dye-ing to stay young

me on a portuguese cliff in 1996
29 yrs old

When I got home from this two week vacation, I developed my pictures in great anticipation (an all-manual Canon A-1, circa 1970, does not a real-time digital image make).

Anyway...I saw this picture and recoiled.   Not because I'm wearing Steve's sweater and it looks like an over-sized and amorphous black hole from which my neck spontaneously emerges, not because my teeth look like I painted them in with white-out, and not because it looks like I'm standing in an oil-spill (the light isn't quite so bad in the analog version).  No, I recoiled because I thought I looked old. 

Despite using gobs and gobs of sun screen on this trip, I had despaired over soaking up too much southern European sun.  Days in the water, on the beach and hiking along dramatic seaside cliffs had left me browner than brown.  Between that, and the half-grown-out highlighting job that had crisped up to a sun-whitened frizz on one side of my head, I thought I looked like a leathery old tanning-bed lady who had tried to turn 55 years of age into 25 by bleaching out my hair.

Wew - that is really harsh--and not just on me.  Let's get some context.  I was, after all, 29--staring 30 down the throat and sitting on the cusp of the inevitable degeneration of things like skin and breasts. Although I can hardly see it now, I looked at this picture and for the first time in my life, recognized something resembling age in my own face.  If you add to it that I was just 2 weeks pregnant with Gareth and awash in both new hormones and new ideas about identity that included my fast-waning youthfulness (in a 20-something's sense of the term), then perhaps you can see where I was coming from. 

Thinking that my hair no longer matched my face, I decided that I had gotten "too old" for highlights.

How ironic is that? 

Now, at the age of 45, I'm feeling pressure that perhaps I've gotten "too old" not to highlight (or color) my hair. 

Hair dye has become so pervasive that you can hardly find a person outside the old folks home who sports any amount of silver.  I have found varying statistics, but it seems that somewhere between 50-75% of women color their hair in some way. 

The lack of gray-haired folk moving amongst us has changed the meaning of gray, don't you think?  Gray doesn't mean you're 50 anymore.  Gray means you're 80.  That's a lot of pressure on a 40-something who's sporting a dish-water brand of no-color such as mine.

Despite that pressure, however, I do not want to color my hair.

For the record, I'm not gray yet--or if I am, you can't tell in my sea of blah.  So why not brighten it up?

Well:

First, when do you stop? I don't want to wake up in my 60s and recoil at a picture of myself because I feel, as I did at 29, that my face doesn't match my hair anymore.  No disrespect to older people, but there's a point at which died hair begins to look like some kind of helmet on the head--one that can make a person look even older rather than younger, if you know what I mean. 

Second, gray hair hides thinning hair, doesn't it?  When you get old, you start baring quite a bit more scalp.  Nothing like a frock of thinning but dark brown curls to set off the white scalp glowing beneath.  Silver tresses would mask that, wouldn't they?

Third, will you even live to see your gray?  You know I'm no fan of chemicals--especially toxic ones.  I don't feel remotely confident that hair dyes aren't super bad for our health.  This blog post offers a nice concise list of chemicals to look out for if you're concerned too.  No matter how much we might want to hold on to our youthful color, "dying" of cancer doesn't seem like a good way to avoid gray.   According to the National Cancer Institute , most studies of hair dye chemicals and cancer are "conflicting."  That doesn't surprise me. Nor does it comfort me.  It takes a lot of money to conduct a reputable study, and the cosmetic industry can't be in a rush to fund such investigations.  Still, in the world I want to live in, you have to prove that products are safe, not the other way around.  So if you haven't proved it won't hurt me yet, I don't want it. 

And finally, if I dyed my hair, I'd miss my transition to gray.  I know I would find myself suddenly sixty wondering how gray I'd gotten, wondering when I should grow out the color, wondering who exactly I'd become while I was busy slapping toxic chemicals on my head for all those years.

Perhaps that sounds ridiculous, but gray signals another life change to me--like puberty, except sort of the opposite. 

