It was the same thing every day. I waited at the corner of Freeman Road and Eisenhower Circle for the bus, watching my breath turn to white puffs in the cold Midwestern air. I bounced on one foot to warm up, then the other, and willed the bus to come closer. I boarded and made my way towards my usual spot in the back. I sat down, unzipped my purple jacket, and waited for it.
“FIRECROTCH!!!!!!!” Adam Lipowski yelled into his hands behind me.
“Hey, Adam,” I said.
“HA. Hey.”
And so it went for two years. Adam’s daily pronouncements on the color of my pubic hair didn’t really bother me. But I never quite got what was so funny about it. His hair was brown; I would have been surprised if his carpet didn’t match the drapes. But between Adam’s ripostes and Gilbert Blythe, it didn’t take long for me to understand that, to everyone else, redheads are a foreign breed. We don’t make sense.
I was born with a strip of red hair that my parents liked to fashion into a Mohawk until it finally reached the rest of my head. My father’s grandfather had red hair, and someone on my my mother’s side must have—it’s a double-recessive trait, meaning it has to be passed along on both sides. But the combination of genes is so rare that only around 1-2% of the people in the world end up with it. And the thing that some people think of as uniquely beautiful is the same thing that sets middle school kids apart from their peers at precisely the time they want to blend in.
In many ways, ours is a society that doesn’t know what to make of redheads. Redheaded women are often portrayed as lusty—Jessica Rabbit, Ginger from Gilligan’s Island—or androgynous—there’s a whole Tumblr devoted to the latter. Our patron saints are often not even real redheads themselves. Emma Stone, Christina Hendricks, and Amy Adams are all naturally blonde.
I wouldn’t assert, as Jacky Collis Harvey does in her book Red, that anti-redhead bias constitutes “one of the last great social prejudices.” Redheads are mostly white (though not all—there are plenty of redheads of color), and we enjoy the privilege that goes along with that. I have never, to my knowledge, been rejected for a job or from an apartment because I have red hair. But I have been asked by total strangers at bars about my pubic hair. I have had people I don’t know say I must be fiery, ask if I had a soul, comment on my pale skin. “The first best thing you can be is skinny and tan,” Lauren Kramer pronounced to our swim class my sophomore year of high school. “Second best is fat and tan. Then skinny and pale. The worst is fat and pale.” It was a ludicrous rubric, but all I could think to myself at the moment was that I could only ever be third best. Harassment of redheads is low-grade and persistent, an annoying hum you manage to tune out and laugh at most of the time.
Disdain for redheads is nothing new. Although I’m sure he didn’t know it, Adam Lenkowski was taking part in a centuries-old tradition that seeks to place redheads outside of normal society. In the 5th century AD, Saint Jerome said the act of trying to dye one’s hair red “presaged to the person who sought it, the fire and red flames of hell.” In some traditions Judas Iscariot has been depicted as a redhead despite a lack of Biblical or historical evidence because red hair was associated with duplicitousness. Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus’s disciples, has been painted with red hair because she was rumored to be a prostitute—another rumor with no basis in the historical record. Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver’s Travels that “the red-haired of both sexes are more libidinous and mischievous than the rest, and a 19th-century book about criminal women posited that fully 48% of criminal women have red hair. For the record, the only thing I’ve ever stolen is an ice cream cone from Whole Foods, and it was completely and the insistence of my auburn-haired sister. (“When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn,” Mark Twain famously said, or he didn’t.)
A multitude of theories exist as to why people are wary of redheads, and they vary from the anti-Semitic—the Biblical Esau had red hair, so some associated redheadedness with Jews and deplored both—to the anthropomorphic—foxes have red hair and are cunning, ergo redheaded people are cunning. (Foxes are also adorable and have four pairs of teats, yet no one has ever asked me why I only have two breasts. People choose what they will.) As we went from a society that valued paleness for its class association with not performing labor in the sun to a society where leisure meant spending time outside and developing a “healthy” tan, redheadedness and its attendant pale, freckled skin became qualities that people started to wish away. What was desirable when Queen Elizabeth ruled—when Lauren Kramer’s rubric would have been flipped on its head—was no longer sought after. Instead, my high school peers spent hours getting their punch cards validated at strip mall tanning salons. They placed little heart stickers near their hip bones, to show their prom dates the intimate places where they weren’t tanned. The exception to the rule.
