BY EMILY CRAWFORD

In print | Published January 28, 2010

There are certain things in today’s popular culture that become so naturalized by society that we rarely stop to think about how truly absurd they are. Concepts and images become so ingrained into the everyday milieu by TV, movies, blogs, magazines and infomercials — the constant stream of social excrement we are bombarded with on a daily basis — that we stop noticing them for what they are. Absurdities, perversions and all-around deeply depressing stuff come to be viewed as completely mundane, simply because of their prevalence. Fortunately for us, some pretty hilarious stuff becomes normalized too. In this column, I hope to explore these nuances of popular culture, the absurdities that go unnoticed or undiscussed, and the implications that they carry with them.

Sometimes, when a few people notice an abnormality in the daily drudgery of celebrity gossip, reality TV and whatever else comprises the background static of American pop culture, they point the anomaly out. They tell people about it. They blog about it, twitter about it, write about it. They post it on “Texts From Last Night.” These abnormalities in the fiber of popular culture turn into trends to be spread and replicated. Some trends mill about for a time, and some almost instantaneously disappear again with the rest of the drivel. They might even become memes, if only I could figure out exactly what that word means. Yet often, elements of pop culture become enough of a trend that they reflect back upon society; their trendiness either reveals pre-existent meaning, or creates new meaning. Today, and once every two weeks for the rest of the semester, I hope to explore such phenomena, to observe these deepest and darkest reaches of human nature. And I will start with the institution of hair manipulation that is the Bumpit.

I discovered the Bumpit one day when, bewildered by the numerous comedic references that I had heard and seen made about them, I decided to Google-search the word. I shall warn you, the infomercial clips that I found were some of the most terrifying Youtube videos I have ever stumbled upon, aside from the time someone made me watch one of an elephant giving birth. The glazed-over eyes of the robot-like hair models, the sinister stage smiles, the sheer height of the hair… Oh dear God, what’s she putting on her head?!

For those who are thoroughly confused by now, a Bumpit is a hair accessory, or more accurately, a hair insert, that one wears and then combs the hair back over, creating a bouffant-like hair style that literally looks like a bump on the crown of the head. Apparently they are advertised on TV all the time, something that my time abroad last semester sadly deprived me of. They even come in different sizes, so that one can make those weird little frontal hair-bumps with their bangs should they choose, as opposed to the larger back-of-the-head bump.

My initial reaction was that we are clearly just reverting to the beauty standards of pre-Columbian Latin America by replicating the distorted-head look that the Mayans created by strapping boards to babies’ foreheads. Then I realized that most Bumpit wearers were probably not aware of this practice, so I thought again. Is there some deep, primeval human attraction to having a lumpy head? Has the concept of volume-oriented hair products just gone wildly out of control, with people following along like lemmings? Then, a more recent factor suddenly occurred to me: Sarah Palin’s hair.

For those of you who were only horrified by her politics and happily able to ignore Palin’s awful red suits, caked-on makeup, and beauty queen up-do, the woman had some significantly high hair, especially relative to most female politicians. There was definitely some major hair teasing going on, if not a kind of Bumpit prototype. Sarah’s manicured image in general was a topic of much scrutiny, but her hair became especially symbolic, to the extent that “Sarah Palin hair” is now a recognizable term for most. But it wasn’t just that her hair was very obviously styled: It was showy, dramatic, over the top. It was what Bumpit-wearers might call “luxurious,” and sane people might call “ridiculous.” Sarah Palin was sending a message with her hair: “I am sophisticated, but spunky too!” Personally, I would argue that in reality, “sophisticated” translated into “tacky” and “spunky” into “trying too hard,” but unfortunately it seems that Bumpit owners everywhere would disagree. The clientele of my food store at home in rural Maryland is strong evidence of this. Palin’s hair started a trend that declared bigger to be better when it comes to hair, and it escalated from there, quite literally.

So, it might seem that Sarah Palin has convinced American women that they too can be both “serious” and glamorous, if only they express their ambition through the height of their hair. But there is more to it than that: Much like Palin, Bumpits are as famous for being made fun of as they are for being liked. Rapidly replacing Palin as the high-hair icon of the day is Snooki from MTV’s Jersey Shore, a figure who is famous almost entirely for making people feel superior to her. The female image has developed a dichotomy where women are besieged with images to replicate and then ridiculed the moment they misstep or get carried away. This mentality of using artifice to create a supposedly “natural” image has escalated to the point that women are actually putting hidden plastic support systems into their hair.

When confronted with this fact, it is tempting to call for a stop to this madness, or to give up hope for a sane society altogether. But the truth is, we have been doing strange things to our hair for centuries, and it’s not likely to stop now: Just think about powdered wigs. But it is possible to benefit from such absurdity by observing, learning and hopefully being entertained as well. I hope you will join me in this endeavor as I delve into topics like these, the dregs of popular culture that we laugh at but seldom really think about. I am diving into the abyss.

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