. By the 15th century in Renaissance Venice, that ideal was locked in. Golden hair and pale skin were the standard, endorsed by the church, the state, and the medical thinking of the day, which held that fair-haired women were healthier. It was so prized that women spent hours bleaching their hair in the sun to reach it. So blonde arrives in the 20th century already carrying 25 centuries of meaning. Beautiful, desirable, sought after. What it did not carry was stupid. That part got added later. And it got added on purpose, attached to blonde, because blonde was the most visible, most commented on category of women there was. If you are going to build a joke about a pretty woman being empty-headed, blonde was the easiest target. We'll come back to why dumb attaches to beauty at all in the research part of this episode. The femme fatale has a completely different and much older lineage. Femme fatale is French for fatal woman, a woman who is dangerous to the men who desire her. And she is genuinely ancient. You can trace her through Eve in the garden, through the sirens luring sailors onto the rocks in the Odyssey, through the biblical Delilah who cuts Samson's hair and his strength, through Salome dancing for a man's head on a platter. The through line is always the same: a beautiful woman whose beauty is a trap, and a man who is destroyed for wanting her. That old figure took a modern form in the 20th century. In the silent film era, she was called the Vamp, short for vampire. It comes from an 1897 poem by Ruddyard Kipling, the same guy who wrote the jungle book, called The Vampire. It was about a man ruined by a woman. And it reached the screen in 1915 when an actress named Teta Berra played exactly that kind of woman in a film called A Fool There Was. A vamp was a woman who drains the man who loves her, his money, his will, his life, and leaves a shell. That's the idea sitting under the whole thing. Not that she wants something, but that wanting her is fatal. One notable detail from that era, on the American screen, the vamp was very often coded as foreign, vaguely Eastern European or Middle Eastern or Asian. The dangerous, desirable woman was also the outsider woman. Beauty plus threat plus not from here. And we'll explore this more in next week's episode on Anime Wong. Then in the American film noir of the 1940s and 50s, the vamp hardened into the femme fatale we picture now. The scheming wife, the seductive liar, the woman in the shadows with the plan. The actress most associated with that harder version is Barbara Stanwick in a 1944 film called Double Indemnity, playing a wife who seduces an insurance salesman into murdering her husband. That exact template Monroe was measured against in Niagara and found too soft for. So, two labels, two separate roots, one is a beauty standard that got a cruel joke bolted into it. The other is an ancient fear of desirable woman updated for the movies. Different origins, but as you're about to see, the same underlying

Two Stereotypes Built On Beauty

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sorting. To see why these two are the same idea, we need the map I laid out in episode one, Are Women Human. Two of the three frameworks from that episode apply here directly. So let me connect them one at a time. Remember the stereotype content model? In that episode, I explained that people size up any other group along two measures. Warmth, are you friendly or are you a threat? And competence, are you capable? Plot those two against each other and you get four boxes. Watch where our two labels fall. The dumb blonde is high warmth, low competence. She's sweet, she's harmless, nobody's threatened by her, and nobody's asking her opinion. The femme fatale is in the opposite corner. Low warmth, high competence. She's cold, she's calculating, she's extremely capable, and that capability is exactly what makes her dangerous. Here's the thing that should jump out. Both women are beautiful. Both are defined entirely by their looks and their effect on men. The dumb blonde sits in one corner, high warmth, low competence, harmless and not credited with the brain. The femme fatale sits in the diagonally opposite corner, low warmth, high competence, cold and dangerously capable. So those two aren't neighbors on the map. They're in opposite corners. Flip a woman from one to the other and both qualities swap places. Her warmth drops and her competence jumps, or the reverse. What stays the same is the only thing either label actually cares about, that she's beautiful and that her beauty is the whole story. Now, do you also remember the ambivalent sexism theory from episode one? Because these two labels fit it almost too well. That theory says sexism comes in two forms that travel together. Benevolent sexism, which is the warm, affectionate, protective kind. She's precious. She needs looking after. And hostile sexism, the openly antagonistic kind. She's manipulative. She's out to take what's yours. The dumb blonde is benevolent sexism made into a character. The femme fatale is hostile sexism made into a character. And the reason this theory says that these two forms travel together is the reason why these two labels are actually one. They're both reactions to the same thing: a beautiful woman. And which one you reach for depends entirely on whether she's flattering you or threatening you. And while Cantor's roll traps back in episode one focuses on labels within the workplace, the pet, the mascot who's treated as cute and not taken seriously, is the dumb blonde in the workplace. And the seductress, whose sexuality is treated as the whole story, is the femme fatale in the workplace. So that's how they connect to the foundational research on sexism in general. Now let's look at some research about these labels specifically. Let's start by just testing the Dumb Blonde central claim. Because unlike most stereotypes, this one makes a factual assertion you can actually test. And someone did. In 2016, an economist used a long-running national survey that had given a standard aptitude test to about 11,000 Americans years earlier. And he sorts the results by hair color. The averages, blonde women, an IQ of 103.2, brunettes 102.7, redheads 101.2, and women with black hair 100.5.

