-Caveat Lector-
>From www.theatlantic.com/issues/99jun/9906mirror.htm
The Mirror of Dorian Gray
> Mirrors never lie, they say. But how much truth do we really want?
>
> by Cullen Murphy
>
> FREUD. Durkheim. Levi-Strauss. Mead. Lorenz. Bettelheim. Spock.
> Skinner. And now the Walter siblings, of Manhattan, whose names may
> one day join these others on the edifice of self-understanding. John
> Walter, whose background is in physics and computer science, and
> Catherine Walter, whose background is in cultural anthropology, are
> the progenitors of the Hair Part Theory, an exploration of
> psycho-behavioral dynamics to which a friend recently drew my
> attention. The Hair Part Theory states,
>
>
>
> The way a person parts [his or her] hair is related to many
> subconscious associations when assessed by others. Each hair part type
> initiates cycles of behavior toward, and response from, the
> individual. Over time, these cycles affect personality development.
>
>
>
> The underlying premise of the Hair Part Theory is that parting one's
> hair on the left calls subliminal attention to left-hemisphere brain
> processes -- associated with logic, verbal acuity, and "activities
> traditionally attributed to masculinity in our culture" -- and tends
> to be regarded as natural for men. Similarly, parting one's hair on
> the right evokes right-hemisphere processes -- associated with visual,
> artistic, and musical skills, and "nonlinear tasks traditionally
> attributed to femininity in our culture" -- and tends to be regarded
> as natural for women.
>
> Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.
>
> More on arts & culture in The Atlantic Monthly and Atlantic Unbound.
>
>
> Related links:
>
> "Hair Part Theory: What Is Your Hair Part Saying About You?", by John
> Walter and Catherine Walter (1998) "The Effects of Hair Parting on
> Social Appraisal and Personal Development."
>
> True Mirror
> The official Web site of the True Mirror, hosted by John and Catherine
> Walter. Features customer testimonials, press releases, the "Hair Part
> Theory," and an order form.
>
>
> I don't intend to get drawn into a debate on differences between the
> sexes; the Hair Part Theory has to do with cultural perceptions, not
> biological realities. The Walters' point is merely that the "wrong"
> hair part can play against type, sometimes in a way that proves subtly
> advantageous but more often in a way that creates vague discomfort in
> onlookers and may lead to being shunned. Being shunned, in turn, may
> reinforce eccentricity and other abnormal behavior.
>
> Margaret Thatcher's left-side part supposedly enhanced her aura of
> strength and will; Hillary Clinton's left-side part seems to produce a
> more brittle version of the same effect. The right-side parts of
> Robert Kennedy, Laurence Olivier, Gary Cooper, and Lou Gehrig added an
> intriguingly soft dimension to otherwise solid, confident personas.
> But Jimmy Carter's right-side part may have reinforced perceptions of
> inadequacy; he didn't switch hair-part side to the left until halfway
> through his presidency -- too late. Overall, six American Presidents
> maintained right-side parts throughout their term in office; three of
> them (James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Warren G. Harding) are
> deemed by historians to be among our worst, and two others (John Tyler
> and Chester Arthur) are deemed to be inconsequential. (The sixth was
> Ronald Reagan.) Bill Clinton's brushed-back coiffure defies rigid
> analysis, but manifests a "right emphasis." Other well-known
> right-parters: Major Frank Burns, of M*A*S*H; John Tesh; MAD
> magazine's Alfred E. Neuman; Al Gore; Macaulay Culkin; Regis Philbin.
> In the movies Clark Kent parts his hair on the right. Appropriately,
> Superman parts his hair on the left.
>
> The origins of the Hair Part Theory lie in John Walter's adolescence,
> when he remedied a seemingly intractable deficiency in social standing
> by the simple expedient of changing his hair part from right to left.
> Simultaneously, Walter experienced an epiphany regarding the insidious
> role played by the common household mirror, which had shown him in
> reverse all those years.
>
> Moved by his experience, Walter embarked on a crusade to create a
> mirror that would show objects not in reverse but as they actually
> appear to observers -- an effect one sometimes encounters accidentally
> through a freak alignment of mirrors in a hotel bathroom. A patent for
> a nonreversing mirror had in fact been issued in England, in 1887; an
> actual prototype has never been found and may never have been made.