There was a time when each summer brought with it a fresh set of hopes that I, too, could get tan and finally catch the attention of a boy I liked, or at least wear a crop top without someone claiming that my pale stomach was blinding them. I wanted to “lay out,” the formal name for sprawling in the sun until you turned bronze. I wanted to put Sun-In in my hair to bring out its natural blond highlights. Instead, I ended up with pink shoulders and weird orange streaks in my copper hair. My parents handed over the sunscreen and I dutifully applied it the rest of the summer, until next June rolled around and I thought, maybe this time…
It’s never happened. I’ll never be tan, and I’ll always have red hair, and it’s been at least ten years since anyone called me firecrotch. It hasn’t been a particularly hard-fought battle, to be honest—I figure that everyone has something they get teased about, and red hair has been my very light cross to bear. Perhaps it’s the older women who tell me I have beautiful skin, or the hairdressers who remind me that “people pay to get your natural hair color,” or perhaps it’s just the chill wisdom that comes with age.
Whatever the case, I’ve learned to love my hair, to always wear SPF 30, and to hope that perhaps someday I’ll have little redheads of my own. People remember me easily; women compliment me on the color of my hair and it makes my day. I make sense, is what I want to say.
“I make sense, is what I want to say.”
From one ginger to another, cheers. I may be the only redhead in my extended family (on both sides), but I am definitely my mother’s daughter and my father’s – not “the milkman’s” – daughter, as well.
Also! My youngest has some definite strawberry in his hair, and this summer particularly people have been commenting on it. It makes me gleeful, like I’m welcoming him into this secret society.
In the department of inappropriate comments: our gynecologist once asked my sister: does your mother have red hair too? Referring to our carpet/drapes. This must be the oldest joke in the world
D:
To be honest I probably am more libidinous and mischievous than the rest…but that’s only okay when we say it.
“the thing that some people think of as uniquely beautiful is the same thing that sets middle school kids apart from their peers at precisely the time they want to blend in.”
I feel this so hard. For my sister and me, our red hair was the curse of our teenage years. We had our own versions of Adam Lipowski and redhead-themed bus torment. She’s dyed hers darker to a kind of brown now. I’m keeping mine though. It’s like a special sassy badge that I didn’t do anything to deserve.
Aw, I love this.
I’ve always really liked my hair – I actually never got teased as a kid in the 90s. I only noticed it as I got older and the “ginger” thing came to North America (I think via southpark in the mid-2000s?) and it became really funny for people to tease redheads.
There are many reasons why Trey Parker and Matt Stone piss me off but that “LOL GINGERS” shit is one of the biggest.
I was in a psych ward once, and 5 of the 10 women, patients all, had red hair, including me. I asked my psychiatrist about it, and he gave me a really funny look, and said it was all just a big coincidence. Not saying redheads are crazy, but that was quite a gathering. A lot of laughter going on, and it was probably the best psych ward stay ever.
I once had some people yell “GINGER” at me out of the window of their car as I cycled along a busy main road. (I did not fall off, thankfully, but it would have been on their consciences if I had.) There were the obligatory comments about my pubic hair as a teenager. (I find it fascinating, actually, how the hair all over my body varies in colour depending on location; if I were a cat, my fur would be so interesting!) Less offensively but still annoyingly, I had to put up with a lot of elderly ladies (strangers!) stopping to stroke my hair without permission as a child. My immediate family all have dark hair, so I often got asked in confusion how my hair could be red (being a triplet confused matters even more). I love my hair, and the argument that redheads experience prejudice on a par with racism is nonsense, but some people can be real dicks about it.
Your phrase here made me smile: “if I were a cat, my fur would be so interesting!” It’s just charming and I love it and that’s all.
Gosh, nobody touched my hair (dark red as a child, but it got darker as I got older and most people don’t see me as ginger now), but I always got exclaimed over by old ladies at church. Now Edie gets exclaimed over wherever we go.
People always ask whether it’s from mum’s side or dad’s side, which is awkward cos a) donor sperm and b) BOTH, THAT’S HOW RED HAIR WORKS, WERE YOU NOT PAYING ATTENTION IN GCSE SCIENCE.
