Geek Power and the Rise of the Redheads

As I said before, for a longtime Hollywood & American as a whole was caught up in the blonde/brunette dichotomy. Occasionally, redheads would make a splash (Rita Hayworth (note the tiger behind her) or Ann-Margret, for example) but for the most part they were considered comedic and didn't really register as sex symbols.

Then in 1988, things began to change. This was the year Angie Everhart hit the scene in all her redheaded glory. She is considered by some to be the first "supermodel," and she was the first redhead ever to grace the cover of Glamour magazine. Apocryphally, she had been told that "Redheads don't sell," by the head of a modeling agency. Well, they didn't, but suddenly they were about to.

The same year, Geena Davis was allowed to be her redheaded sexy self in Earth Girls Are Easy. Sure it's a comedic role, but she wouldn't have been cast if the director wasn't sure she'd excite the audience appearing in a bikini in the movie's opening sequence. She really is hot in all her nipply see-through bikini glory, but here she is as Odette the Brunette "vampire," since I know that's what everybody's into these days.


Coincidentally, in 1988 I was dating my first redhead. An Irish girl with pale, freckly skin. She had long, wavy, thick red-brown hair. She was short and curvaceous. I fell hard and she broke my heart into at least a million tiny pieces. Every now and then I'll step on one in some unswept and unexpected corner of my memory. They are tiny but sharp.

For the public at large, the redheaded sex symbol had arrived. Tori Amos broke out as a sexy singer/songwriter in 1992 (Suzanne Vega had of course released her significant Solitude Standing album in '87, but didn't quite make it as a sex symbol (yet?)). In 1993, Gillian Anderson hit the scene as agent Dana Scully in The X-Files. Also in 1993, Julianne Moore definitively broke out of soap opera hell with a bit part in The Fugitive and her bush-baring appearance in Short Cuts, really the only reason to see the movie. She boldly stood on the camera without her skirt on, showing off the bright orange of her cedarn cover, all the while carrying on a heated argument with her onscreen husband. She confirmed that redheads are indeed fiery and indomitable, and that it makes them all the sexier. When she followed this up with The Big Lebowski, she went one further, showing that redheads are smart, too, and that smart can be sexy.

To be fair, I ought to give props to Nicole Kidman and her turn as the sexy damsel in distress in Dead Calm in 1989. Yeah, she was a redhead then.

Since 1993 we've had a regular stream of redheaded sex symbols like Lindsay Lohan, Amy Adams, and of course songstresses Jenny Lewis and Neko Case.

But what allowed for this sea change? Molly Ringwold made a splash in the early to mid-80s with her brat-pack shtick, and as the cute ragamuffin sidekick in Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (okay, so this contributed essentially zero to her fame, but in elementary school I couldn't go see the movie, but I remember my best friend describing it, and it seemed sexy at the time. Of course, we did have a tendency to exaggerate the naughty bits.), but by '86 she had pretty much evaporated and never quite made the transition to mature stardom.

What she had done, though, is capture the heart of "The Geek" incarnate in two subsequent films. And if we look at the redheads making their way into mainstream sex-symbol status, the majority of them are "geek" icons. I think this holds true, even to this day.

Why are geeks more likely to love the redheads? Well, traditionally, redheads are

• Free-spirited
• Fickle
• Strong-willed
• Smart

Many of which most guys hate, but which geeks embrace. Strong-willed, smart women? Geeks love 'em. After all, somebody has to make the first move and know what to do in the sack!

Long before they went mainstream, geeks have been in love with redheads. Mary Jane Watson has been the love of Peter Parker's life since the 60s, and the redheaded sex mutant Jean Grey has been wowing the comic book world since shortly thereafter.

Unless he can muster up some form of superpower, though, the redheads, like all the other girls, go to the hunk in the end.