long hair and a longer face

I wore my hair down today out of laziness, which is something I rarely do anymore (now that it's long enough to put up again). When I wear it down, I usually wear it down with intent and the right clothes to match that intent, and I feel good about it as a representation of what I'm up to on a given day, even if, truth be told, it's not the most flattering thing for me.

My hair down narrows my face and also draws attention to shadows on my face that give me a masculine cast. It emphasizes that my eyes turn down, that my countenance is the sort that studies show is considered classically attractive but not friendly or appealing. A face for paintings, but not television. A low Q score means a life of villains.

I've been thinking a lot about my hair lately, but it was strange to get that today. To get that when I so cultivated having long hair so that I would seem more feminine (and I did, I think because men responded to the hair as an easy code, but not to the total of how it made me, my face, look), it really made me look so much more masculine. I look the most girlish, the most sweet when my hair is very short. I understand getting called "sir" in the Citibank now, when my hair was down to my ass.

Other than the results of this being sick nonsense, I don't spend much time of late thinking about being "ugly" or "filth" which are two facets of so many things -- the inner monologue, the aspersions of children, my non-reality-based friends -- but it's certainly not because I've suddenly seen the light or any such thing. I think I have an astoundingly clear picture of what I look like -- after all, I have to. But I get why it's confounding and confronting to others in a way I didn't before, and I get how it's useful and I get how it's safe (not, as I've been told because of some damn fear of intimacy, but because it keeps the stupid out).

My hair is getting much greyer. I find silver in my brush; I can see where a streak is starting to form. I've never minded, and in some ways I wanted it, I'm better suited to older characters, and I look so young. I do a lot, and I feel I deserve the proof of it. Logical enough it should be in the hair, which in tales is all sin and glory.

I've never really thought I look much different than I do. Do people think that other people don't know what they look like? Is that why they inform strangers that they're fat or ugly. I don't know about other people, but to me the anger comes not out of insults, but of the imprecision.

The current state of my hair is probably not the most flattering for me (at least in a pop-culture, middle-of-the-road, identity-issue-free way), although it's the most flexible within a useful and manageable range. More importantly though, it's the most appropriate. There's a picture of me, from when I first cut my hair very short, and did my eye brows, wearing a collared lavender short sleave shirt and I am a the picture of new media profesional cuteness. Absolutely a delectable and clever girl. But it wasn't me, just an illusion I had to work very hard to keep up -- be neat, be clean, never talk about anything strange, smile, be happy, don't over plan too much, defer but don't hesitate -- a long list of things on how to be a normal girl -- clothes from here, this coat, the right everything for your house comes from Pottery Barn.

This is so much better. Weird and long-faced and too many things. It's so freaky though to me, how fucked up other people get about the notion that I would choose to look like this, when it would be so easy for me to go unnoticed, to be the right outline and semblance of an acceptable woman. In high school, for one semester I wore a minskirt every day, and pitched my voice up an octive and spoke more softly and all the boys paid attention to me. But I was tired a lot, and stopped doing it. For a long time, I just thought I was lazy, and I know a lot of people always will. But if I'm going to be a product, and I am, I will be my own, because it's too much work any other way.

all these cunning men

schpahky and I have been emailing about her latest piece for school. In talking about what it should be talking about we got on a digression in which she asked if I had read Cat's Eye, and said this about it:

But the whole childhood of that narrator is about driving around all summer with parents and brother in a station wagon, and camping, and because her dad is a science professor, they always have jars of bugs and stuff, and she arrives into adolescence feeling more like a boy than girl, and doesn' t know how to manage the subterfuge and hierarchy of girls.

It was no doubt the slimy things in jars that made me make the connection I'm about to go into -- both because of my HP fannishness and because I was crazy for science (although not biology, but rather chem) when I was a kid.

Perhaps women love villains in stories, not because of Jungian this or that, not because of some dark, removing responsibility for sexual desire fantasy, but because we relate to them and so can wish to be them -- they are in range of our experience as heroes rarely are. The villain (or at least the anti-hero), like girls and women, must navigate subterfuge and heirarchy. We see their male privilege as attainable to us, because their burdens are similar to our own unprivileged ones. That the long tradition of the feminization of villains (and JKR actually does this on such a consistent and massive scale it's a little weird), strikes me as possibly being an outgrowth of this, and not merely, as I think is often assumed, an attempt to insult the sexuality/power/honorableness of the villain or anti-hero.

I think it's why we like the Slytherins, ladies. We imagine the prices they pay are measured in units we can understand. And so we play at wickedness being clever and sexy and all that, because it's simply a way to show gratitude to certain tales while not being questioned too closely.

When I mentioned this to schpahky she seemed to agree. She listed her cunning men, and "crushes" seemed to be the easy word in what is mostly, really about desire and identity.

So much of the two-gender world seems to be a lot of people unwilling to say aloud, "I want all my wounds and all your power" and then being pissy about it.