I hated it so much. It’s my head! I don’t want strangers to come up and start touching it!
Nobody understands red hair genetics. It’s very tiresome.
My mother refered to this trait of caring body hair colors as having “accessories that don’t match.” The hair on my head is bright copper, but my body hair ranges from blond to auburn to dark brown. I wonder if Mia-matched accessories is just a redhead thing?
No one has tried to touch my head as an adult, or even that I can recall as a child, but my mom says that when I was a baby, people would always want to rub my hair. Especially Mexican immigrants.
What is it with old ladies and redheaded children? Happened to me all the damn time, to the point that at like 6 I remember seeing a strange woman coming up to me and my mom and thinking, “Here we go again.”
There are redheads threaded through the family (currently my aunt and one cousin). I got the paleness and freckles and easy sunburn, but my hair is a darker brown.
My mother is and both of my grandfathers were red heads. My father is and both of my grandmothers were brunettes. Somehow, my two siblings and I ended up with that ash/dishwater/mouse blond/brown color, that varies a bit depending on the sunlight. All my life, I deeply longed to be either red haired or brunette, and was sad that I failed at either.
I did henna for a while in college, and dyed my hair dark brown *once*. Sadly, none of it suited. 🙁
The Tiny Terror of my house has red hair passed down from grandfather and great-grandfather, one on each side and it’s so beautiful I am a bit jealous. When she is screaming and literally stomping her feet I do wonder about those dumb old jokes about red-head temper.
I don’t have red hair, but I do have ridiculously pale skin, so I can relate to that part. Man, high schoolers are mean about not having a tan. I still have to give myself pep talks wearing shorts the first time after winter…”Its ok. Your legs are not offensive. If someone wishes they were tanner, well, that is their problem.”
When I was born, my hair was exactly your color. Then it fell out when I was still a baby and grew back blonde. Which is weird, because there are more redheads than blondes in my family, really.
But I had NO IDEA there was any kind of prejudice against redheads until a redheaded Australian friend explained the stigma against gingers to me in exasperated detail. It still blows my mind. I get it from the “prejudice against the Irish” point of view, but it sounds like it goes deeper than that and idek.
I dye my hair various shades of red from time to time, and on election day in 2012 I was walking to my polling place when a guy shouted at me, “Hey, you know what they say about redheads?” *keeps walking* “They really like tigers!!”
Turns out, he was selling Greenpeace subscriptions.
Same here. I was born with dark red hair, then it all fell out, I was bald for months, then it grew back platinum blonde. Which makes sense for my Swedish side I guess. The red came from the Irish bit maybe? idk.
Am I recalling incorrectly, or was Mallory the auburn-haired ice cream thief?
My mom’s a redhead (like her great-grandmother and uncle, and my next-younger sister). My older sister and I started out tow-headed af, which darkened into auburn on her and dishwater blonde on me.
I started dying my hair when I was eighteen, kept it up for over a decade, and now that I’m growing out my natural color, it’s markedly more red than it was last time I saw it. Like, it’s red enough that I’m not sure I count as a blonde anymore. Hair is weird!
My most recent act of redhead self-affirmation was adopting a big fluffy ginger cat who matches my hair almost exactly. So if current career plans don’t work out, I can always fall back on pet look alike pageants.
I adopted a short red dog, and months later realized I’d fulfilled the stereotype of dogs and owners who look alike.
If this story had been 100% an excuse to post that picture of the two of you in the heart costumes, with no content whatsoever, just some sort of lorem gingersum content, it still would have been worth it.
Boys/men can’t help themselves, lol. I was asked about my carpet/drapes all through college, much to my surprise, given I was brought up Catholic in the 50s/60s and was unbelievably naïve; but after the shock it made me laugh, gave me an unexpected joy to hear ridiculous curiosity get the better of those boys/men. All I can say is, eat your heart out all other hair shades — I am almost 67yo and still have red hair (never dyed or enhanced) and just a few wrinkles because I haven’t “laid out” since high school! My sisters, also redheads, and I tried to tan, hoping all our freckles would merge to make us look bronzed. Silly, hopeful laughing girls. Thank you, Laura, for writing this and writing so beautifully!
