Ageism, Gender Norms, and Rocking the Short Hair

I got this weird idea in my head that, because I'm turning forty this year, this would be my last chance to grow my hair out, which is pretty stupid.



It turns out that I have all of these presuppositions about life after forty that I don't really notice I have until I base actual life decisions on them, and then I realize that I am dangerously close to turning into that person who sells all her flashy jewellery and any clothing with an ounce of cheer in it because it's her fortieth birthday and she has to accept that it's her old lady times now.

I decided that I had to TAKE A STAND against my own ageism, as though this were some kind of revolutionary power struggle against an oppressive political regime, and I secretly chose to let my hair grown out. I felt vert boot stompy, very 1990s riot grrrl about the matter (if that riot grrrl could see the adoption of 1950s' gender norms as rebellion, that is).

So, after my last haircut in late November, which left it at just under an inch long — I've been cutting my own hair with clippers for years now — I left it to grow. I imagined it growing down around my face and whisping under my chin. I imagined how it would feel to tuck it behind my ears again, or how it might look kind of poetic and tortured as it fell across my eyes while I worked furiously over a hard piece of writing.

What I didn't imagine was how slow the process was going to be. Two months into my experiment with hair growth, it barely covered the tops of my ears, and one side seemed to have grown almost a half inch longer than the other side, and my cowlicks along my hairline were sticking out in tufts like baby ducks on the back of my neck.

The other thing I should have known would happen is that I got a creeping sense I was verging on drag, again. When I was a kid, I truly believed that I would grow up into a man, so when I threw a towel over my head to simulate long hair and belted out Diana Ross songs, I was dressing in drag, and I loved it, but as I grew older and family and friends worked to impose the adoption of feminine accoutrements upon me — I had to suffer through many sessions that involved having my hair curled to "soften" my appearance and being taught how to apply eyeshadow just so — it became a different kind of drag. The first was a gender bent laugh riot, but the second was a true misinterpretation of who I actually was. Makeshift wigs were fun, but being soldier-marched into gender conformity based on my genital structure was heartbreaking.

I admit to wearing eyeliner and mascara on a regular basis now, and I love a pair of heeled boots and a bright scarf, but I do gender on my own terms, mixing it all in with men's flannel shirts and jeans and letting my body hair grow as long and as thick as and where it will.

Somehow, though, longer hair feels like too much. It is somehow the line that, when crossed, tips me over into feeling like I did at fifteen when my mother paid her hairdressser to give my hair a "feminine softness" with toxic perms and texturizing shears. As soon as that hair creeps down around my ears, it feels like a deep and shameful lie is being committed. I'm that kid in 1988 again who can't reveal the truth that lies in the great grey areas of her heart.



So, because I was rebelling against the ludicrous idea that no one can grow their hair after forty, I was growing my hair out, never mind the fact that I'm not actually forty yet, and then I ran headlong into my heart's battle with cultural gender norms. It's not surprising that this wasn't working out for me so well. No one wants to listen to a person whine about how long her hair is when it's barely over two inches, so I got with my previously successful program and sat down with my clippers a few days ago, snapped on the 7/8ths-of-an-inch attachment, and returned myself to my beautiful, nearly brush-cutted former self.

I realized that this was not about turning forty, and this was not about confronting gender norms. This was about, once again, accepting my own sense of beauty on my own terms, because really? How much sense does it make to go through the awkward process of growing one's hair out and to perform an uncomfortable level of female drag for over a year just because I'm going to be forty in ten-and-a-half months? It makes no sense at all.

Plus? I really do rock the short hair.

----------------------------

PS. I'm up for a 2012 Bloggie, for which there is voting to be done. Ahem.

Manipulation

I was just remembering that time at the end of 2010 when this fairly prominent blogger emailed me to propose that we manufacture a rivalry of sorts. I say "of sorts", because we had no rivalry whatsoever. We barely interacted, and, when we did, it was largely pleasant.

People do that. It's weird. Well, it's not actually weird, because people have manipulated social groups since time immemorial to squeeze something out of it for themselves, but it's weird to me.

I have nothing important to say on the matter, I don't feel bad about that exchange. It just occurred to me this afternoon that some of you might be having fake relationships right now in order to get in with the right people or garner some measure of internet attention for yourselves.

I try not to think about it too much, because things can start to feel very Truman Show-y, and paranoia isn't sexy. Con artists, though, fascinate me.

----------------------------

Another time, I think I must have been in grade five, this girl in my class who was more popular than me said "Hey, let's pretend we're best friends at recess." "Sure," I said, because why say no? She had this floaty, soft hair that bunched up in her collar, and she smelled like cherries.

At recess, we played tetherball, which I normally never got to do, because the hockey players and the pretty girls always dominated the tarmac. She showed me a temporary tattoo she'd gotten out of a Cap'n Crunch cereal box. She had this delicate line along the top side of her wrist where the baby fat had receded.