The Research Map Behind The Labels

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Now these numbers are close enough that the differences mean nothing. If anything, the blondes came out a hair ahead, which also means nothing. The point is that on the one claim the label actually makes, it's simply false. Blonde women are not less intelligent. So if the dumb isn't measuring her mind, what is it measuring? In 2011, a team of psychologists ran a simple setup. They gave people a photo of a real person and a short writing task. Half were told to write about the person's appearance, half to write about the person. Then everyone rated that person on how competent, warm, and moral they seemed. And a coin flip decided which. So anything that changed in the ratings had to come from where the attention was pointed. When the person was a woman, the group that had been steered to think about her looks rated her as less competent, less warm, and less moral than the group that thought about her as a person. But when the person was a man, he got rated higher in all three categories. And they ran it three times on newscasters, public figures, and unknown weather forecasters, partly to rule out the obvious objection that people were just reaching for a stereotype they already had. They built the study to rule out that competing explanation. Because someone could argue that focusing on a woman's looks doesn't objectify her. It just triggers the old stereotype that women aren't very sharp. But that stereotype has two halves. Women are supposedly ditzy, and women are supposedly warm and nurturing. So if focusing on her looks were just switching on that stereotype, her warmth rating should have gone up along with it. But it didn't. Her warmth went down right alongside her competence, which is what you'd expect if people were seeing her as less of a fool person, not just filing her under typical woman. Now, remember what we said about blondes. For 2,500 years, it's meant beautiful. Look at her. So blonde is doing exactly what the study needed an instruction to do. It pulls attention straight to a woman's appearance. And this study shows what happens next. Focus on a woman's looks and her competence drops in that moment. And that's what's behind the dumb blonde. Not her hair, not her brain, just a signal that says focus on her looks. Nobody in that study had to say she's stupid. The judgment just happened automatically. Now, while that study shows how judgment is determined, the next study is the most important one in this episode because it shows both labels happening inside a single experiment, the harmless version and the dangerous version in the same study. In 1979, two researchers gave people what were essentially job applications to evaluate. The applications were identical except for one thing, a photograph clipped to the corner, showing an applicant who'd been rated either attractive or unattractive. Different evaluators were assigned to score these applicants for one of two kinds of jobs, a lower-level clerical job or a higher level job with real authority. For the men, being attractive helped everywhere. A good-looking man scored higher for the clerical job and for the authority job. His looks were an asset no matter what. For the women, it split.