Yes, boys and men can help themselves from making unsolicited comments to people about their pubic hair, actually.
Any time anybody asks me about carpet/drapes these days (which happens rarely now that I’m in my 40’s, thank Frogs), I say, “Of course not. I’m not bald” and then see what happens.
FAT AND PALE GIRLZ ROOL
As far as I’ve ever known, there weren’t any redheads in my family on either side, but somehow I have ended up with a pretty ginger-y beard. My hair is dirty blond/brown, but most of my beard is copper colored, especially in certain kinds of light. None of the men in my immediate family have this, and I don’t think it’s really a thing in my extended family either.
Genetics are a strange thing.
So many men seem to have ginger beards! My brother has dark brown hair, like most of my family, but his beard has quite a bit of red in it.
My brother (at 18) is the same! But we have some red hair on both sides of the family, so it’s somewhat understandable.
Mine has, as far as I can tell, a 2 in 3 chance of carrying the gene for red hair (dark hair, two dark-haired parents, but a red-haired sibling, so both parents must be carriers), so it may well be that showing up in his beard. Genetics are weird.
Are you my husband masquerading on the Toast? He has blond-brown hair and a red beard 🙂 Neither his dad or brother have red beards though.
We thought he was mostly Scandinavian (and he looks it) but he did one of those genetic tests last year and found out he’s like 90% British. So maybe that’s where the red comes from?
I spent years as a fake red head because I was already pale and freckled. I had two men really really hate me and they both cited my hair as one of the reasons. Because each one had an ex gf with red hair. It was super strange.
I did not believe I had red hair until I was like nine, because my only conception of it was orange-red a la Anne Shirley and mine is more, well, auburn (getting redder in the summer.) I’ve never actually been teased about it (unless you count women at the salon when I was still a teenager bugging me about what dye I used), but I did write a wee! short story about it I might put on my new website–about how my redheaded complex was about being a subpar redhead–I am not spunky or feisty or hot-tempered or mischievious or sexy or salacious.
The sunburn prone skin can be kind of a pain, though. I don’t even really freckle, just turn shades of pink.
Thanks for this, it was lovely.
I once delivered a somewhat-impromptu children’s lesson about hating my red hair as a kid but then learning to appreciate it after age 20, and can relate to most of your experiences chronicled here.
I come from a large family of redheads–half are red red, the other half more auburn or strawberry blonde. So we got a lot of stares and comments when we went anywhere. And yep, got the firecrotch thing in high school, and people always trying to touch my hair. And the constant refrain of “is it natural?” or “so obviously you’re Irish?” No, no I’m not. Also Scotland has more redheads anyway. And I’m not Scottish either. And suffered the jokes from friends about being whiter than a polar bear in a snowstorm. Which, after seeing how skin cancer has galloped through my mother’s redheaded family and learning that redheads are catastrophically more prone to melanomas than any other hair shade (so please fellow reds, lather the sunscreen on copiously and frequently), I’m glad I never invested too much time when I was younger in trying to tan.
I always confused by the Irish thing. Red hair is Scottish and Northeast English in my experience (at least, that’s where I get it from!)
The weirdest thing about having red hair is that people either hate it or they really love it (in a way that can make you a little uncomfortable.)
My toddler-aged daughter is a redhead (bright coppery orange/red) and as I was giving birth and she was crowning, a nurse said, “I think she’s a redhead”– it was LITERALLY the first comment about my daughter’s appearance, before she even exited my body. It is frequently remarked upon by strangers– always complimentary– and I secretly fear someone is going to accuse me of stealing her, as she has red hair and blue eyes and I am dark haired and dark eyed.
I now find myself drawn to other redheads, and suppressing the urge to say, “my daughter has red hair!” as a conversation starter.
Genetics, man.
My redheaded boyfriend was on a bus, and a woman whispered to him while she touched his hair “your kind will be extinct by 2018” and he said “are you going to get rid of all the redheads?” She got up and sat next to someone else. He likes to jokingly call himself a pureblood because both his parents, his brother, and two grandparents have red hair. My dad and my grandma had red hair, too, but it went dark brown before my dad had his 1st grey hair at 50.
