Ponytail Picks #29 - Hair

100 subscribers! Woot woot!

We grew past the 100-subscriber threshold this week! We’re not sure how real you all are (are you out there Nadia Johnson, with your five email addresses? Are you a bot, Danah Hendricks, with your three?), but we’re letting our locks down to celebrate anyway. Read on to learn—via media suggestions—what we mean by our mane-themed name.

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LISTEN

Songs that show how hair can matter—and what matters to Ponytail Press.

When we started this newsletter, a few keyword concepts drove its ethos: inclusion, egalitarianism, and cognitive empathy are the main three that come to mind now. We wanted to share our love for art that lives on the edges, subverts norms and expectations, and expresses the full spectrum of what it means to be human.

These are, admittedly unapologetically “hippie” ideals. And because music is the first-love artform for both of us, songs were naturally the first things we thought of that communicated the message we were hoping to amplify. The two tracks below are part of a growing list that we hope you’ll identify as “Ponytail Press” music.

Crosby, Still, Nash & Young - “Almost Cut My Hair”

When I came to Joel with the idea of starting of a newsletter together, the philosophy I had in mind came from the the first lines of this song:

Almost cut my hair.
It happened just the other day.
It’s getting kinda long.
I could’ve said it wasn’t in my way,
but I didn’t, and I wonder why.
I feel like letting my freak-flag fly.
I feel like I owe it
to someone.

David Crosby wrote this song. He died earlier this year, and he didn’t always align with the faith Ponytail Press subscribes to¹, but he still alluded to something here that Ponytail Press wants to get behind:

The world tells you to cut your hair, to mould to its standards, to join the main stream. It demands conformity, but you owe it to someone² to push back, to subvert, to align yourself with the underdog, the marginalized, the oppressed. You owe it to someone to say NO to the “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” as the late, great bell hooks puts it³.

If you’re looking for cultural artifacts to inspire you in this kind of fight/recovery, Ponytail Press is the place for you. If you’re not so sure—if you’re wary of men with long hair, names like bell hooks, or words like “egalitarian,” “inclusive,” or “anti-patriarchal”—we still want you here and hope you’ll stick around long enough to catch what we mean by all this. As we were all so ready to say in the spring of 2020, we’re all in this together.

-AK

Lady Gaga - “Hair”

I’m a sucker for the type of emo lyrics that harken back to the angsty days of youth (think Simple Plan’s “I’m Just a Kid”: “I’m just a kid and life is a nightmare”) because really, does the angst lessen at all as we get older? Maybe it gets redirected a bit, or we pick up more tools for dealing with it, but ultimately the world is still a hard place and we still want the same things we did when we were teenagers blasting music in our bedrooms after school:

I just wanna be myself
And I want you to love me for who I am

What else is there to being human than figuring out who we are, together?

In “Hair,” the great Gaga ties her journey of identity and freedom from oppression (even if it is just her “parents put[ting] up a fight”) to her ability to grow out her hair how she likes.

I’ve had enough, this is my prayer
That I’ll die living just as free as my hair

… Don’t wanna change, and I don’t wanna be ashamed
I’m the spirit of my hair, it’s all the glory that I bare

I am my hair, I am my hair

It’s not an uncommon comparison; we often use the expression “letting our hair down” when we talk about expressing or enjoying ourselves without restriction. Wouldn’t that be nice to feel that free all the time? Long hair or not⁴, everyone deserves to feel like they can be themselves. If you don’t feel that way right now, I encourage you to blast this song on your real or metaphorical bedroom stereo circa 2003 (or whatever your 2003 was) and let Lady Gaga, with sultry saxophones and club beats in tow, lead the way to a new sense of self-worth.

-JB

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WATCH

Films that show self-expression through hair.

So much goes into making a movie. It might start with a script, but to put that script to film you need sets, lights, actors, and costumes. You need to choose camera angles, scene cuts, music, and sound mixes. Whether you’re working in live-action or animation, a decision needs to be made for every detail in the frame.

It’s no wonder then, that in most cases not much thought goes into hair. But for the following two movies, hair means everything.

Edward Scissorhands

Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands is one of those immaculately formed films. The set design, the costumes, the lighting, the framing, the cast: they all work perfectly together to tell the story without a single strand out of place.

And then, there’s the hair.

Down in the easter-egg coloured suburban neighbourhood, hair expresses conformity. From the personality-matching styles of the neighbourhood women to the dull comb-overs of their 9-5 husbands, each character’s hair is in accordance to what’s expected of them.

But Edward doesn’t know what’s expected of him. In contrast to the darkness of his scraggly, grease-soaked hair and goth-punk garb, his years of isolation have left him timid and naive. His appearance tells the neighbourhood he’s a tough guy, a sinner, a “perversion of nature,” but his behaviour tells the audience something else entirely.

Thanks to the loving care of the Boggs family, Edward finds a role in his new world by putting his difference to use, first in a familiar medium (the Boggs’ backyard bushes) and then with something new—women’s hair. With the flick of his hinged wrists, Edward gives the women of the neighbourhood a way to break free from the confines of society and embrace their wild sides.

But amidst all this change and surface-level acceptance, one things stays exactly as-is—Edward’s hair. He can cover his scars with make-up and his leather with a office attire, but as his tangled hairdo will attest, he can’t hide who he truly is. Like those greasy strands, Edward will always stand out. It’s why the neighbours are so quick to turn on him, and why we love him long after the credits roll.

-AK

Tangled

I had a bit of an issue with the central relationship’s power dynamic (an extremely sheltered 18-year old girl accompanies a well-travelled and bearded rapscallion) but Rapunzel is fortunately still given plenty of agency and nuance throughout the story.

