Does a woman's hair color affect whether she gets a date?

You wouldn't think so...but maybe it does.

Why would that be? Does it take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure it out?

Origin: a couple of weeks ago (early June 2006), "Ask Amy" (kinda like Dear Abby) had a letter from in guy ("In Search of a Goddess") in Los Angeles, CA, lamenting that he couldn't find a "nice, wholesome, model-type blond in Los Angeles who wasn't after his money". Apparently he could find brunettes otherwise fitting the description, and mentions one who was leaving to go back to her hometown in middle America. Clearly, the answer for this guy could be "well, look somewhere else", or "don't fixate on blonds". You also have to wonder about whether he looks enough like a god for a goddess to be interested. Could also be that he's as shallow as the question implies.

Yesterday (June 21, 2006), there was a letter from "Redheaded Goddess" who wrote "I am a very nice, pretty shapely, single redhead with a six-figure income--and no dates". [Damn. Where was she 20 years ago?] She continues "My three best friends are blond, a little overweight, and are all married housewives." She does not mention ages. Furthermore, "When we go out, the men look right past me to the blondes." Apparently she asked, and she quotes one guy as saying "all a woman has to do is be blond to be attractive. She can be fat, skinny, old, young, stupid or smart, as long as she is blond."

Whoa. It's all about hair color..? Why would that be?

I don't have any personal experience with this, never had a date with a blonde. Ever. My wife's a brunette (well, actually right now she's blonde, but it comes out of a bottle, and is to disguise the gray). My first girlfriend was a redhead, and I'd hazard a guess that that's my actual preference. But I look at them all. I think I prefer brunettes.

In a purely Darwinian world, a preference for blondes would cause the blonde population to expand over time and eventually eliminate others, excepting for a small population of random variations that would be brunette or redhead (which would maybe drive up their desirability, based on unusualness, keeping that population around).

What are the statistical priors on this? Is there data to support this result? The empirical evidence is against it--if it were true, we should be able to observe it around us--people have been producing offspring for millenia. I grant you that it is only in recent centuries that there's be easy enough travel long enough distances to begin to produce the mixing of previously more homogeneous populations, and perhaps only since 1939 that communication technology was good enough (prior to that you couldn't even see a photo of someone in color to really notice blonde hair, but in 1939 when color movies began to be made, wider distribution of them would expose non-blonde population areas of the world to things they'd never seen, in color). So decent demographic and census data might tell us whether the blondes are starting to dominate the population in places.

But I suspect not. In fact, I think it's something else entirely that drives this. Nothing complicated, but subtle.

Sex.

Recall the phrase "blondes have more fun"? Not exactly clear what that means. Perhaps it could be rephrased as "blondes ARE more fun". What would that mean? I recall a tv show episode (won't say which show as I'd be embarrassed to admit having actually seen it, it was appallingly stupid), in which a woman on the show was referred to as a "fun date" in this episode (for the wrong reasons, of course). "Fun date" meant she'd have sex with you.

What I think the hair color preference is about: blondes are perceived as more sexually liberal, brunettes are sexually conservative, and redheads are dangerous/trouble (witness the historical description of redheads as "fiery", hot-tempered, etc). If you're a single guy, interested in easy sex with women, which targets are you likeliest to pursue? If there's one population group that is easy to get naked with, one that's hard, and one that's weird, which one do you go after? Doesn't take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure that out.

And if hair color is the distinguishing characteristic visible from a distance, and is a 1:1 correlator with the 3 population groups, and blondes are in the "easy" group...well, surely it doesn't take an Advanced Degree to see what's going on.

If the above is true, and it shouldn't be too hard to get a handle on it, then blondes would be harder to get a date with, because of competition, meaning those of us willing to have sex with non-blondes would still have plenty of opportunity, albeit with the hard and weird groups. But there ought to be more blondes...

It's been my experience (granted, from a limited population sample set, and no blondes) that hair color is NOT an indicator of a woman's willingness to have sex with you. No reason to assume that hair color correlates 1:1 with libido (or that breast-size does either, else we'd see the female population trend towards larger). In fact, give the size of human population around the world, and the randomness and wide distribution of variations, there's no reason to assume there's any detectable correlation between libido and something else.

Except perhaps how they dress. I wonder if that's any indicator? Or would it be a reflection of something else? It's the only other casually modifiable variable.

But perception is reality if you act upon it...so if you think blonde women are more likely to go to bed with you on a casual basis, and others are not, what do you do? You pursue the blondes. Plain and simple. Except that I still prefer to minimize competition, thus a preference for brunettes.