I once melted off various chunks of my hair because I wanted to have white stripes in it and was chatting with a friend while leaving 40 volume bleach in my hair extra-long. Parts of my hair were literally reduced to mush. Fortunately, I have thick hair to begin with and I was wearing it in stripes anyway, so it didn’t look as disturbing as it might have otherwise.

My best friend in ninth grade had naturally platinum blonde hair and I saw Heavy Metal that same year. Seeing white-tressed Tarna chopping off heads in her leather underwear was a formative moment for me. Whenever there is a real albino in a movie with humans (as opposed to cartoons), they often end up being a villain. I think the whole lack of pigment thing strikes some people in a primal off-kilter way which makes them associate it with danger.

Punk rock hairstyles are partially based on trying to evoke this response in others. I know, I know, you have a blue mohawk solely because you like how it looks, and you totally hate it when anyone stares at you in the street or when you frighten annoying passers-by or when anyone thinks it is sexy.

Maybe I wouldn’t have a thing for dangerously sexy if I hadn’t seen Heavy Metal when I did. But, not a lot of English language movies came to the theater in the country I was living in at the time, so I was going to go see whatever came through, whether it was an old movie or R-rated or even if it was a wretched doomed romance movie. I suppose, given that I still hate doomed love flicks, and I saw those at the same formative age, perhaps Heavy Metal is not wholly to blame/credit for my adult tastes.

So I admit that I watched and enjoyed the first season of America’s Next Top Model where the cool sorta rivethead chick with the good work ethic won. I stopped watching ANTM some time during the second season when I suddenly realized that Tyra Banks was appallingly egocentric, sadistic, and disingenuous and wasn’t really trying to select a top model at all. How this took me until the second season I do not know. Maybe it is something about Tyra Banks. Many years ago, when Trya Banks was a big deal model but not yet a brand, a sibling of mine scouted her for his modeling agency while she was on a date with John Singleton. Without noticing that she was, ya know, already a model.

So ANTM has apparently made it to its thirteenth season now or “cycle 13″. I guess they do more than one season a year. Part of each season includes an episode where Tyra dominates the wannabes by forcing them to get disturbing makeovers they have no say in. A lot of people (well, a portion of the people who don’t have pay cable and thus watch The CW) are all in a tizzy because Tyra Banks had three of the contestants this year get bleached kind of albino, eyebrows included.

Now I think albino features are seriously hot, but why is Tyra Banks suddenly all about albinism? A couple of models currently making a splash include Shaun Ross and Diandra Forrest, both from the Bronx. If Shaun Ross and Diandra Forrest were from Tanzania, however, their lives would be much less fabulous. Albinos in Tanzania have been being hunted. Tanzanians have been systematically murdering albinos and chopping off their body parts to harvest for supposed medicinal or magical properties or maybe for fun. These sorts of creepy things are difficult to parse when they happen in an alien culture. I think of Tanzania as a happy place with interesting animals because my grandparents lived there when my grandfather was helping Tanzania learn to utilize their leather resources. (Yes, leather, the apple doesn’t fall that far from the tree.) But I guess it has its downside. Ugh. Anyway, the Tanzanian government announced this week that it will be getting tough on albino killers and hanging some soon. Hopefully that is a deterrent. Positive Exposure is an organization working to help the victims of albinism discrimination in Africa.

Anyway, I think white hair looks lot. And soon it may even be sort of in. I would prefer, however, that fashions I like come into style because of factors other than genocidal events. But that’s just me.

Ivan Reitman directed Ghostbusters and Stripes and produced Heavy Metal, so I’d like to believe that his progeny would be on the side of all that is awesome. His son Jason Reitman adapted Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking for the screen. I thought he did a great job and I loved the book and love Christopher Buckley’s writing. Doing an adaptation of a good book that readers enjoy is no mean feat. So I’m sure Jason Reitman’s movie Juno is well done. But I haven’t seen it for a few reasons.

I first became aware of Diablo Cody, who is credited with having written Juno, when a bunch of my writer friends started complaining about how they believe Diablo Cody, at best, co-wrote the film and, at worst, allowed her youngish sexually-adventurous hip chick chic to be utilized as a pseudo-feminist face for one of the Reitmans. I’d never heard of her before, so I was surprised by how many people I knew, from really different areas, who all believed this. I always remember Diablo Cody as Cody Diablo because Diablo just sounds like a last name to me and Cody sounds like a first one to me. I guess she kept some kind of a blog about stripping in between office jobs and some of the writers I know base their opinion on the level of maturity in her writing there. I haven’t read the blog and don’t really know. Whoever wrote Juno, it looks like it has some snappy well-delivered dialog, judging only from the trailers. I’m not a fan of the female mascot PR methodology, but I’ll give Diablo Cody the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she did write the film.

Here is where we come to problem number two. I dislike it when companies use a fake female spokesperson and have her pretend to run the company or some such, just so they can get some feminist points or chick support. I dislike it the same way I do when large corporations will back some supposedly indie project and send out phony press releases about what a bootstrap operation said project is. Basically, I think that a certain strata of American culture has figured out how to co-opt their own opposition. So Juno looks like a hip little film, with a spunky portrayal of how intelligent teenage girls approach the world. As played by Ellen Page, even in the trailers, the title character Juno looks like the sort of girl any teenage girl would want to be. Only the storyline of Juno has a teenage girl getting pregnant, deciding not to get an abortion, and giving her baby up for closed adoption to a woman in the middle of a divorce. This is pro-life without even the benefit of family values. Are the baby boomers really that scared that social security is going to go bust if younger generations don’t start breeding immediately?

I’m pro-choice, but I’ve never had an abortion. I realize that there is some powerful biology there and you don’t necessarily 100% know what you would do, until you are dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. So I’m not saying it is wrong for a teenage girl to bring her baby to term and then give it up via the out-dated closed adoption method where she can never meet her offspring, even if the child wants to meet her. I do, however, know that every single woman I know, who has had an abortion and saw Juno, came out of the movie feeling terrible about having had an abortion. So, if the film was not intended as pro-life propaganda being disseminated from within the castle walls of hipsterdom, then it was a poorly done movie, because that was surely the impact it had on its audience. If it was intended to cause more unplanned pregnancies to be brought to term, then good job, guys.

Witness the recent much-publicized pregnancy pact in Massachusetts. Whether or not the fourfold increase in pregnancies at Gloucester High was the result of something which could be described with so sinister a term as “pact”, the fact remains that teen pregnancy appears to be on the rise in some surprising places. My mother mentioned this teen pregnancy story to me when it first broke and my first thought was that this was another example of co-option of cool to promote a counterintuitive agenda. Sometimes certain cultural patterns look obvious to me, but I’m not sure if others will share my view. Well, turns out high schools are now referring to this as “The Juno Effect” and this apparently annoys actor Jason Bateman, who played the prospective adoptive father.

You can be damn sure that, if kids were stealing cars after playing Grand Theft Auto, connections would be drawn. You can be damn sure that, if kids started killing themselves after listening to Ozzy Osbourne, connections would be drawn. You can be damn sure that, if kids started swearing after listening to Eminem, connections would be drawn. So, now that the shoe is on the other ideological foot, connections can damn well be drawn here too. Juno causes teen pregnancy. The film only cost $6.5 million to make and has grossed over $100 million, so maybe they can use some of those profits to help out all the unwed mothers they have inspired.