Femininity (7 page)

In the Western world, parental concern that the sex of an infant not be mistaken led
to the social convention of the pink blanket or the blue. The second convention of
social importance is the haircut. Shorn of ringlets a toddler is certifiably a boy,
and woe unto the mother who delays for too long this critical event, for she will
be accused of trying to sissify her son. Yet the rock-bound belief that short hair
makes a boy and long hair makes a girl is as arbitrary as blanket color. Given a sample
lock for analysis, an expert would not be able to say if it came from the head of
a man or a woman. There are known racial differences in the way hair grows on the
human scalp, but the only true sexual difference is the phenomenon of balding.

Unhappily for white men, baldness is an inherited characteristic that afflicts Caucasian
males more frequently than other racial and sexual groups. Genes for baldness are
carried without regard to sex on the autosomal chromosomes of males and females, but
they are less frequent in the genetic pools of blacks and Orientals. Even though white
men and women both carry the baldness genes, it takes the androgens, the hormones
that induce male sexual development, to make the characteristic express itself. About
60 percent of all white men show some degree of hair loss by the time they reach the
age of fifty, and a receding hairline or a bald spot at the back of the head may begin
to show when a man is in his early twenties. A similar pattern of thinning hair occurs
later and less extensively in white women.

Like the big nose on the male proboscis monkey, baldness is troubling to the neo-Darwinians.
They can’t figure out what possible advantage it might give to the male sex, and to
white males in particular. Using their favorite line of argument, one could propose
that baldness serves an important function in sexual selection by warning a young
Caucasian female that here is a fellow who would not make a desirable mate because
he is past his prime and too old to provide for her and the children. But I don’t
like this sort of argument. I prefer to see baldness, like many other natural differences
between men and women, as merely accidental, a hormonal happenstance that has no larger
evolutionary meaning whatsoever.

But however irrelevant baldness might be to reproduction and evolution, it appears
to be the key to one of the more tenacious beliefs about masculine men and feminine
women, for the idea that long hair is feminine and that men by contrast should wear
their hair short took hold and flourished in white European civilization, while in
the East and in Africa, where men seldom go bald, this artificial polarity was either
reversed or met with great resistance, or was never taken up at all.

Egyptian pharaohs and their royal families had their heads plucked clean of natural
hair and covered with wigs that were sexually distinct, while their slaves wore their
own hair by law.
Among the Masai and other African and Indian tribes that still hold to their traditional
customs, an imposing mass of long hair ornamented with shells, feathers or beads remains
a proud masculine emblem, inspired perhaps by the lion’s mane or the colorful plumage
of exotic birds, while the heads of tribal women go unadorned, covered or shaved.
A long tangle of braids that seems to frighten the white folks is a common sight on
the island of Jamaica, where male Rastafarians made the dreadlocks a part of their
religion. The great classic periods in Japanese art show that long, elaborate hair
styles were in vogue for men and women, although an expert can detect a sexual difference
in a decorative comb. During the tenth-century Heian civilization Japanese noblemen
wore their long hair in a topknot while court ladies wore theirs loose and flowing.
Oriental hair is usually suited to luxuriant growth, so it is not surprising that
both sexes in Japan and China treasured long hair until Western influence established
a new concept of masculine appearance. It may be recalled from the lessons of American
history how the pigtail on the Chinese railroad worker became an object of racist
scorn.

Belief in the intrinsic femininity of long hair took centuries to establish even in
the West, for an older tradition identified long hair with physical strength, holiness
and other masculine values. Luxuriant tresses are not significantly associated with
feminine beauty in the Old Testament, but references to long hair as a sign of beauty
and strength in men abound. Samson’s uncut hair was the secret source of his fabled
power, as the wicked Delilah discovered. The beautiful Absalom had long, heavy hair
but it got entangled in an oak tree, where King David’s soldiers finished him off.

