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

[sasha_feather]

Excellent analysis. I'm also bothered by the "I was just joking" defense; it was so helpful to me when I learned that's a common bullying/ harassment tactic.

[brainwane]

Uggggggh "I was just joking".

Once, in a situation talking to someone who had done me a small wrong, I said I wanted a public apology, and then they started asking what I'd want in the apology, and I realized that there was a big possibility for blowback that would hurt me if I actually made them do this. So I said "oh I'm just kidding" and acted like I hadn't been serious. So I have had an experience of being on the other side of it and I know how untruthful and slippery it can be from the other end, and it only solidifies my opinion that it's a dirty trick.

I think it might be better, net, for people to sometimes have a face-saving way of backing off, so they have an attractive option that is not "double down on really awful thing I have said." But it is still so gross. And "well obviously I didn't mean it literally" (from someone who usually wants their word taken literally) is in the same category, to me.

[sasha_feather]

That's a good point, maybe "I take it back" like backsies / no backsies that kids do. "I've reconsidered, let's rewind."