“your kind will be extinct by 2018”
lolololol, of all the hilariously inappropriate things to say
People have a lot of weird theories about the future of the redhead bloodline. I think they all read one garbled article years ago on a dubious genetics theory. This sometimes leads them to tell me that I have to breed with another redhead to prevent extinction. Nevermind that neither of my parents have red hair.
My kids are friends with the kids in a family of 2 redhead parents and 7 redhead siblings. I’m not familiar with the grandparents.
what an oddly threatening thing to say.
Family ginge story: my great-aunt (maternal grandma’s sister) had red hair, and was known as Coppernob. This was shortened to Nob and she was Great Aunt Nob for my entire life.
Here’s my dad and his 5 red-headed sisters
I love that the oldest, on the left, hasn’t had a hair color change my whole life. Their mom never did, either – it was crow-black until she was hospitalized & unable to get to the salon.
My dad hated his hair until it did him the favor of going prematurely grey in his mid-30s, but his mustache and beard still get red in them now he’s in his 70s.
The only really dark-haired sibling (not on the bright red to auburn spectrum), not pictured, is my uncle, and he married a redhead.
Yes! I’m a redhead. It’s a kind of odd thing, because it has no large-scale effect on my life, but it is the thing about me that has been commented on the most–orders of magnitude more than anything else. I tried to dye my hair brown in high school to see what people would notice if it were gone, but used the washable kind and just ended up with a slightly duller red.
I wasn’t teased as a kid, but got the fire crotch and soulless ginger stuff a lot in high school, not to mention all of the “hey, red!”s on the street as soon as I hit puberty. Old women tell me about the niece they have with red hair, or how they tried to get my hair color in salons with no success–all of which is perfectly pleasant, but repetitive. And certain men do seem to talk, freely in front of or to me, about how much a thing they have for redheads. Which makes me extremely self-conscious–I might have a physical type, but would not bring it up in conversation.
Aw man, so many feels. I also got called a firecrotch in high school, and lots of adults told me emphatically a) my hair was auburn, which is better than red, b) never ever cut or dye your hair.
So I got the impression that my hair was my best feature (and I have some pretty impressive photos of it glowing in the sun), wore it to my waist as a teenager, and now it’s darkened so that most people wouldn’t identify it as red. Which breaks my heart, honestly. I still can’t bring myself to identify as a brunette…I still feel like a redhead at heart.
Anyway, here’s my brother (RIP) and me:
Oh man, you and your brother look slightly terrifying like me and my brother at similar ages. I’m so sorry he died.
Ditto on the no-longer-identified-as-red-hair sadness!
I always really wanted red hair (in ways that are weirdly tied up in my childhood feelings about my race, but w/e) and now I’m a grown up and I dyed my hair pink-red and it’s amazing.
This was a really thoughtful essay! Have to say the inclusion of the “fat and tan/thin and pale” thing rubbed me the wrong way… reminded me of the very common assumption among people that being fat is the Worst Thing and that it’s outrageous to ever imply that any kind of thin woman is less attractive than any kind of fat one.
I had bright orange hair until I was 5, then it started getting more and more brown and less and less gold.
Many times old women have come up to me and leaned in, as if to impart a great secret, and said: “did you know…that redheads can wear purple?” This was baffling at first because yes, I do it by putting purple clothing on my body…but later I looked it up and it was a fashion “rule” circa the 60s that redheads shouldn’t wear pink/purple because supposedly it clashes with our hair. False, I look great in purple.
This sounds like a spy greeting, are you sure they weren’t spies trying to drop off a package?
https://youtu.be/t_vULnoDRfo?t=20s
That’s nonsense. Purple is one of my favorite colors to wear!
I am wearing purple right now!
Both my grandads had red hair when they were younger (or so I’m told; they were both grey by the time I knew them.) My mum’s dad’s nickname is Gin (for ginger) and when my mum and uncle were growing up, he built a sailing dinghy from a kit that was named Ginger Pop.
Neither of my parents inherited the red hair, but my mum always suspected it would come through in our generation (is hasn’t, except in my little brother’s beard – why is beard hair often a different colour to head hair?) But for a year now I’ve been dying my dark blonde/light brown hair auburn with henna, and I often get comments from relatives about how red hair is in the family and how natural it looks on me.