I said as little as possible and did what she said. I had no idea what the protocol was in this sort of situation. We had fifteen minutes to be best friends, and I had no idea how to read her. I wanted it to pass without incident.

Near the end of recess, she pulled me over to stand by a fence and went to the trouble of arranging me so that I faced a particular way.

"Now, you say something," she said, "And then I'll laugh like it's really funny."

"What should I say?" I asked.

"Anything. It doesn't matter. Look like you're having fun."

"What if it is funny?"

"It doesn't matter," she said. I could tell that she was irritated with me. "I'll just laugh, anyway." And then she tossed her fluffy hair around and laughed this really loud stage laugh that I found embarrassing.

It was then that I noticed her usual best friend staring at me over the popular girl's shoulder down the length of chain link fence.

While it was clear that I was being used in a bid to manipulate her friend's emotions, I wasn't hurt by it. The whole thing was a short-term social adventure for me, and it was a relief to be able to see the end of this thing rushing in. I felt bad for the other girl, though, the usual best friend. She stood there squinting against the sunlight with a slack mouth, looking displaced.

The sunlight was suddenly more harsh, and the tips of the usual best friend's blonde lashes flashed out from the dark shadows of her eyes.

I instinctively shrugged my shoulders with my palms face up, not wanting to be blamed for my part in this social slight. This, of course, blew the game, and the popular girl shook her head at me. Her mouth held this subtle sneer that probably worked to great effect on other kids, but to me it signalled a glad dismissal.

She never spoke to me again over the remaining seven years that we attended school together. I was happy to be free of her. That short fifteen minutes as her fake best friend had exhausted me.

----------------------------

I find neither situation alluring — the former was looking to manufacture entertainment for what amounts to her job, and the latter was just being shallow and manipulative to entertain herself — but I could watch the players in question for years. It all just seems like so much work to plot scenarios that have to be acted out meaninglessly just to get a reaction, and I kind of have to hand it to them. That shit takes serious commitment.

Little Schmutzie Had A Christ Complex

There was an extended period of my childhood during which I was certain I was a prophet — at least a prophet — if not the son of God returned.



That I was a girl was of little consequence to me. My male body would arrive on time as assuredly as my female friends had started to get their periods. The beloved prophet or son of God could not be forgotten.

No matter how much I tried, though, I simply had no confidence in a higher, conscious god. I believed in belief, sure enough, having been taught that my existence would be deprived of meaning without it. I believed in the power of it enough to know that my lack of it contained the possiblity of my condemnation for all eternity, but I had no sense, no feeling whatsoever, no matter how much I read or tried to wrap myself in the wonder of His supposed creation, that a conscious entity responsible for the existence of all things was out there. To me, it was an impossible prospect. In my heart, I felt nothing.

I made a ritual of keeping my prayers in little boxes next to the bed, because I was afraid that my whispered conversations into the ether lacked enough substance to last the night. My empty heart meant they might never reach the ears of God. I pinned my hopes on the written word to have the power my spirit couldn't muster.

It was during one of these fits of desperation that I concluded it was my lack of faith that meant I was to be a chosen prophet. I would be saved, and I might even ascend if I were to believe the biblical reports, and that possibility was harboured within the deficiency of my spiritual commitment. God was using me like some kind of divine covert operative, you see. I was simply in a sleeper state waiting for my awakening.

I decided that my future role as a beacon of God's light must be so great, so global and stunning in its outreach, that even I could not have it revealed to me until the appointed time. What I potentially held within me could have the influence to topple the very structures that underpinned our governments and economies, and they would very likely be perceived as dangerous by the powers that be. It was because of my import that my true purpose needed to remain hidden, even from myself, until the time was right. God would know me, and then I would know God.

That all fell apart, of course. I grew out of my earlier childhood into a female puberty that wouldn't give me back. My male body never came, and God never reclaimed his son or even bothered to reveal me as a lesser prophet. I never took this as a rejection, though. I resigned myself to the fact that I really had no more belief in belief than I did in the religion that started it all.

I feel so much sympathy now when I look back and see that little kid who pinned her entire understanding of her place in the universe not on belief but on the idea that she would one day believe. It was all I had known, though. The world had been described to me through church services and Sunday school classes, during supper devotionals and family gatherings, and I didn't know how to tell the story of a universe without a conscious progenitor. To me, a lack of a godhead intimated that I lived in a universe without a story, a universe with no compelling narrative.

In a world without a maker, and I without anything in place to guide me, all of human existence felt futile and rudderless, so I called upon a God I wanted to believe in, and I became a soon-to-be prophet, His divine child in waiting, praying under full moons and over smouldering altars built in secret, pleading for salvation from a universe whose story gave up nothing for an eleven-year-old girl.