I would like to gratefully acknowledge the inspiration for this editorial essay from Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez.

As a subscriber to Sports Illustrated (which I subscribe to mainly to keep up with my favorite sports of football and basketball), I am sometimes an unwilling audience to other things the magazine gives me. For example, as a subscriber, I have to receive the yearly Swimsuit Issue [which I dislike because (a) all of the women featured are much much slimmer than my taste and (b) I would rather look at a live person I know than drool over a stranger I don't].

Thus, when I received the 5 June 2000 edition with a young blonde female tennis star on the cover, I made it my business to thumb through the magazine to see if there was anything else worth looking at inside and then toss it. However, something (probably boredom) made me look at the cover story. I didn't see much in it about tennis, but I saw a lot of raving about blonde good looks. Although there are a great many non-blonde women presently tantalizing U.S. men on a national scale (see Jennifer Lopez, etc.), the case of blonde women in this country bears some discussion. For some reason, blonde is in, as far as female desirability in the U.S. is concerned -- so much so that a sizable percentage, perhaps even a majority, of blonde women get it out of a bottle.

Although I would be the first to champion the idea that no person, blonde or not, should have someone rain on his/her parade, I am concerned with the idea of some "universal standard of beauty" which the mass media bombards people with in the U.S (and in Latin America: people who look at Latin American TV are looking at stars who resemble people in Stockholm, not Guadalajara).

I claim to be no judge of beauty for African Americans, but I would wager that, even if tennis stars Venus or Serena Williams were tens in the African American community, they would not have received a Sports Illustrated story which so slavishly pandered to their "beauty" as the one I looked at on 5 June. And I am not just pandering to "blacks" when I say this. Darker women (e.g., mulatto, Latina, caucasian brunette, Asian, etc.) may score some points for being "exotic" but the heavy hitters in the beauty department are blondes -- and most women know this.

There are many many many phenotypic norms in the United States and the world in general. If the blonde phenotype is the one which women are all supposed to aspire to (even if they haven't a snowball's chance in hell of being blonde), that sets up a lot of people to be disappointed, self-doubtful and ego-hampered.

There are plenty of good looking people in the mulatto phenotype. There are plenty of good looking people in 1001 phenotypes. Sports Illustrated (or any other mass media outlet) announcing that the only people worth looking at twice are blond females may simply cause some people to give an ironic smile -- and keep going about their business. But, for many children and teenagers, it sets people up to be dissatisfied with what God gave them -- and that is an appearance in his image.

I had mentioned in a previous observation in IV that I have seen some magnificent looking African American women (who are more African than mulatto) and I believe that the time has come for all women in the United States (and Latin America) to get their due.

Not just blondes.

Of course, the only thing getting in the way of a mass advocacy of this is......a desire to be blonde.

William Javier Nelson, Ph.D.

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