on the hair bounty

[brainwane]

So I saw the news story about Martin Shkreli getting punished for posting online and offering USD$5,000 for a strand of Hillary Clinton's hair. And it gets at a bunch of deep primal or overlapping things, doesn't it?
* girls being pressured/socialized to have longer hair, and Hillary specifically revamping her hair for decades to avoid particular narratives about her feminism
* pulling people's hair as a childish bullying tactic
* entitlement to women's bodies
* this specific guy's obsession with using his wealth to collect rare stuff that people think he should not have/monopolize (e.g. the Wu-Tang Clan album)
* punishing Hillary specifically for being a public figure who interacts with ordinary, unscreened people
* perverting the well-known oldschool token of affection valence of a lock of a woman's hair (_consensually_ given & taken)
* stealing _a single hair_ as literalizing the idea of microaggression
* figuratively: a single hair is like the metadata we cannot help emitting, for other people to scoop up, as we traverse the world

Comments

[moem]

It made me think of the way that people use other people's hair or fingernail clippings in rituals, such as voodoo. Having a part of someone's body gives you a kind of power over them.

And yes, hair = DNA = identity, like in the movie Gattaca.

[brainwane]

I was thinking about Gattaca too!