When the world’s largest sperm donor bank stopped accepting sperms from redheads this week, and I was reminded of Cartman’s presentation, “Ginger kids have no souls!” from a South Park episode two years ago. With popular media making fun of ginger kids in the U.S. and the U.K., do parents shopping for their baby’s DNA avoid the red-headed gene?
Perhaps playground bullying is one reason parents look away from the ginger DNA. Cyros, the sperm donor bank, considered supply and demand factors before deciding to restrict red-headed sperm donors.
Director of Cyros Ole Shou told the Danish newspaper Ekstrabladet, “There are too many redheads in relation to demand. I do not think you chose a redhead, unless the partner—for example, the sterile male—has red hair, or because the lone woman has a preference for redheads. And that’s perhaps not so many, especially in the latter case."
Many students at Duke were not quite sure how to react to this news, and some redheaded students were taken by surprise.
“I’ve never really thought of red hair as a disadvantage until now,” sophomore Philip Doerr said. “I am sad about it—it’s like everyone thinks I’m ugly.”
Aside from South Park, The Catherine Tate Show also featured an excessive amount of redhead jokes. Ginger-spiral-haired Sandra Kemp, ostracized from her ginger-phobic town, moves to a ginger refuge where she encounters confused gingers, gingers in denial and militant gingers.
From flame-haired to strawberry-tinted, how true is gingerism—prejudice against redheaded people—outside the fiction world?
Doerr never encountered bullying in school playgrounds.
“The ginger jokes only started two years ago, just amongst my friends,” he said. “Before South Park, [my hair] was not a big deal.”
Junior Guy Tracy, who had not even thought about donating sperms, also had peaceful lunchtimes at school.
“I haven’t had any kind of bullying or anything as a child," he said. "it only started in college after the South Park episode.”
Maybe Shou should rethink his donor restriction, and look to advertise the perks of being a redhead.
Tracy easily gets mistaken for other gingers and comments such as, “You look just like Prince Harry!” are not rare, he added.
If resembling the British prince or Harry Potter’s sidekick isn’t enough bonus for parents shopping for sperms, Doerr described his experiences in the dating world.
“I think they’re especially attracted to the red hair, it’s like a cult classic,” Doerr said.
Redheads represent approximately two percent of the world population, according to the Washington Post.
Personally, I beat the odds and acquired two ginger boyfriends in the past.
Both, contrary to the South Park fan beliefs, had souls, were not creepy and were not part of any ginger separatist movement.
To those in situations where you are able to pick your baby’s sperm—look beyond the hair color DNA. There’s more to the soul than meets the eye.
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