Do Blondes Really Score Lower

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For the clerical job, the lower status, stay in your lane job, being attractive helped. Same as the men. But for the job with real authority, it flipped completely. The attractive woman was rated as less qualified than the unattractive one. Her looks, which helped her for the small job, became a penalty the moment the job involved power. Think about that. Because it's both of our labels in a single result. The attractive woman applying for the harmless job is being read as the dumb blonde. Pleasant, hire her, keep her in the low seat. The attractive woman applying for authority is being read as the femme fatale. Too much doesn't belong there. Don't hand her power. Same woman, same face, sorted by how much power the job involved. The researchers even found the reason underneath it. When they statistically factored out how feminine the attractive woman was rated, the penalty vanished. Her beauty was making her read as more of a woman, and more of a woman read as less fit for authority. That hiring study shows how beauty turns into liability when a woman reaches for power. This last study we're looking at shows the same reversal in an even sharper setting, a courtroom. And it's the clearest look we have at the Femme fatale specifically. In 1975, two researchers had 120 people act as mock jurors. Everyone read about the same defendant, a woman named Barbara Helm, and everyone sentenced her to somewhere between 1 and 15 years. Two things were varied. First, some jurors saw a photo of an attractive woman, some saw an unattractive one, and some saw no photo at all. Second, the crime itself changed. Half read about a burglary, she used a stolen key to rob a neighbor's apartment, half read about a swindle. She charmed a middle-aged bachelor into handing over his money for a company that didn't exist. Same amount stolen, same guilt. The only difference was whether her looks had anything to do with the crime. For the burglary, a crime where her beauty was irrelevant, being attractive helped her a lot. The attractive burglar got an average sentence of 2.8 years. The unattractive one got 5.2 years. Her looks bought her a break, which is the usual finding.

When Beauty Becomes A Work Penalty

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Actually, a touch more than the unattractive one who got 4.35 years. Well, that particular difference wasn't large enough to be statistically reliable on its own. What is reliable is the flip between the two crimes. When her beauty had nothing to do with the crime, it protected her. The instant her beauty was the weapon, that protection vanished. That's the femme fatale measured. A beautiful woman is fine, charming, even, worth a lighter sentence. Right up until her beauty is aimed at a man. At that point, she stops being harmless and starts being a threat. And that is the moment the label changes. The same beauty that got her a lighter sentence is now the reason she's punished. Because a woman who uses her looks to get what she wants is exactly what the Femme Fatale label is. The paper's title says it in three words beautiful but dangerous. Now, that courtroom study was done in 1975. So you might reasonably hope that the pattern has aged out since then. But here's the same thing in the workplace in 2019. And the researchers actually named it the Femme fatale effect. Across six experiments, a team gave people a short news article about a company doing layoffs with a quote from an executive. Explaining why. Everyone read the same explanation. The only thing that changed was a photo of the executive, a woman or a man, rated more or less attractive. Then people rated how truthful the explanation seemed. The attractive woman was rated as less truthful than the less attractive woman. Same words, same layoff, lower believability, just for being pretty. For the men, attractiveness gave them a slight bump. And here's the important part: it was the less attractive woman who actually got a credibility bump. Women in general were trusted a little more than men, but that bonus evaporated the moment the woman was attractive. Now you could say, wait, this is the same pattern as the previous study about how attractive women don't fit jobs with authority. But the researchers checked, and it wasn't. They ran it with the woman in a traditionally feminine job, still distrusted, in a feminine industry, still distrusted, delivering good news instead of bad, still distrusted. The suspicion followed her regardless of the role, which means it isn't about the job, it's about her looks. So what is it about her looks? The researchers put that to the test too. And this is the finding I want to emphasize. They ran