Etruscan warriors prided themselves on their noble tresses and the soldiers of Sparta
spent hours combing and preening their manes before they went into battle. But Caesar’s
legionnaires who set out to conquer longhaired Gaul were close-cropped and clean-shaven,
and the apostle Paul, who lived under Roman rule, made the grand mistake of assuming
that the customs of Roman warfare were a natural rule of God. Christianity owes to
Saint Paul the erroneous belief that the length of male and female hair is a gender
characteristic.

It was Paul who told the Corinthians that a woman’s long hair is “a glory to her,”
but the saint did not mean his words as a compliment to feminine beauty. He was laying
down the creed that Christian men should offer up prayer with their heads uncovered
because they were created as the image and glory of God, but women should cover their
heads in church because they were created as the glory of man. “Judge in yourselves,”
he wrote in his epistle, “Is it comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered? Does
not even nature itself teach you that if a man have long hair it is a shame unto him?
But if a woman have long hair it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for
a covering.”

Paul’s thoughts about hair come after his famous creed that “the head of every man
is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man.” “It follows,” wrote Saint Chrysostom,
“that being covered is a mark of subjection and authority. For it induces her to look
down and be ashamed and preserve entire her proper virtue.”

Puritan moralists in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England hammered away at this
theme. The feminine woman, the virtuous woman, the woman who knew her place, was the
female who wore her hair long, neatly arranged, with a concealing cap on her head.
A wife’s long hair, railed the pamphleteer Philip Stubbes, was her God-given “signe
of subjection” before her husband and master, “as the Apostle proveth.” Pamphleteer
William Prynne also called up the apostle’s proof. Women’s long hair, he echoed, was
something that “God and nature have given them for a covering, a token of subjection,
and a natural badge to distinguish them from men.” Denouncing the worldly fashions
of his day—“our shorn English viragoes”—Prynne blasted off, “A woman with cut hair
is a filthy spectacle and much like a monster.”

So the male moralists protested, but always with the understanding that although a
woman’s long hair might be sacred it was also profane. Since it was given her by God
to cover her nakedness, it was also a distressing symbol of her sexual nature. Out
of control—unpinned, disheveled or free of a concealing cap—it was invested with dangerous
powers. In myth the beautiful Lorelei, who sang while she combed her long blonde hair,
lured sailors to wreck their boats on treacherous rocks. Sight of Medusa’s hair of
living snakes turned men into stone. The long, loose tresses that covered the nakedness
of Lady Godiva as she rode her horse through town to honor her husband’s oath seem
less a “signe of subjection” than a very sexy image, and although it was hardly Saint
Luke’s intention, the unnamed sinner of his Gospel (often confused with Mary Magdalene)
who penitently wiped the feet of Jesus with her hair became a paradigm of sensuality
to Renaissance artists who delighted in painting this Biblical scene.

In
Paradise Lost,
Milton crystallizes the theme of subjection and feminine sexuality when he describes
the hair of Eve as seen by Satan:

She, as a veil down to the slender waist,

Her unadorned golden tresses wore

Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved,

As the vine curls her tendrils—which implied

Subjection, but required with gentle sway,

And by her yielded, by him best received,

Yielded with coy submission, modest pride

And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.

A woman’s act of unpinning and letting down a cascade of long hair is interpreted
as a highly erotic gesture, a release of inhibiting restraints, a sign of sexual readiness
which may be an enticement or a snare, a frightening danger or, in some cases, a possible
salvation. According to psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, the prince who called to Rapunzel
to let down her hair was pleading for rescue from an impotent condition. The erotic
appeal of a full mass of hair was recognized in the extreme by the denial of a natural
head of hair to the Catholic nun and the orthodox Jewish wife, an attempt to desexualize
them in the eyes of strangers. After the liberation of France in 1944, the common
form of retribution inflicted upon a woman accused of consorting with Germans was
to forcibly shave her head and parade her in shame through the village, a far cry
from the ride of Godiva.

