Emma says about....

When I was 8 years old I changed primary schools, it wasn’t easy as I had already made friends in a school I was comfortable in and loved.  But in September 1981I started St Hilda’s Girls school.  Like most kids on a first day at school, we work out the nice girls from the not so nice girls, and even at a young age I knew who i did and didn’t want to spend my break times and lunches with.  I think it must have been the end of my first week in Mrs Hefernans class, when a little girl I had been chatting to on and off all week, who had told me her name was Andee, wondered if I would ask my Mum if I was allowed to have her come back to my house for tea one afternoon.  I remember so clearly going home that day and saying to my Mum “Theres a little girl called Andee in my class, she wants to be my friend and come for tea, and she has long red hair”, 33 years later and Andee is still my best friend and still has wonderful red hair.  However, why is it people with red hair have a label?  I mean, did she run home that afternoon and say to her Mum “I met a nice girl called Emma, she is having me over for tea, and she has lots of brown hair” No, of course she didn’t, because red hair gives you a label, and sadly red heads have had far too much bad press......

 

I don’t understand why someone who has red hair and freckles has to be branded this way, I find it so upsetting and offensive, especially when someone like Andee is one of the nicest, kindest people I know, being her friend is one of the best things in my life, she is funny and caring.  I have been through some horrible times and some happy times, but she is always there for me and there is no other friend I have who I could share things with like her.  When we go out on a “girly night” we usually do end up wetting ourselves from laughing, its the sort of laughter no one else gets, and if you try and explain it to anyone, they just look at us blankly.   What also makes our friendship very special is  our kids love eachother too - we have even said that one day when we are old and grey we will retire to Miami together and share a condo in the sun, she will have that lovely pale skin and sit in the shade and I will be more like an old leather handbag.  The one thing that I love most about Andee is, she has always kept her beautiful hair colour she has never died it, not even tried a few highlights its just her lovely colour, which amazingly throughout the year changes naturally, in summer it takes on a lighter more strawberry blonde shade and in the winter a more auburn shade.

 

Being friends with a red head has never gotten in the way of our friendship and I actually think its ginger/red head boys who get bad press more than girls, girls get away with being “cute or pretty” where as boys with ginger hair and freckles are told by society that they are drippy nerds.... I really don’t think you could ever look at Damian Lewis and call him a nerd or a drip. Nicholas Brody “Terrorist or Nerd” just doesn’t sound right.

 

Andee, like myself is a Mum, but not to two but three children.  Toby, Zach and the ever so beautiful Ruby!  I remember when she was pregnant with Toby who is now 10, she told me how much she was scared about having a boy with red hair who will get picked on at school and be a nerd!  But on August 16th 2004, Toby came into the world and is blonde! Then in 2007 Zach came joined them - and in her words “I remember them passing me this little bundle and all i could focus on was this tuft of Ginger hair”  BUT Zach, who is now 7 is one of the coolest, toughest Red heads I have ever met, in fact even I am a bit scared of him, he is seriously one ginger I would not mess with..... Finally came Ruby in 2011, possibly one of the cutest, loveliest children I have ever met.  Andee always wanted a girl and after having two boys, gave it one last go, it could have been another boy and even another red head boy.  

So I sat down with Andee for a coffee and I asked her! What is it like to be a red head? and also a red head mother of red head kids!

 

Andee: Being a red head has never really affected me, I agree that boys get more stick than girls and I was always glad that Toby was blonde and NOT the ginger out of my two boys, Toby is a very sensitive boy and the thought of him being picked on would just really be hard for him, whereas Zach has embraced his red hair and does not stand for anything.  Having red head kids is a great conversation starter, from when they were babies just standing in a supermarket line - someone would just look a this carrot top family and have to say something (always nice comments) and its been that way since they were babies. 