Courtroom Proof Of Beautiful But Dangerous

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a version where before raiding anyone, some people were prompted to briefly recall a time they felt secure and certain in their own romantic relationship. For those people, the bias vanished. The attractive woman was rated exactly as truthful as everyone else. A separate group was prompted to recall just general good feelings instead, nothing romantic. For that group, the bias stayed the same. Romantic security was the only thing that made it disappear. In other words, the distrust of beautiful woman was based on the person's own sense of a romantic threat. Turn that threat down and she stops looking like a liar. I want to note that the researchers explain this using evolution. Mate competition, jealousy, that kind of thing. But that part is their interpretation, not a settled fact. I'm ignoring that because when a social pattern gets explained as evolution, the explanation tends to make it sound permanent and natural, like that's the way it's supposed to be, and there's nothing to be done about it. The measured result doesn't need that explanation. It stands on its own. A capable woman delivering a plain business statement was believed less because she was attractive. And that disbelief was tracked to the audience's own insecurity. That's the femme fatale, not as a movie character, but as a live bias measured in 2019 with real consequences. On the dumb blonde side, the label attached to a long line of women who were treated as pleasant and not serious. We've got Jane Mansfield, marketed in the 1950s as a walking punchline, despite reportedly being able to speak multiple languages. Judy Holliday, who won an Academy Award in 1951 and spent her career playing the very dumb blonde types she was nothing like. Goldie Hahn, who turned the giggling ditch into a launching pad and then had to fight for years to be taken seriously as a producer. Suzanne Summers, Lonnie Anderson, Pamela Anderson, Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, different decades, same treatment. Not one of them chose that label. It was given to her and it followed her around. And some of them learned to wear it, like Marilyn Monroe did, precisely because fighting it cost more than performing it. On the femme fatale side, the label attached to women whose sexuality got read as a weapon,

The Modern Femme Fatale Effect

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usually women who had some kind of power or who threatened a powerful man. Matahari, the dancer executed as a spy in 1917 on very thin evidence. Remembered ever since as the seductress spy rather than the person. Cleopatra, a head of state who ran a kingdom, flattened in the retelling into a woman who destroyed two Roman generals with her body. Anna Nicole Smith, cast as a gold-digging schemer. And in the 1990s, Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year-old intern who was recast in the national press as a scheming temptress who had brought down a president, while the 50-year-old president, who was her boss, was treated as the one she'd ensnared. That is the femme fatale doing its oldest job, taking a man's choice, and relocating the blame onto the desirable woman. And here's where the two labels that seem to be opposites reveal themselves as one. Because the same woman can get moved from one to the other depending on what the moment needs. A starlet is a lovable, dumb blonde while she's compliant. Let her demand equal pay or control of her image and watch how fast the press reaches for difficult, calculating diva. The warmth gets turned down and the label flips, but nothing about her changes. What changes is whether she stays harmless. So has any of this gone away? The crude versions have faded. You don't see many literal, dumb blonde comedy characters today, and the phrase femme fatale isn't used anymore. But the sorting underneath them is the part the research says is durable. And the studies we walked through aren't ancient history. Remember, the trust study that named the femme fatale effect was published in 2019. Run on ordinary online participants judging an ordinary business statement. As long as a woman's looks are treated as the most important fact about her, the sorting has everything it needs. She can be filed under harmless or filed under dangerous. And which one she gets depends on whether she is seen as a threat. Which brings us back to Dolly. Remember her line: she knows she isn't dumb and she knows she isn't really blonde. What she is telling you is that she can see the

Who Gets Stuck With These Roles

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label from the outside. She knows it was put on her, not chosen by her, and she decided to perform it deliberately and on her own terms, because she understood the thing the whole episode has been about. The dumb blonde and the femme fatale were never accurate descriptions of any real woman. They were two things a culture does to a woman who is judged mainly on her looks. When it finds her harmless, it calls her one. When it sees her as a threat, it calls her the other. Dolly's answer was to name the label out loud and take control of it, which is one way to handle a thing you didn't ask for and can't fully refuse. Now, not every woman gets that option, and it should not take that kind of effort to be seen accurately in the first place. But the point holds for all of them, the harmless ones and the dangerous ones alike. Not one of them picked the label. It was assigned to her based on her looks, and then it followed her for the rest of her life. And now I'll leave you with a quote from Rita Hayworth, who played the most famous femme fatale of her era in a film called Gilda, and got stuck with the label for the rest of her life. Quote Men go to bed with Gilda, but wake up with me. This has been a Witch's Bitches and Sluts Research Rabbit Hole. I'm Christina Rose, and I'll see you next time when we take a look at Hollywood's original dragon lady, Anna Mae Wall.