In Esquire, Richard Dorment writes about growing his red hair our after spending years buzzing it to avoid "hearing shit about it" from others. "For the first time in a long time — years, maybe — I feel good about my hair. Scratch that: I feel great about my hair."

  • Guest

    Heck, he can FEEL his hair. Come, touch his hair.

  • plus MEDIC

    Uh oh, I feared the day Ginger Pride became a thing.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_BZPUF2EASKRBUSDXMNN4IRB5GA dahlia

    i don’t get it, do people make fun of people with red hair?  why?  it’s just a color.

    • bodenski

      I see what you did there.
      Hair and color, and skin and color.
      Got it.

      • BunnyShank

        Its the whole anti witch/pixie/unclean (menstrual) sex-thing.

    • AllyPally

      I think it’s Anglo-Saxon prejudice against the Celts. I live in Scotland and we have a higher proportion of redheads than any other country. I get really annoyed by people mocking redheads. Mock someone’s skin colour and you’ll be in deep trouble. Mock their natural hair colour and everyone laughs. (If you deliberately change your hair colour to something weird and get mocked for it, that’s your own problem.)
      Disclaimer: I don’t have red hair myself.

    • BunnyShank

      Its the whole anti witch/pixie/unclean (menstrual) sex-thing.

  • http://contraditorium.com Carlos Cardoso

    Because you don´t have a soul it doesn´t mean you´re a bad person. Fight the prejudice!

    Now seriously. Mock people because their hair is red? That´s plain stupid. Kids today need more spanking, less Ritalin. 

  • http://twitter.com/tueksta Andreas Beer

    i don’t get this anglo-american ginger-thing – girls with red hair are the sexiest women alive…

    • GawainLavers

      It’s Anglo, but not American.  I’ve never heard of it outside the UK.  Here we make fun of blondes.

      • Lester

        But even in America, we poke fun at blondes (stereotypes aren’t nice kids), but it isn’t hatred on the genetic level. The blonde kid gets laid here. In the UK, it seems, the ginger kid gets beat down.

        For that matter, here its more like a form of misogyny. Blonde guys rarely get teased, and blonde jokes (in general) are variations on the theme of “women are stupid.”

  • digi_owl

    As a fellow male redhead, i sympathize.

  • Alvis

    Why no link to the story?

    • neurogami

      Because the dude has RED HAIR.

  • Mister44

    What I find interesting is red hair is seen as an asset on a woman, but a detractor on a man.

    ETA – Re: why do people make fun of red heads?

    Because they are different – the same with anything.

    • tylersweeney

      permit me to disagree.

      • Mister44

        I stand corrected!

  • Lester

    I don’t get this Ginger hate stuff. This is a British import, right? Because until Cartman on South Park, I had never, ever, never heard anything remotely negative about red hair and freckles in the US. 

    What the hell? At first I thought it was just a parody of racism (the SP thing, of course, but Ginger hatred, in general), but I think people are serious about this in the UK.

    • Guest

      Aside from Frenchiness, it’s all they had to hate on for many generations. 

      I think the English temperment requires an enemy.

    • LinkMan

      South Park used gingercide and gingerpride to satirize racism, but as a very red redhead myself, I assure you that poking gentle fun at redheads (or just commenting on it incessantly) is nothing new in the US.  And sometimes it gets a little darker.  Have you never heard the phrase “beaten like a redheaded stepchild?”  I have.  Many, many, many times.

      Other observations:
      * As a kid, I can’t tell you how many times I pointed out to well meaning adults that my hair was orange, not red, and that carrot tops are actually green.  Stupid grown-ups.
      * I don’t know why, but a number of black people in my life (from very different backgrounds) seemed to think it absolutely hilarious to call me Opie.   I’ve always assumed it was an Andy Griffith/Ron Howard thing, but it’s weird how only black folks seem to use that one.
      * No, I am not (nor am I related to) Lexi Lalas, Bill Walton or the “comedian” known as Carrot Top.

      All of those inane interactions aside, I’ve never really had a problem with my hair.  Heck, I’ve had a red pony tail and a red Jew-fro at various points, and I’m still rocking a red beard.   The only real downside is that I was forced to give up the dream of being a bank robber in a Zorro mask.  “Who was that masked man?!”  “Um, it was the dude with the big mop of curly red hair.”

      • http://profiles.google.com/dave.mckee David McKee

        If we’re on the topic of inappropriate things to call ginger people:

        I once had a teacher nickname a fellow red-head in the class “McVitie’s.”
        As in, “McVitie’s Ginger Nuts”. Apparently, joking about the colour of a kid’s pubic hair is appropriate.