Damian Lewis and the case of the missing redheads memory piece

There's Julianne Moore, Karen Elson, Lily Cole, Nicole Kidman … but where are their male counterparts? Flame-haired Michael Hann meets the photographer aiming to show redheaded men are sexy

 Thomas Knights wants you to think about action heroes. About James Bond, or the characters Arnie gets to play. He wants you to think about romantic leads in Hollywood movies, about the guy who gets the girl, about the film star every man wants to be and every woman wants to be with. And then he wants you to ask yourself this: how come those men are never ginger?


That's why he's spent the past couple of years photographing red-headed men – not tubby, acne-ridden men with greasy hair, but vivid and beautiful red-headed men, the kind who – were it not for their hair colour – would make any member of the mousey majority jealous. "It's in the public consciousness that ginger men aren't sexy and aren't strong," he tells me. "They are completely emasculated and desexualised in popular culture." And so with his exhibition Red Hot, featuring photographs of 50 men, he wants to do what many people would find either ridiculous or risible: he wants to make ginger men desirable.

If you think "gingerism" is really, well, a bit of a laugh, you're almost certainly not ginger, as Knights is and as I am. You weren't one of the red-headed kids injured by bullies at Wingfield Academy in Rotherham in October, when a group of students decided to celebrate "Kick a Ginger Day". You've never been violently attacked in drunken incidents simply because someone who'd overdone the beer didn't like the colour of your hair. At the most prosaic level, you've never had your hair colour used routinely as an all-purpose putdown, or heard random strangers shout "Ginger!" (always with hard Gs; apparently it's really funny when you pronounce it like that) as you walk down the street, minding your own business. Though I guess having red hair in public is pretty provocative.

"The main thing for me is the huge polarisation between the way our society perceives ginger men and ginger women," Knights says. "You can name successful redheaded women in Hollywood. But with men, once you've said Damian Lewis, you're stumped. There's got to be a reason for that, because genetically it should be equal. But it hasn't been allowed to happen. So I think the whole gingerism thing is a stealth form of acceptable racism that goes on in boardrooms, in authors' minds. Look at Harry Potter – the redheads are the poor, weak family, the buffoons. If Harry Potter had been ginger, that would have been a different story."

The idea for Red Hot came from the rising profile of Lewis, and from the continuing escapades of Prince Harry, whom Knights views as the epitome of the sexy ginger man – high-profile and a bit wild. He decided redheaded men were having their "moment". So he called up the leading model agencies, asking for subjects to photograph. "None of them had any ginger models," he says. "They had loads of redheaded women, but no male models – there wasn't a demand from the fashion industry."

In the absence of models, he had to appeal for subjects and go out in search of others. Greg Rutherford, the Olympic gold medal-winning long-jumper, was among them, and told Knights he's still known within sport as "the ginger athlete" not the "Olympic champion athlete".
"His girlfriend told me that when she started dating him, her friends got together and told her, 'We didn't know you were into gingers,'" Knights says. "And her friends were saying, 'Aren't you afraid you're going to have a ginger baby?' My best mate is dating an Irish guy with a ginger beard. I said, 'Genuinely, how would you feel if you had a ginger baby?' And she said, 'I'm not going to lie to you, I would be disappointed. Of course I'm going to love it, but I don't want a ginger baby.' This is at the heart of it – that women are ashamed to have a ginger baby.

 He's heard stories from his subjects of the bullying they have suffered, of their attempts to render themselves un-ginger (as Knights himself did – he dyed his hair for 10 years before resigning himself to his natural colouring). "That really shouldn't have to happen in today's world. That's why I feel boys need their strong male role models. Back at school, if someone said to me, 'You fucking ginger,' I'd say, 'Yeah, I am, and I really hate it.' I agreed with them. I had no prid."

Not now – even though, irony of ironies, his hair has now darkened, and – as someone whose hair is bright enough to be used as a beacon on dark nights – I'd be hard pushed to describe him as a true ginger. But ginger intersectionality must be upheld, and after 50 minutes of Knights's determined proselytising on behalf of our kind, I'm ready to head out into the streets of central London and yell: "Say it loud! I'm ginger and I'm proud."
I don't, though. Someone would only shout back: "Fuck off, ginger."

   
article the guardian picutres copyright thomas knights
see his homepage for the project here: