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

[ivy]

Yep. Super fucked up, and yet I know a bunch of dudes who are like "it's one hair, it's not a big deal". Lacking having lived on the inside of this context, I think they're missing how utterly fucked up it is. :/

[brainwane]

Oh dear. I do not know whether it is plausible or kind to hope for those dudes to learn better.