Certain kind of people

How random encounters and my haircut have me thinking about expectations

A couple weekends ago was the big arts festival here in Madison—Chautauqua. It’s one of the busiest weeks in town and we mostly hunker down in our house, but we did make our obligatory trip to the farmer’s market on Saturday morning. On the street, I passed a woman—white, middle-age-ish, with short gray hair, wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Nothing about how she looked was remarkable, except for what her t-shirt said—“It costs $0 to use the correct pronouns.”

I was, of course, delighted. She was not the sort of person I expected to be an outspoken advocate for the rights of transgender people. But there she was, casually cruising down the streets of Madison with her t-shirt snarkily encouraging people to treat each other with basic human decency, which shouldn’t be radical, but sadly, is.

That encounter, along with my haircut, got me thinking about the expectations we have about certain kinds of people. Like, that a middle-age Hoosier woman is unlikely to be supportive of the rights of transgender people. Or that when I walk down the street with my new short haircut, people perceive me differently than they did when my hair was long. I think people believe that women with longer hair are more feminine, maybe more traditional in their ideas about gender, and definitely less likely to be a lesbian. Women with short hair are defiant, less invested in their appearance, and might be able do do things like change a tire.

Obviously these expectations aren’t true. My hair was long and now it’s short, but I am the same person either way. Or am I? I feel lighter with my short hair, like I’ve cut away some of the heaviness that’s been dragging me down since the pandemic. Short hair always makes me feel a little freer from the male gaze—that maybe men don’t ogle women with short hair they way they do women with long hair. It’s not a stretch to assume that feeling lighter makes me actually lighter or that believing that I’m less pinned down by the male gaze may make that a reality.

Our beliefs about who we are and who other people are can be pretty powerful and sometimes in really convoluted ways. This is especially true when it comes to hair. In my sociology of gender class recently, we talked about gender and hair. We’d watched a video made by Ivana Fischer, a Black trans woman, discussing the association for Black people between natural hair and masculinity. More “feminine” hairstyles, meaning straightened hair or weaves, are seen as more feminine than letting your hair go natural.

Which raises the question—what does feminine hair look like? One student thought that the idea that long hair on men is feminine isn’t really true anymore. For male athletes, having long hair is seen as part of your ‘flow.’ Think Trevor Lawrence, the NFL quarterback with his pretty, blond locks.

I mean, look at that hair.

I pointed out that, yes, it may be okay for men like Trevor Lawrence to have long hair, but there are still rules. Men can’t have long hair and bangs. Their long hair can’t really be styled or layered, right?

Only then we thought of mullets. Short hair in the front, long in the back. Lots of dudes have mullets. What’s the difference between having a mullet and having bangs? Is it nothing more than language? Women have bangs, but men have mullets? And then there’s the hipster mullet, an ironic fashion expression, I assume? But there’s nothing ironic about the mullets of the white dudes I see here in rural Indiana, so social class is also part of how we understand what a mullet means.

From a sociological perspective, our identities are never created in isolation. They can’t be. As soon as you decide to wear your hair short or long, to get a mullet or not, to wear the t-shirt about pronouns or not, you’ve entered into a conversation that’s larger than yourself. It’s a conversation over which you have very little control. I might want people to read my short hair as super-feminine, but there’s not much I can do to change the collective meaning of short hair on women.

Who you are and how you express that is always part of a larger narrative. You demonstrate your individuality through collective representations. I’m going to be different and get a mullet, but you’re only differentiating yourself because everyone collectively understands that a mullet is different. That realization can be disturbing. To realize that all your attempts at self-expression are also always an act of conformity.

It doesn’t bother me so much, probably because I’ve spent the last thirty years of my life steeped in this way of thinking. Life’s a constant conversation. Yeah, that’s okay. The poet David Whyte talks about how we believe in a division of the world into what’s inside us and what’s outside us. We tell ourselves that there’s a neat boundary line that can be drawn.

The truth is, we live our lives in the space where the two meet. We live in the conversation. The place where the world and whatever it is that’s ‘me’ come together. Deny it all you want, but there it is and, as far as I can see, it’s not a bad place to be.

Also, don’t sleep on white, middle-age, Hoosier women.

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Jami Attenburg also talked about hair on her newsletter this week—specifically, bangs. You might know from previous newsletters that I’m a gardener and I really enjoyed this post from Rootbound, detailing this year’s gardening failures. I, too, planted over-zealously and left no room for the actual harvesting of things. Amanda Parrish Morgan wrote about sad dad bands and bittersweet, a perfect topic for fall.