In addition to the erotic value attached to sheer length,
elaborately arranged coiffures requiring the work, and often the hair, of others were
regarded historically as imposing signs of aristocratic grandeur. Marie Antoinette
and Lady Pompadour are the enduring examples, but the wigs of British barristers still
derive from this conception of the noble head. Under the laws of supply and demand,
impoverished women were encouraged to view their own hair as peasant women in Europe
and Asia were expected, as wet nurses, to view the milk from their breasts. Hair and
milk were exploitable commodities that could serve the upper classes, an exploitation
less stigmatized (and less financially rewarding) than the selling of sex. Liane de
Pougy, the great courtesan of France during the Belle Epoque and herself of middle-class
origins, remarked with some surprise in her diary that daughters of the poor quite
often had glorious heads of hair. Of sociological note, the elaborate coif lost its
usefulness as a status symbol in America during the 1950s when the beehive hairdo
became identified with tackiness and the lower classes.

We remember the Roaring Twenties as a time when women demonstrated their newfound
emancipation by bobbing their hair, though the trend actually began during the first
World War. The flapper experience has been trivialized as just so many flat-bosomed,
short-skirted, short-haired debs drinking gin and dancing on tables, but the decision
to bob, like the decision to go without a corset, was for many women an anguished
act of rebellion.

Two classic American short stories published less than fifteen years apart illustrate
the deep sense of loss from a romantic male perspective when a woman cuts off her
hair. In O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” (1906) Jim and Delia sacrifice their proudest
treasures to buy Christmas gifts for each other. Jim sells a gold watch that belonged
to his father and grandfather to purchase a set of jeweled tortoise-shell combs for
Delia, whose hair ripples and shines “like a cascade of brown waters.” But Delia has
sold her brown cascade to buy a watch fob for Jim. O. Henry’s tale is an exquisite
parable of good intentions and crossed purpose and it deserves its place as the ranking
Christmas story in American literature, but the notion of a hank of hair as a woman’s
greatest treasure is sad and, frankly, demeaning.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald published “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” in the
Saturday Evening Post
in 1920, the majority of young women were cutting their hair not for the price it
could bring or because they were copycats but because they wanted to be free of a
tiresome bother, yet that is not what Fitzgerald chose to see. Bernice is a simple
girl from Eau Claire who visits her city cousin Marjorie, a modern, popular flirt.
To get attention from Marjorie’s fast crowd, Bernice announces that she is going to
have her hair bobbed at the Sevier Hotel barber shop. Forced to put up or shut up
by Marjorie, Bernice marches in dread to the barber—even he is aghast—and has her
“dark brown glory” chopped off. Fitzgerald mourns the results: “Her face’s chief charm
had been a Madonna-like simplicity. Now that was gone and she was—well, frightfully
mediocre—not stagy; only ridiculous, like a Greenwich Villager who had left her spectacles
at home.” Bernice had been had. She goes home to Eau Claire, but not before she performs
her act of revenge. While Marjorie is asleep Bernice takes a pair of scissors and
snips off her cousin’s blonde braids.

Female competition and flapper confusion are Fitzgerald’s themes, but he and O. Henry
turn their tales on a deeper message: the tragedy of a young woman who foolishly discards
her greatest asset. Romantic sentiment over the nature of feminine beauty is the heart
of the matter. If one doesn’t feel that short hair is a tragic feminine loss, the
stories lose much of the poignant drama.

Decades before O. Henry and Fitzgerald put their words to paper, Louisa May Alcott
used the drama of shorn female tresses in
Little Women
(1868). Her heroine and alter ego, Jo March, sells her long, thick hair so her mother
can travel to her sick father’s bedside. Meg, Beth, Amy and Marmee are full of tender
compassion, for coltish, plain Jo has sacrificed her “one beauty.” Jo has her arguments
marshaled. Her head feels “deliciously light” and cool and soon she will have “a curly
crop which will be boyish, becoming, and easy to keep in order.” But even sturdy Jo
is not immune to the sense of feminine loss, and we know that “boyish” is a loaded
word. Late that night Meg hears her sister stifle a sob.