Her hair, if you know the fairy tale, is her character’s defining feature. It’s remarkably long and has magic healing powers, so it’s understandable that it’s the first thing we think of when we hear the name Rapunzel. The interesting thing with Tangled, however, is that her golden locks are more the source of her oppression than her agency. Her mother (who is not really her mother at all) kidnaps her as a baby in order to use her magical hair to keep her young, all the while manipulating her as she grows up into believing that the outside world was too dangerous for her to experience (not to mention using her hair to climb up a tower—youch).

In the end, it’s a haircut that is her salvation. Rapunzel eventually learns the truth about her identity and resolves to leave her terrible mother. But when her mother stabs her new beau Eugene, Rapunzel agrees to stay with her if she’ll let her heal him with her hair. Before she gets the chance, though, Eugene cuts her hair, removing it of its powers and thus removing the life force that was keeping ol’ mom going for so long.

Sometimes, the thing that should give us a feeling of power and freedom (like hair for Lady Gaga) ends up becoming the opposite. Maybe people take advantage of you for it. Maybe it becomes your only identifying feature. In which case, there’s no shame in cutting it off, or at least giving it a bit of a trim.

-JB

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READ

Further reading that shares the ethos of Ponytail Press

We haven’t come out and said what we’re all about here at Ponytail Press until today. Doing so might be off-putting to some of you, might raise a few “red flags” as it were, might have you labelling us “lefties.”

That’s OK. As millennials, we’re generally uncomfortable with labels, but we don’t mind getting them from you—as long as you stick around. The point of this post isn’t to alienate those who feel differently but to clarify who you’re talking to. This is a safe space, even for readers who disagree with us⁵.

That said, here are a couple things to read that say what we want to say in more explicit terms. I encourage you to look for them, flip through their pages, and be open to what they say to you.

The Will to Change by bell hooks

For the last few weeks, I’ve been singing this book’s praises. It’s not new. It was originally published back in 2004⁶. But it addresses the current discourse around gender with shocking clarity.

For anyone seeking escape from the restrictive definition of what it means to be masculine, look no further. bell hooks⁷ is here to tell you it's in your nature to want to love and be loved. Your will to change is the will in you we want to encourage. And we’re here with the same struggles, urging you on and hoping you'll urge us on, too.

-AK

“Going natural,” by Chanequa Walker-Barnes

The article referred to here was published in Geez Magazine - Issue 18, Summer 2010: The Body Issue.

Further to Andrew’s excellent words on letting our hair down and escaping from under the patriarchal slab that seeks to squish us all (and as priviliged Ponytailers we pledge to do our best to aid those for whom it comes more aggressively than us), I would say that the whole concept of “further reading” (or listening, or watching) is part of our ethos here at Ponytail Press. “Don’t take our word for it,” as the saying goes. We have things of value to say about our own unique engagement with the art that we talk about, and that is important for us, but ultimately, the thing that should be at the center is the art itself, which has its own unique story to tell. And of course, your own experience of it will differ from ours!

With all of that said (there’s a lot of that in this issue—feel free to tell Andrew and I to shove it for the next one), I wanted to share this compelling article about one person’s experience with their hair and how it was tied to their oppressive experience of white supremacy and sexism, among other things.

Chanequa Walker-Barnes talks about how, beginning in her junior year in college and for the next six years, she spent at least $1500 each year on “salon visits and the cabinet full of products bought in my ongoing search for the bottled miracle that would keep my always-reverting hair straight.”

She dryly comments on the racist and sexist structures in place that kept women like her feeling like they needed to straighten their natural hair:

In some lost book of the Bible, African American women must have been given a new Decalogue. The first commandment: “Thou shalt keep thy ‘do nap-free at all times and at all costs.” African American women are likely the only racial/ethnic group worldwide where the majority do not wear their hair in its natural texture. In a society gripped by racism and sexism, we are strongly discouraged from doing so. Some corporations actually have policies forbidding “ethnic” hair.

Her (shackle) breaking point came one day in the bathroom when her hair spoke up: “Isn’t it obvious that I don’t want to be straight?” Her next visit to the salon had her stylist trimming away her chemically straightened ends and leaving her with her natural hair “for the first time in [her] adult life.” Even then, her freedom was a process (“It took five weeks for me to adjust to the sight of my own hair and to feel comfortable exposing it to the world”) but when it arrived, it “was like being emancipated” in every sense of the word:

I was freed from a daily 20-minute hair ritual and a weekly two-hour salon appointment. Freed to exercize anytime I wanted, not just when I could spare an hour afterward to get my hair back in shape. Freed from fear of rain (a relaxed head’s kryptonite) and the weight of the umbrellas and ponchos I carried everywhere. Freed from the bondage of constantly striving to make my hair conform to an ideal that I could never attain.

Walker-Barnes doesn’t claim to speak for all Black women in America, but for her and others like her who were “rooted in the traditionally conservative black church…letting our hair exist in the way that it grows out of our head is revolutionary. It is a countercultural move, an intentional act of personal liberation from the sociopolitical powers and principalities that tell us that we are ‘less than.’”

If that isn’t a Ponytail Press kind of story, I don’t know what is. Here’s to many more!

-JB

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This strand of words has reached its maximum length. Time to cut it off.

Steal away with us next time, when we break into meaning of

crime.

1. His anti-guitar-smashing Twitter-beef with Pheobe Bridgers, for example, was a little too much boomer-vibes for our taste.

2. ei. yourself, the world, your god, your loved ones—whoever sufficiently motivates to to keep putting your body “against the wheels” as it were.

3. More on that later.

4. That’s not the point.

5. That is, as long as you remain polite about it. We will not hesitate to snuff out a troll.

6. Joel and I were both in high school then.

7. The lowercases were her choice, not mine.