Which gets us to the crux of all of this, right?  AGE.  For a population so averse to being old, it's no surprise we don't want to look old.  Then we have the double whammy that we're women who are getting and looking old.  Nothing spells the end of beauty like a head of silver threads, right? And in our culture, the end of beauty equals, well, the end. 

Except I don't buy that.

I won't pretend that some aspects of aging really suck.  I have a cracked root in a tooth that will require extraction any day.  If I swim too hard, I wreck something in my shoulder that takes months to heal. My toes ache (?!), and my perfect eyesight has suddenly and oh so disappointingly, let me down.

You get the idea. 

I suppose all those complaints have changed my vision in other ways too because I see such different things in that picture than I did 16 years ago. While I agree with my old self that my hair looks kind of ridiculous, I disagree that it matters, and I certainly object to the idea that I look old.  In fact, I think I look young.  And with that, I also look a little naive.  I had not yet felt the pain of childbirth, the wonder of parenthood, or the exhilaration of passing my Ph.D oral exams.  I had not yet discovered the sound of my voice in my research, in front of a classroom, or on the Internet.   I remained a stranger to real loss. 

I would never trade my victories, discoveries or scars for the naturally blond hair I had as a teen.  Still, I know plenty of people (most people?) would say we can have both. 

I'm not here to say other people shouldn't color their hair.  Most people that I know do so, and I would never spend one second of any day judging them. 

I just want to voice an alternative. 

We can embrace a different kind of beauty--one you won't find on the front of Vogue or Cosmo.  This beauty grows out of wisdom, and wisdom comes to us through experience, laughter and pain.  We can't have that beauty without living and aging--without graying.  That is the beauty I want to see in the mirror as I grow older.  That way, if I'm lucky enough to see the years go by, I can embrace what time has given me instead of dreading to see what it has taken away.

my beloved "greggie"
wise and beautiful
she was about 80 years old when i snapped this
 

take that mr. media: reflections on "miss representation"

I took Olivia to see the excellent film, Miss Representation, this week. Since I cannot spare her from the all-penetrating gaze of men, society and the media, I have striven to teach her early to look back—to know the power of her own gaze. I hope that if she learns to keep a critical eye trained on the digitized she-fantasies of media moguls, then perhaps she will be less likely to turn that eye on herself.

The timing of this film is perfect for us. Olivia has just begun to look in the mirror with expectation. So far, however, she hasn’t found anything unacceptable there--saved, perhaps, by the great irony that, at age 11, she still lives in the kind of body to which the rest of us grown women are supposed to aspire. Like so many ears of corn, we’re to forever strip ourselves of our husks, our silken hair, and our many plump kernels of goodness, until there’s nothing left but a hard narrow cob to be accessorized with a boob-job and a pair of low-cut skinnyjeans. How truly hilarious that would be if it wasn’t so completely not funny at all.

I wish that someone had shown me Miss Representation when I was eleven. I did see a similar film, Killing Us Softly, in college. It’s about the ways that women are systematically sexualized and objectified in advertising. The message came too late, however. By the time I saw it, a fast/binge/purge pattern of disordered eating had long since entangled me in its ever tightening noose. I would follow its lead like an obedient dog, well into my twenties.

I do not want Olivia to skip out of her childhood into that snare.

Despite all the graphic and horrific images of women portrayed by Miss Representation, the most pernicious thing I learned is that men own the increasingly consolidated media. You don’t have to dig too deep into the theories of political science to learn that he/she who owns the means of communication in a society, controls that society. I did not realize how few women work behind the scenes (producing, writing, programming) in news and entertainment.

Suddenly I’m wondering, do we need a woman president?—or do we just need to take over Fox News? I hear they’re in search of a new figurehead anyway, what with good old Rupert being “unfit” and all. With the standard so low, surely even a woman could do that job!

No wonder women have taken social media by storm. What the male dominated communications industry has tried so hard to contain has come oozing out in blogs, on facebook and in tweets.