> Walter tackled the problem anew. The result is the True Mirror, which
> "shows you what you look like to others" and thus "allows you to gain
> an accurate sense of yourself."
>
> * * *
>
>
> Not long ago, finding myself in New York City, where the Walter
> siblings have set up a workshop, I decided to buy a True Mirror. The
> workshop fronted on a dark alley a block or so off Broadway, near City
> Hall. Following Catherine Walter's instructions, I called from a pay
> phone nearby. She brought my mirror down to the street. It is a bulky,
> heavy object in a deep, boxlike frame; a precise opposition of two
> ordinary mirrors is required to create the correct effect. The True
> Mirror will not soon be available for use with handbag cosmetics or,
> unless you are a hippopotamus, in dental instruments.
>
> My new mirror came with an assortment of testimonials. "So that's what
> I look like! I look better than I thought!" "It is like looking at
> someone who looks familiar, but who I've never seen before." "Is this
> really who I am? My entire persona is 180 degrees from my own
> perception." "Thank you! This is the correction of life-long deception
> of other mirrors." "I saw a person I'm not sure I know, but would like
> to."
>
> In an ordinary mirror your right eye stares at your right eye and your
> left eye at your left eye -- the opposite of the right-left,
> left-right connection we employ for assessing one another in the wild.
> The image in a True Mirror can come as something of a shock. You tend
> to look the way you do in photographs, which for many people is also a
> shock. (This is the flip side of the start you sometimes get when
> looking at the reflected image of someone you are accustomed to seeing
> in person.) A newspaper headline held up to a True Mirror doesn't
> appear backward -- it reads just fine. But your own face may seem
> oddly asymmetrical. Facial mannerisms nurtured in front of a normal
> mirror (that shy, knowing smile of bemusement tinged with mystery) may
> in a True Mirror be revealed in a different light (a flaccid gash of
> self-doubt). "It is a wholly new view for many," the True Mirror's
> promotional literature concedes, "and not surprisingly, some don't
> like or feel comfortable with the new look." Such people may think
> they have come upon the Mirror of Dorian Gray.
>
> Another issue: in a True Mirror you seem to have far less control over
> the figure in the glass than you do in a normal mirror. If you turn to
> the right in front of a normal mirror, the image turns with you and
> ends up facing in the same direction, completing the visual
> palindrome. In a True Mirror the image faces the other way, as if you
> were about to begin pacing off for a duel with yourself; and when you
> take a step, the image steps away from you. In a normal mirror your
> reflected finger comes out to meet your real one until they touch,
> like Michelangelo's God and Adam. In a True Mirror the reflected
> finger comes at you from the other side of the glass, as if pointed by
> the other hand. Ordinarily, you have no difficulty looking at a normal
> mirror and guiding your hand to an object reflected in it. Try this
> with a True Mirror, and your grasp will prove errant. Shaving becomes
> a blood sport. If all the rearview mirrors in America's cars were
> suddenly replaced by True Mirrors, there could be a very special
> episode of ER.
>
> The True Mirror is intended to restore a sense of reality; in truth it
> adds elements of perplexity to an object that offers plenty of them
> already. Mirrored images have always been a reliable portal into the
> twilight zone -- the tradition runs from the myth of Narcissus through
> Lewis Carroll to Groucho's mirrorlike transaction with Chico in Duck
> Soup. London's National Gallery last year mounted an extraordinary
> show, pulled together by the director and critic Jonathan Miller,
> called "Mirror Image," which traced the influence of mirrors in
> Western art -- real mirrors, implied mirrors, reflections, reversals,
> glints of light on apples and eyes. René Magritte's La Reproduction
> Interdite was there -- the famous painting that shows a man looking at
> the back of his own head in a mirror. Some lesser-known works are more
> quietly preposterous. A sixteenth-century painting by Hans Suess von
> Kulmbach shows God seated in heaven; why does the crystal orb in his
> hand reflect a mullioned window?
