'ON BLONDES' | A review Pitman's book offers a look at enlightenment

A third of American women are blond, many with help from a bottle.
By GRETCHEN GURUJAL
ASSOCIATED PRESS
"On Blondes" by Joanna Pitman (Bloomsbury, $24.95)
It seems so illogical and so unfair. Why should something so easily attainable mean so much?
Well, being blond does indeed matter, asserts Joanna Pitman, whether it is achieved by smothering pigeon dung on one's locks (as did the ancient Romans), lathering with horse urine (practiced in Renaissance times) or visiting the drugstore for some blondness in a bottle (as do many modern women encouraged by ads telling them they're "worth it").
In her book "On Blondes," Pitman names and bleaching methods, dissecting the racial implications and intellectual suggestions of those lightened strands.
The one question Pitman doesn't answer: Does it matter if one is a "natural"? Pitman suggests this isn't relevant to the telling nature of blondes throughout history.
"Every age has restyled blonde hair in its own image and invested it with its own preoccupations. Blondeness became a prejudice in the Dark Ages, an obsession in the Renaissance, a mystique in Elizabethan England, a mythical fear in the nineteenth century, an ideology in the 1930s, a sexual invitation in the 1950s. ..."
Most are not "genuine." Only about one in 20 adult white Americans is naturally blond, but one in three American women is blond by design, writes Pitman. Blondness as such is not important as an innate feature; it is a show and the actors and directors are all around.
Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love and fertility, set the standard. The much-maligned biblical Eve covered herself with her blond locks in paradise. Venetian beauties including Veronica Franco also paraded their golden strands. Queen Elizabeth I ruled with it. Many others achieved it by applying saffron, white wine, olive oil, hay seeds, ivy bark, soap flakes, ammonia or other substances. Later, in the early 1800s, hello hydrogen peroxide!
Risky business
Basking in her subject, Pitman surveys prejudices, Aryans, Hitler, the Nordic ideal, anti-Semitism, the fair ideals of Stalin, Wagnerism, literature's blondes, pop icons and many other powerful empires with neck-breaking alacrity. Such speed at times makes for tiresome generalizations, but over all offers a fast, witty and rollicking read on blondness -- what Pitman calls a wildly prevalent standardization of a Western commodity.