The XX Factor: What women really think.

Farrah Fawcett: The Hair That Launched a Thousand Feathers

For a boy growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, Farrah Fawcett was a dreamgirl; but for a girl growing up then, she was a nightmare. Everyone knew that she was the quintessential Charlie’s angel. She was the prototype. Jaclyn Smith was the brunette. Kate Jackson was the “brainy” one. But Farrah, she was perfect—pretty, blonde, and with a gorgeous body, posterized in a bathing suit and adorning every teenage boy’s bedroom wall. I remember the first time I saw that poster at Spencer Gifts and was shocked on two accounts: that the poster was so overtly sexual, and that a human could actually have a body that looked like that. When Farrah left the show, the producers tried to replace her with a series of other, lesser blondes: Cheryl Ladd, Shelley Hack, but no one compared to Farrah. She even had an unusual and angelic name.

And her hair ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.) 

The Memoir We'd Love To Read

As an aside, if I do lose ability to remember who I used to be, I hope I do so as elegantly as the Alzheimer's patient in the 2007 film Away From Her played by Julie Christie (coincidently also once romantically linked with Warren Beatty). For obsessed boomers, Christie's character is a role model for going gaga gracefully.  

Getting back to Diane Keaton, Jessica is quite right the Academy Award-winning movie star has a platform of readers no matter what her topic. If she must pay tribute to her mother, we all understand where she's coming from. But let's hear how mom let her audition for the Broadway rock musical Hair, only insisted her daughter keep her clothes on, or maybe write Hall's observations about her daughter's ex-boyfriend and frequent co-star who later settled down with his teenage stepdaughter. 

Hair-Color Industry: Cockroach of the Economic Apocalypse

Conde Nast Portfolio polled its readers to ask "where they've already cut back or where they plan to in the coming year." The results provide a little bit of an unsettling look at our priorities. The top and bottom results, with a selection from the middle:

Stop eating out: 29.4%

Move in with parents: 8.1%

Stop buying clothes: 7.3%

Sell eggs or sperm: 5.4%

Sell home: 1.8%

Let go of housekeeper: 1.6%

Stop coloring hair: 1.1%

Stopping buying clothes is a more upsetting prospect than moving in with the 'rents? Selling one's entire home is less depressing than laying off the household help? And five times more people insist they would sell their eggs than say they'd stop dyeing their hair?

P.S. Reader MK notes that "the unusual distribution probably has less to do with relative preferences between dissimilar solutions and more to do with how desperate people are," suggesting that it's a different class of people contemplating selling their home than considering stopping coloring their hair. Very true, and related to the point Torie made. Still, this wasn't a random survey; it was a poll of readers of Conde Nast Portfolio, whose financial situations are probably more alike. I'd reckon a majority of women who answered that poll color their hair. The finding struck me, too, because it jibed with a (yes, small and random) anecdote I heard at the place I get my hair cut, which does a big business in "color." The stylists at this salon reported a recent uptick in requests for coloring, not a downturn.

That Is Some Pricey Lipstick, Sarah

Wow, forget medicine and law; I'm gonna push my girl toward beauty school, where the big bucks are. Here's where Sarah Palin's traveling makeup artist made more money than anyone else in the whole McCain-Palin campaign during the first two weeks of this month. According to the New York Times, Amy Strozzi, "who was nominated for an Emmy award for her makeup work on the television show 'So You Think You Can Dance,' was paid $22,800 for the first two weeks of October alone.'' Now that she's moved on to Project Runway, "the campaign categorized Ms. Strozzi's payment as "PERSONNEL SVC/EQUIPMENT." Does that mean the lipstick is included?

Either way, Sarah Palin's makeup artist makes more in a month than a lot of people make in a year. We are really veering toward Marie Antoinette land here, aren't we? With perfumed sheep down on the old faux farm? And if she wants to talk small towns, I'll see her and raise her, because where I come from, this lame non-explanation of the $150,000 the RNC spent on her new wardrobe would be considered worse than no explanation at all: "That is not who we are,'' she told the Chicago Tribune. "It's kind of painful to be criticized for something when all the facts are not out there and are not reported.'' Only, she didn't elaborate, didn't add or subtract any facts from our Escada-gate knowledge base at all, so her "denial'' is .. .denying what, exactly? "That whole thing is just, bad!'' she said of the uproar over her clothes. "Oh, if people only knew how frugal we are." OK, I'll bite: How frugal?

Hairier and Hairier

Actually, Emily—didn't Hillary get the idea that it would be OK to complain about her hair from none other than Mike Kinsley himself? Last week, he pointed out (in his Slate column, of course) that male candidates can sleep a whole extra half-hour every night because they don't have to primp. The article was frighteningly similar to Hillary's comments several days later.

Not suggesting Hillary reads Kinsley every week (though who knows!), but I'd be pretty surprised if someone on her staff didn't notice that article. Although it's not Tuzla II (or even another Northern Ireland fib), there was something rather phony about Hillary's out-of-the-blue lament. Would it have occurred to her to complain in public about "the time it takes to get ready," unless an important (male) columnist had not suggested it first?

Hillary's Hairy Lament

I realize this isn't up there with Tuzla and utter delusion, but am I picking on Hillary to bring up this self-pitying joke she made, at a town hall meeting in Missoula, Mont., about her looks and her hair? From CNN's political blog, "And that is another difference, you know how long it takes me to get ready than my two opponents — I mean really just think about it," she joked. "I think I should get points for working as hard as I do plus the time it takes to get ready."

Is this really a smart way for a female candidate to go? I know other women will identify with her—even I do, and my hair is an inevitable mess. But isn't she awfully quick to move from difference to inequity and persecution, in order to make a cheap bid for sympathy? Though of course, that's hardly a cardinal political sin. So maybe the real question here is whether I'm being hard on her for no good reason, as opposed to not getting the joke or shrugging it off.