    • Patrick

      Growing up (pre-South Park) as a male with red hair I got tons of shit about having red hair.  Once I hit my 20′s it became pretty rare.

  • tin robot

    The English obsession with slagging off redheads is bizarre, and as an English Ginger, somewhat irritating.   It’s a well established, generally not talked about, phenomenon, and I genuinely have no idea why it continues.  It’s basically the standard punchline for an unimaginative comedian.  I know people whose greatest concern for their unborn baby was that they might be born ginger.  Weird.

    As a teenager I got an amazing amount of stick for it in the small, decidely un-cosmopolitan town I grew up in.  Aside from the predictable stuff at school, what shocked me was the harassment from total strangers.  I was spat at in the street (a guy stopped his car, wound down the window, shouted “Ginger c**t” and drove off), chased down, and had some random drunk try to bottle me.  Under-evolved individuals loudly stating the colour of my hair in public was pretty much a daily event.  Ultimately I discovered that the solution was not to shave it off (though I dare say the Dormont method worked) but instead to grow it obscenely long.  Weirdly, no-one ever commented on the long pre-Raphaelite curls billowing down my back, loudly declaring my ginger pride,  and the abuse pretty much stopped entirely.  (Though I occassionally got felt up by unsuspecting arseholes in night clubs who mistook me for a woman.) 

    I’ve heard loads of theories to explain it – long festering resentment towards Celts/Vikings, that perhaps redheads represent a poor genetic choice if you’re European, or, as one friend put it, “it just looks a bit freaky doesn’t it?”  Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to result in any “proper” discrimination – I’ve never heard of someone being refused a job on account of their red hair for instance – and as a result, it seems a bit churlish to complain.  Except when offered an opportunity to do so, like this one…  (Of course,  Dormont’s article seems to be chiefly about the Joy of Hair, rather than the horrors of red headedness, but still.  It’s fun to off load…)

    • http://twitter.com/matthewfabb matthewfabb

      @boingboing-15320475f701325790638791d18d3fe6:disqus : “I know people whose greatest concern for their unborn baby was that they might be born ginger.  Weird.”And I assume that their hope is that they are not ginger? Because living in Canada, I know many who while not their greatest concern hope for a redhead kid. My wife is a redhead and that is certainly what we are hoping for when we eventually have a child.

      Anyways, this thread is quite the shock to me. I was aware of the South Park episode, of Catherine Tate’s comedy skit of a ginger refuge, but I always thought these were a parody of racism and discrimination, not something that actually existed. One of my best friends as a kid growing up in Montreal was a redhead and a few of my cousins are redheads and I never witnessed anyone making an negative issue of the colour of their hair.

  • Stonewalker

    I did not learn of prejudice against people with red hair until I saw the video for M.I.A.’s “Born Free”.  I thought it was funny and strange so I went and did some reading about ginger-prejudice.  Now I just think it’s strange.

  • MadMolecule

    I had no idea this existed until I saw the South Park episode about gingers.  And even then I thought they’d just made the whole thing up to satirize racism, seeing as how the word “ginger” has a far more offensive anagram.

    • http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

      Holy crap.  I can’t believe I never noticed that.

  • http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

    Testify!

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_IH3CQ7VQW6OVWD2OW367WYETXU William

    When the 11th Doctor Who series started up, one of the first things Matt Smith’s character did on regenerating into a new form was to check his hair and express thanks that he was still not a ginger. It is bizarre. Some of the most beautiful people have red hair. Alicia Witt for instance. And the Lady In the Water lady.

    • autonym

      Thanks? I could have sworn that he was disappointed.

    • bentleywg

      He was disappointed. It was also a reference to the David Tennant regeneration episode (“Christmas Invasion”) in which he’s disappointed that he’s not ginger. 
      The Doctor: [still recently regenerated] Am I… Ginger? Rose: No, you’re just sort of… brown. The Doctor: Aww, I wanted to be ginger. I’ve never been ginger. And you, Rose Tyler, fat lot of good you were. You gave up on me. Ooh, that was rude. Is that the kind of man I am now? Am I rude? Rude and not ginger? 

  • mutiex

    I luv me some redheaded ginger guys.  Sooo hot!  Haters can GTFO.  That leaves more for me.  

  • Kevin Johnson

    So I finally found this post that was never linked to:
    http://www.esquire.com/style/grooming/growing-hair-out-men-1011

    And while it has a great deal to say about growing out your hair, it’s really nothing about being ginger or ginger pride.  Lots of reading between the lines of the one pull quote about not hearing shit about his hair.

    And as far as growing up a red head pre-South Park, the whisling of the Andy Griffiths Show theme was one of the things that taught me how to fight.