Choice and Meaning: Musings on Womanhood

Recently, I listened to two fascinating podcast episodes that converged on a theme that left me with a lot to chew over. The first one is an older (2024) episode of Diabolical Lies, “Taylor Swift, Injectables, and Other Genres of Magical Thinking.” The second is a recent episode of Culture Study, “The Politics of White Women’s Hair,” in which Anne Helen Petersen interviewed Sarah Mesle, the author of Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women’s Hair and What They Tell Us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity. I can’t recommend both enough, and I am putting the book on my library request list too. There is a lot to unpack in their respective discussions, but one of the main themes could be summed up as: what is the ‘right way to woman’ and how does that uphold existing race and class structures.

The bottom line is that women — including those at the top of the hierarchy of marginalized groups thanks to their whiteness –always exist in a precarious position vis-a-vis power in a patriarchal capitalism society and that ‘womaning’ the right way is a hamster wheel of existential futility. It sounds depressing and it is. But at the micro level of beauty trends and such, it’s fascinating to observe how the machinery works to keep the hamster wheel constantly turning, exhausting women’s mental, emotional, and financial resources. And I think it’s a useful exercise because it exposes the guts of the lie; the more you see it for what it is, the less compelling it becomes.

Both episodes led me down tangents of reflection about my own engagement with beauty ideals. It’s natural to want to think that one is wise to capitalist trickery — who wants to admit they can be manipulated without their knowledge? — and surprisingly easy to reassure oneself that this is, in fact, the case. “I do X because I like X, not because society tells me that I should do X; that’s just a coincidence.” And, actually, the first part of that statement is probably true, in many cases. It’s possible to genuinely believe that a particular preference is the product of free, uninfluenced choice — even when it’s not. In most cases, it’s not … because we live in a society, not on a deserted island, and are subject to social conditioning from the moment we are born. But Western society is powered by the illusion of free choice and untrammelled individualism, so the system requires that people believe it.

I don’t think there is something inherently wrong about making decisions that are influenced by external forces, whether in our environment, social norms, etc. People are social creatures, and there is no getting away from that. But I do think it’s important to not be afraid to examine what those influences are, and how and why they exert themselves on us. We need to see the machinery clearly. I can tell you, it can be pretty darn uncomfortable. The discomfort of accepting one isn’t free of external influence is the easy part (hard as it may seem at first). It’s a lot harder to dig deeper and confront the fact that some choices which, on the surface, seem either value-neutral or aligned with one’s consciously held values are, actually, a lot more complicated and ‘messy’ than they appear.

And it’s hard to sit with that messiness — because, sometimes, that’s all you can do, at least to start.

That’s the stage I’m currently at: sitting with the mess of unpacked choices.

For example: hair. We could talk about this for hours, but I’ll try to keep it brief. For most of my 30s, I rocked various short haircuts. Then, when the pandemic hit, I stopped cutting it — first for practical reasons, then as a kind of challenge (how long can I go?), and finally as an aesthetic choice. I decided that I liked long hair on me and, since hair takes forever to grow, keeping it long made more sense than going through a constant cut-grow cycle.

That was 5 years ago, and my hair has stayed long. It’s currently almost down to my butt, because I haven’t had a trim in about 4 or 5 months. I’ve gotten really lazy about haircuts, which is a nice bonus of long hair. [Anything that allows me to be lazy and not have to do something is great in my books.] This past week, I’ve been thinking about why I keep my hair long, digging deeper than the ‘obvious’ reasons I just gave. One of the reasons that surfaced is that my long hair is a protest against the idea of “age appropriateness”. I’m not sure if it’s still the message that young women receive these days, but when I was in my 20s, the general social consensus was that, after a certain age, women should not have long hair. That long hair wasn’t polished/elegant/mature enough. That there is a whiff of desperation about long hair on older woman; clinging on to one’s youth and fooling nobody.

I like long hair in the same way that I like wearing clothes I wore in my twenties: it doesn’t make me feel like I’m 26 again, but it does make me feel like I’m not ‘trapped’ by my age. I don’t want to be defined by my age, so I don’t confine myself to the aesthetics that supposedly define my age. I love being in my 40s; I love the wisdom and experience and personal growth I’ve earned getting here. I am not interested in disavowing those things by pretending to be younger. I want to celebrate them … but I also want to challenge some aspects of what supposedly comes with age. Or, rather, I want to enlarge the definition. Passion, curiosity, and excitement don’t only belong to youth; they don’t need to be jettisoned in order to give experience its due. Wisdom and curiosity can co-exist. They should coexist.

I am no less vital at 46 than I was at 26, whatever biology might dictate. And I want the world to see that. Long hair is one of my signals.

But …

It’s more complicated than that. Because long hair carries many more and complex connotations. I might say (and believe) that my meaning is X, but that doesn’t exclude Y and Z from the conversation. If long hair is equated with youth, and youth has a premium in society, and I am a woman who has been conditioned from childhood to strive for social status, can I truly say that my choice to have long hair is completely divorced from any consideration of social value? Is there not a part of me, unconscious or otherwise, that enjoys and benefits from the privilege that is conferred by proximity to youth? There probably is, much as I don’t like to think about it or accept it.

Does that mean that I am going to cut my hair short now?

No, of course not. What long hair means to me hasn’t changed. The fact that I still, experientially, enjoy having long hair hasn’t changed. Cutting my hair doesn’t save me from the hamster wheel. Because if it says, on one hand, “I reject the supremacy of youth,” it also puts me back into the “women of a certain age should look like this” bucket.

So, what was the point of the whole exercise? To understand what lies behind a choice that seems reflexive — the values, the messages, the nuances. That clarity is a good thing. Being able to confront uncomfortable facts and grapple with nuances and hold contradictions is part of growing up, growing wise.

I was going to talk about Botox next, but this post is already too long so let’s save that for another time.

I would love to hear your thoughts, especially if you’ve had a chance to listen to the podcasts I mentioned. Let’s talk about it in the comments!