You know, the expression “Bad Hair Day” has been around for a while; according to one source, its earliest printed use was in 1988. Literal usage describes a day when, despite your best efforts, your hair is frizzy, flat, or frumpy; figurative usage would be a day where your hair is frizzy, flat, or frumpy and you break a vase over your husband’s head when he helpfully comments on that fact.
I think we all have literal bad hair days from time to time (some of us more often than others: see Susan Boyle, Donald Trump; I myself favor Gene Wilder on occasion), but as a general rule, it’s the figurative ones that cause more problems.
I was just watching a popular morning news program covering Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s news conference in Kinshasa (if you haven’t heard about it by now, don’t worry–you will), wherein she snapped a shrewish retort to an innocent, albeit poorly translated and ill-conceived, question about “what her husband thought” about China’s growing influence.
“Wait, you want to know what my husband thinks? My husband is not the secretary of state – I am.” You could read her anger from the twentieth row back.
You know, I felt sorry for her at that moment. I am not a Clinton fan, to be honest, but even so, I still admire and respect a woman who has worked so hard to accomplish so much. And I can certainly feel sorry for her that, even in the face of such accomplishments, her knee-jerk, momentarily unguarded reaction to that question reveals her fears that she will never be completely out of her husband’s shadow. Bill’s Rescue-Hero impersonation of last week and the ensuing lovefest, though laudable, cannot have helped assuage those fears in any way, either.
But what really burned me this morning was not Hillary’s loss of composure–I’ve been waiting to see Hillary Clinton tear someone’s head off since Monica Lewinsky first reared her ugly head (see Bad Hair Day parenthetical, graf 2). No–what burned me was NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell’s offhanded comment that Hillary was “clearly having a ‘Bad Hair Day'”.
Wait a minute, wait a minute–are we talking literal, or figurative here? If it’s figurative, I’d have to agree, but as far as literal goes, well, let’s go to the video: Um, yes. Mitchell appeared to be correct; the Secretary of State was indeed, having a literal “Bad Hair Day”.
What?! Are you kidding me? You’re following the Secretary of State‘s international tour to some of the more dicey parts of the world, and you’re spending time covering the state of…her hair?!
It’s bad enough that Clinton has to spend so much of her time scrabbling out from under her husband’s lingering shadow, especially this last week, but to then put her unfortunate snappishness down to a possible poor choice of hair product that morning is ridiculous, and what’s more, it helps reinforce that persistent, opportunity-stifling double standard that a woman has to do everything a man does and look good while doing it in order to succeed.
Did anyone ever make a comment about Madeleine Albright having a bad hair day? Did anyone ever care about Madeleine Albright’s hair? No, because she was the Secretary of State, for crying out loud, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.!–she had bigger fish to fry than choosing the right hair spray for Bosnia’s current humidity level.
And with that, I was angry–just about as angry as Clinton herself appeared in the video. When are we going to stop talking about powerful, accomplished women’s hair, their pantsuits, their fabulous arms (do you know that you get over 1, 470,000 hits if you do an online search for “Michelle Obama’s arms”?), their choices in designers, and start taking them seriously?
Until we do, I think many women, myself included, are going to be facing an endless future of Bad Hair Days, and I mean figurative ones here, because those are the days when you misbehave, when you snap, when you throw that vase at that unsuspecting moron’s head. If that’s what it takes to get some respect, well–wasn’t it Eleanor Roosevelt who said that “well-behaved women rarely make history”?
You go, Hillary–I may not agree with your politics, but I do support your right to have a Bad Hair Day–of both types. And Andrea Mitchell, stop talking about Hillary’s hair–you’re doing her and the rest of us an injustice.
Interesting take on the issue at http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/andrea_mitchell_attributes_cli.php , but what’s more significant to me is the general lack of conversation about this.
I agree with your premise that women are demeaned by comments like those made by Andrea Mitchell. Unacceptable. To us, anyway, but not apparently to Hillary. I don’t hear the same calls for apology that we would hear if the same remark was made by, let’s say, Wolf Blitzer. Or Dan Rather. So that silence says it’s okay for a woman to make those disparaging remarks about another woman because she’s part of the…sorority? Or is Hillary just picking her battles?
We may never know. The silence from Hillary is the problem: in that silence, the general view becomes that as long as it’s tolerable for anyone to make those remarks, it’s acceptable for someone to make them. Why shouldn’t that someone be you or me or Andrea Mitchell? Well, okay, maybe not me, but it’s not right anyway. If you can’t say something nice….
Mitchell should have made her point some other way, but Hillary should have called her on it.
Oh, and bad hair days? I can dimly recall hair down to the middle of my back once upon a time. Those were ALL bad hair days for me. A ponytail holder can only do so much.