Why are television news anchorettes so blonde?

Jack Shafer writes in Slate in "TV's Aryan Sisterhood" that:

Joanna Pitman estimates in On Blondes that only one in 20 white adult Americans is a genuine blond, yet one in three adult American females sports has the look. If you do the math, it's clear that many female newscasters lie about their true hair color every time they appear on television. Lest you think I exaggerate the bogus-blonde glut, I recommend a visit to TVheads.com. The Web site maintains an archive of 50,000 newscaster images collected by volunteers during the last three years. TVheads.com breaks out newscasters by network and by sex, and by my definition of blond, at least 60 percent of the females qualify.

Unfortunately, the theory Shafer offers for why this is so is clearly wrong:

As the leading scholar of blond studies, Joanna Pitman provides us with the best collection of statistics, history, prehistory, and commentary on the subject. Her book offers an evolutionary psychology explanation for the hair color's timeless allure: We associate blond with youth, she writes, because the hair of babies and that of young children tends to become wan and darken with age. Pittman—a blonde, incidentally—notes blond women appear younger and thus more fertile, winning them an evolutionary advantage over brunettes.

From an evolutionary standpoint, however, it makes no sense that women trying to catch male attention would want to look like toddlers. Prepubescent children don't appear "more fertile," they appear infertile. So, that is likely only a coincidence. Much more plausible is a theory I offered in VDARE in 2003:

The press typically attributes the popularity of blondeness to the evil monopoly of the WASP elite (or whatever). But that doesn't make much sense because there's little demand for blond men. Hollywood, for example, believes that ladies prefer their gentlemen tall, dark, and handsome, a phrase coined by Mae West about Cary Grant. There are dramatically more blonde actresses than actors, because audiences apparently associate darker hair with mature masculinity. In the vast majority of love scenes in movies, the man is darker in hair and skin color than the woman. Actors typically described as blond, such as Leonardo DiCaprio, generally wear their hair much darker than do blonde actresses, such as Meryl Streep or Kate Hudson. Even Conan the Barbarian was played as a brunet by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This pattern appears to be true around the world. Latin American television, for example, is full of blonde women and darker Latin lover-type men.

Why do gentlemen prefer blondes - or at least take more notice of them? My guess is that it's largely because blonde hair is inherently more noticeable. [It reflects more light.] Women like to wear gold and silver jewelry for the same reason—it makes them, to put it crudely, shinier.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer