Happy About Hair

An awesome new Sesame Street video, I Love My Hair, has been making the rounds of a lot of my Facebook friends. Here's a CNN interview with the Sesame Street writer who created it, and one of many print interviews. 

I think that it's a great song and an adorable video. One of the friends who posted it also adopted her daughter from Ethiopia and making sure she feels good about her hair is one of the many cultural issues they think about a lot too. Going back to our body image week and our reading from Rapunzel's Daughters, it makes me think about the huge variations among human bodies, and how we often start out "ok" and then dislike our own features as we compare them to those of our friends and what we see in media portrayals.

For me, hair is also a big thing. Frizzy brown hair tends to be common among American Jews whose families came from Eastern Europe, hence the term "Jewfro" which comes up in the movie Knocked Up at one point, I think-- or somewhere else. In New York a zillion women have hair like mine, but out here it looks a bit odd. When I _am_ in settings with more Jews around, it also leads people to think they know me, confusing me with cousins, old friends, etc. When I was at the big Religious Studies conference in Atlanta, I was sitting one night and listening to a plenary talk when someone suddenly came up and lightly pulled on my hair! When I turned she quickly apologized-- she could have sworn I was a friend of hers, who had a very obviously Jewish first name. Ooops.

I do think it's ironic that at one point in the CNN interview, the perfectly coiffed female interviewer speaks critically about how many women are not happy with their hair. I wish she had said that while wearing her hair in whatever its natural state might be.

While we're on Sesame Street, here's a video starring Grover [one of my favorites], Smell Like a Monster, which is a take-off on some recent Old Spice ads and their messages about masculinity.

Do you love your hair? Do you want to smell like a monster?