>
> In the book that accompanied the exhibit, On Reflection, Miller notes
> that the size of the mirrors in paintings has gradually grown larger
> over the centuries -- indicating some combination of ascendant Western
> hubris and self-discovery, no doubt, but also the simple fact that
> technological progress has made bigger mirrors possible. The Russians
> have been planning to build an array of giant space mirrors to serve
> as artificial moons and provide extra light during long northern
> winters. (The first of these experimental mirrors was launched into
> space in February, but failed to unfold.) The largest reflecting
> surface of all may eventually be the entire planet, if one doomsday
> scenario comes to pass. Were the polar ice cap ever to reach a
> latitude as far south as Boston, something called the albedo effect
> would kick in: the amount of solar energy reflected out of the
> atmosphere (and therefore not retained by the earth) would increase so
> dramatically that the rest of the earth would freeze over in a snap.
>
> * * *
>
>
> Reflectivity is about surface images, and especially about images over
> which one can exercise some control. But control over image may have
> reached a high point from which it is rapidly receding. The future
> belongs not to reflectivity but to "transparency." The idea crops up
> everywhere now, the word "transparent" being used metaphorically to
> mean some combination of "visible through and through," "totally
> aboveboard," and "what you see is what you get." A nonprofit
> organization called Transparency International now produces an annual
> Corruption Perception Index -- a survey that tracks public impressions
> of the extent of venality in some eighty-five countries. A New York
> Times story describing a murder last year on Vatican soil, and raising
> questions about the integrity of the investigation, noted that the
> secular world "remains deeply suspicious of the Vatican's commitment
> to modern standards of transparency." The U.S. Treasury has proposed
> the creation of an "international transparency standard" for global
> financial dealings. To highlight what one newspaper commentary calls
> "postwar Germany's overriding preoccupation with transparency," the
> new dome on the rebuilt Reichstag building is made entirely of glass.
>
> As the Reichstag example suggests, the notion of transparency is fast
> moving from the metaphoric to the literal to the surreal. Last year
> the Gill & Lagodich gallery, in New York, mounted an exhibit devoted
> to picture frames, titled "One Hundred Years on the Edge." The frames
> were hung empty, creating seductive windows onto a void. The recent
> news that a team of scientists in Massachusetts had succeeded in
> artificially slowing the speed of light (to thirty-eight miles an
> hour) apparently heralds another triumph of transparency. According to
> press reports, the slowdown somehow means that opacity-piercing night
> goggles of superior power will now become a reality. More ominous,
> Attorney General Janet Reno is looking into establishing a national
> DNA registry, even as computer makers press to encode all digital
> information with identifying user tags -- measures that threaten to
> raise transparency in the form of personal permeability to an
> unprecedented level. Commenting on the implications, the chairman of
> Sun Microsystems stated simply, "You already have zero privacy -- get
> over it."
>
> Given what transparency has in store for us, we may look back on the
> Age of the True Mirror, and the Hair Part Theory, with a certain
> wistfulness. When we do, a corpus of social-science research will be
> available for study. Catherine Walter has been relentlessly gathering
> data. Her analysis of hair-part side and nationwide electoral patterns
> is already complete. One highlight: as of last fall, the ranks of
> governors, senators, and representatives were devoid of right-siders
> in fifteen states, mostly in the "rugged cowboy" West or in "highly
> traditional" New England. "When I pulled that map together," Catherine
> Walter says, "it was like, 'Whoa!'" Walter maintains an ambitious
> roster of future research tasks, including a study of high school
> yearbook photographs since 1900 to tabulate hair-part trends, and,
> more tentatively, a study of correlation between hair-part side and
> Myers-Briggs personality type.
>
> The Walters will continue to spread the word about hair parts and the
> True Mirror. They turn up at trade shows, and maintain a Web site
> (www.truemirror.com). They fully understand that their work is
> delicate. "Men in particular are reluctant to change their hair part,"
> Catherine observes, "and you can't just begin walking up to people in
> the street." No, but if you call from a pay phone nearby, she'll be
> happy to come down.
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -- Cullen Murphy is the managing editor of The Atlantic.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -- Illustration by Greg Clarke.
>
> Copyright © 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
> The Atlantic Monthly; June 1999; The Mirror of Dorian Gray - 99.06;
> Volume 283, No. 6; page 22-26.
A<>E<>R
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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