On the internet, we can redefine the terms, giving women: power without the bitch, intelligence without the nerd, humor without the ditz, emotion without the hormones, sensuality without the debasement, and of course, beauty without the objectification.

However, while we encourage each other to celebrate the portrayals of women that achieve these ideals (and reject the ones that don’t), we also need to look inward. I think there are a lot of women like me: ex-bingers, ex-anorexics, ex-selfhaters. We look and sound healed, but when this film asked me to examine that more closely, I admit, I discovered a residue. A dirty film left on my psyche by the colonizing eyes of men.

Case in point: I had to abandon my usual workout routine last fall because I injured my neck in a car accident. Instead of exercising my body all winter, I had to exercise patience, standing quietly by as I gained nearly 15 lbs.

It’s really no big deal. I know that.

Except, I lied about my weight on my driver’s license renewal last week.

And, I wonder, what is the first thing you see when you look at this snapshot, taken at Steve’s birthday in March?

The cake? the candles?...Perhaps the roll of fat hanging over my pants in the background? Or if
we really want to take it apart, perhaps my veiny arms? Or my right hand? It looks sort of like the three-fingered claw of a sleestak from that 70s show Land of the Lost, don’t you think?

When I saw this headless photo, I picked everything about my body apart and piled the wreckage of it on the table next to me, a trophy to my inadequacy.

Even though I already knew it, watching Miss Representation reminded me of the insidious nature of such behavior. What’s so bad about a roll of fat? Who cares if my body type doesn’t fit the arbitrary beauty-norms of the late 20th/ early 21st Centuries?

I fit in perfectly if we just go back a bit.

Here I am sitting on a sofa one day in 1876. I know I look a bit sad, but do you think I’m worrying with Renoir about the roll of fat that would have tumbled over the front of my pants were I modest enough to wear any?

Nah. I think I’m just feeling a bit resentful of this painter who wants me only for the beauty of my form.

Here’s another shot of me after the hunt.

I know what you’re thinking: I’m ashamed of my plans to binge on yet another
deer. I’m gripping my bow, trying to talk myself out of the slaughter, reminding myself of the heft of my ass on the rock. It seems, doesn’t it, that I’m calculating the time: can I eat the beast, hide the evidence, and throw it up before my knight in shining armor comes along with a barrel-chested horse to sweep the tremendous bulk of me off my feet?

Nah. I think I’m just marveling at my excellent shot and wondering how the heck I’m going to get that thing home by myself. I’m also feeling a bit irked that I’ve been asked to go hunting then sit on a rock in the nude. Really, Pierre!

Renoir, known for his misogynist views, was said to have stripped women not only of their clothes, but of their agency in nude paintings where he equated their bodies with the earth. How interesting, however, that my body fits so easily into his objectified form, yet fits so badly into the expectations of beauty today. The men with the means to represent are just making this shit up!

Amazing, isn’t it, how the context and the narrative around our bodies so dramatically shapes our vision of them? If Renoir had painted my gelatinous belly in the background of a birthday cake, would art historians note it as a thing to be reviled, rejected and erased?

No. But if I ran for office in a few years and this picture that I’ve so recklessly shared on the internet, were discovered (as it would be), do you think it would make CNN? Would they get out the digital pens and circle the evidence of my weakness for emphasis, marking me as “unfit” for public service?

Even if you deplored the news story, would you inwardly cringe at the up close exposure of my belly roll?

You might. Or perhaps I should say, I might (sympathetically), if it were your belly, spread out over the expanse of a wall-sized flat screen TV.

If women like me, who have bent under decades of programming, want to honestly critique the unnatural standards of beauty foisted upon us by a male dominated media, then we need to start in earnest with the mirror.

We cannot truly reject the random fantasies of men until we fully accept the varied realities of women. With that, we can model for our daughters the self-love we so desperately want them to own.

So there you have it, for Olivia’s sake and mine:

My belly.

My veins.

My sleestak
fingers.

Take that Mr. Media.