Second story: at my high school there was an incredibly pretty girl with long ginger hair that grew into natural ringlets (I ended up developing kind of a crush). One of the teaching assistants, who was doing A level Art in her spare time) once painted her in Pre-Raphaelite style leaning wistfully against a tree or something.
Thank you, Laura! This is wonderful. My hair has gotten darker as an adult and now I’m dying it to be more intensely auburn, because I consider being a redhead as an essential part of my personality. And I think this piece sums up why perfectly — it’s a constant part of your childhood and how people see you.
When I was growing up my biggest fear was that my hair would turn brown, because my mom was born ginger but it turned auburn/brown as she grew older. My hair is no longer as pumpkin-orange as it was when I was a baby, but I’m happy to say the gingerness has remained.
https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/p20…
When I was growing up my biggest fear was that my hair would turn brown, because my mom was born ginger but it turned auburn/brown as she grew older. My hair is no longer as pumpkin-orange as it was when I was a baby, but I'm happy to say the gingerness has remained.
https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/p20…
That's nonsense. Purple is one of my favorite colors to wear!
I am a redhead, but neither of my parents are, nor is my brother, so the thing that bothered me most about it when I was a kid was when people — grown, reasonable-seeming people — thought it was appropriate to ask me — a five-, eight-, ten-year-old kid — where I’d gotten it.
“Where’d you get that red hair?” strangers would ask, while my parents, standing nearby, decided that was a question I should take as a compliment and as an opportunity to engage with an adult who definitely wasn’t being creepy at all. My answer became “genetics?” because it nearly always wiped the patronizing smiles off their faces, as they contemplated a 7-year-old understanding the concept better than they did.
“The thing that sets middle school kids apart from their peers at precisely the time they want to blend in” especially resonates with me as well. My redheadedness, too, was all about “carrot top” and “firecrotch” the occasional “orange butt hairs” at that time. I suspect it also for some reason played a role in classmates’ assumptions about my sexual orientation, unless there happened to be a freckly redheaded girl present, in which case I clearly had no choice about who my eventual mate would be. Erin, the freckly redheaded girl, was also not amused.
All that went away eventually, but one annoying thing still lingers to this day: if I’m miraculously not the only redheaded male in a class or an office, no matter what other features clearly set us apart, I will always be confused for that person, and, I assume, that person for me.
On the other hand, I can enjoy almost total anonymity while wearing a hat.
Oh, the relentless matchmaking with the only other redhead in your class. Infuriates me 20 years on!
Being a redhead married to a redhead shores up a whole new level of assumptions “low-grade and persistent”.
My red hair is easy to find in my family (It’s scattered around on both my parent’s sides). My wife and her brother are the ONLY redheads in her family going back several generations. Both of us gritted our teeth and grinned through the usual childhood harassment (enumerated beautifully above).
But the weird and uncomfortable stuff hit after we got married. Aside from being pale and red-haired, any resemblance we share is social. Yet, we get asked if we’re related by strangers constantly, and family/family friends have “pointed out” that we look like we could be brother and sister. Which is weird. And gross. And incorrect. And No.
Neither one of us has spoken strongly about wanting kids, but a popular icebreaker for people is how our kids are all going to be redheads. It’s amazing the level of assumption of familiarity there. Woe be unto this hypothetical kid either way.
Best parts? We both look amazing in the same shades and colors, so complementing outfits is almost automatic! And at least one of us will always remember sunblock.
My mother was born white-blonde, and she married two red-headed men – one brown/auburn (my father) and the other very ginger. I turned out to be “strawberry blonde” (my hair is made up of very fine white blonde and thick, coarse deep red strands, it’s very nifty), and my siblings are, in order: medium ginger, white blonde, ash blonde, very ginger, ginger blonde, strawberry blonde and some kind of neon orange. We make quite the picture when we’re all out together. And it looks like my baby niece might end up a redhead too, despite her father being brunet. Genetics are fascinating, and it’s ALMOST enough to make me feel slightly guilty for a) shacking up with a brunet, and b) choosing not to have kids. Like I should have reproduced with another redhead just to keep our numbers up. 🙂