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

[naomikritzer]

Oh, yeah. All of this.

The other things that occurred to me are the stories about using someone's hair magically to curse or control them.

Shkreli is one of the most profoundly creepy people in public life today. He's a comic book villain from the sort of story where you pull back the curtain to find someone ridiculous rather than frightening, who then almost kills everyone because they stop taking him seriously.

[brainwane]

I'm so delighted you found it an apt analysis.

The other things that occurred to me are the stories about using someone's hair magically to curse or control them.

Do you suppose the locket-with-hair custom partly relates to this? As in, I will give this to you willingly, as a sign of trust?

And what you said about Shkreli is shiveringly on-point.