My hair was strawberry blonde when I first bleached it. Why I thought bleaching hair a few inches short of my ass was a good idea is a mystery. Not-so-great decisions usually accompany periods of increased anxiety. I kept it in a braid so it was less obvious how much of a calico blonde I was.
The second time I dyed it, I got most of the darker red out and started using purple shampoo. In case you have no clue what the hell that is, purple shampoo is formulated to deposit pigment that takes the brassy red out and neutralizes all warm tones. Cooling it makes it a more silvery rather than yellow blonde. My nephew's friend started calling me Rapunzel. Yup, blonde hair, braid, got the reference.
This time, I went full attack. Full cover bleach, pure white toner. Sigh, okay, toner is also a 'huh?' for some people. You add a chemical toner to a weaker developer and it does much the same thing as the purple shampoo. Whatever default a dye leaves you in, a toner will repigment it where you're aiming. You can get these in all ranges of colors, they foam up like shampoo and you leave them in for maybe a half hour.
Anyways, it's Elsa. I've gotten many compliments... From kids. Because my hair is mostly snow white and trapped in a loose braid with those tendrils that don't stay in the braid. I wasn't really aiming for that, but I got comfortable with the braid over the past few months and I'm not out to avoid it simply because Disney hijacked it.
I used to dye my hair damn near crayon red and I got 'Little Mermaid' or 'Ariel', the first if that person was trying to seem too mature to remember her name.
8 year old me would be psyched. I would memorize Disney songs then run outside to sing them with my friends. I'm not going to pretend to be embarrassed simply because PC groups want to turn being a Disney princess into an anti-feminist or white inclusive fantasy. Nor do I care that it's sometimes considered an insult, since I'm a 37 year old woman so shouldn't I grow the fuck up?
Here's the difference. It's not what I set out to accomplish. I found my first white hair and rather than mourn it like most people would, I was ecstatic. I wanted to go platinum! It's not my attempt to recapture youth. It's my attempt to embrace aging. Braids aren't just a young girl thing and it can't be helped that I have a young face. I'm not mortified by the princess comparisons.
I'm an artist. Comparisons are how people have always tried to break me down and if I let it get to me, I wouldn't have pursued anything. Creative pursuits are open season for critics that, even if they could do what I did or might have even done it better, still can't do what I do. Sometimes, all you have to back up why you do what you do is that you don't for yourself. While I don't owe everyone that story of my first grey hair or the braid, I'm well aware that no matter if I do or don't give them the long or short version (if I don't shrug them off entirely), people tend to fill in all the blanks or take their own creative liberties. In fact, the more thorough my story, the more likely the person is to be suspicious that I'm lying to cover up my real goal of looking like a Walmart Disney Princess, because why not also throw in that I'm always wearing pajamas if I'm not in a work uniform.
Crazy world we have, where people are so adamant about redefining what girls should want to be. Just the other day I saw this winner:
Sigh... Even though, yes, overwhelmingly, the princess trend took off. But it wasn't forced on us and some of us even played with our brother's GI Joe's without our parents smacking them out of our hands. My generation did have a lot of princesses, but we also had Wonder Woman, She-Ra and Xena Warrior Princess. We had plenty of strong women characters but princesses were more popular to young girls begging for toys.
What irritates me is this idea that women would be more like men if we were allowed to be. In truth, sexuality and identity is neither that oppressed nor that fluid for everyone. Some people know they're straight or gay pretty clearly. Some people know which side of gender roles they feel more comfortable in. I mean, it does suck for the rest of us that aren't so neatly in those comfy niches, but part of what drives me isn't expecting a niche to form for me. It's my ability to adapt, to carve little dimples for other wanderers to find peace with being different.
Every little girl won't want a general either. Don't discount the princesses nor forget the value of warrior princesses. We can't lose masculine and feminine entirely. Those are someone else's comfort zones. I'm not out to take those away from people just because I'll never have a niche like that. Transsexual men and women often find comfort in the polar opposite sex to the one they were born into. Regardless of how you feel about their appropriation or adoption of gender roles, reducing all humans down to what is appropriate (rather than harmless choice) is not the solution anyone could think it is.
Of course people will bend what is good into something twisted and foul. Setting up unreasonable 'safeguards' doesn't really make it harder for predators to find a way. Desexualizing women role models doesn't make rapists forget that women have vaginas. What message really needs to get out there is that what is typically considered masculine or feminine is not a cage for boys or girls. People will judge and people will attempt to define things for everyone's (no one's) benefit but it's also okay for those roles to exist.
Some of the harder issue lie in Latin American culture, where the superiority and inferiority of masculine and feminine is hardwired into the language so much that we're getting the Latinx label so that neutrality doesn't create labels to assume such gendered ranks. I don't pretend to understand this entirely, but yes, culturally, North Americans have the most wiggle room in these gender politics. Everyone in the world wandered here to escape some form of oppression, yet the divisions aren't so easy to whittle down. Here, we're carrying all of those biases and still clinging to some shitty old cultural baggage.
It's not easy, deciding where princesses and warriors and generals fit. In my own experience, those types don't wait for permission--they go with their heart, their guts and their instinct and make their path. Pretty or gritty, she'll find her way.
This time, I went full attack. Full cover bleach, pure white toner. Sigh, okay, toner is also a 'huh?' for some people. You add a chemical toner to a weaker developer and it does much the same thing as the purple shampoo. Whatever default a dye leaves you in, a toner will repigment it where you're aiming. You can get these in all ranges of colors, they foam up like shampoo and you leave them in for maybe a half hour.
Anyways, it's Elsa. I've gotten many compliments... From kids. Because my hair is mostly snow white and trapped in a loose braid with those tendrils that don't stay in the braid. I wasn't really aiming for that, but I got comfortable with the braid over the past few months and I'm not out to avoid it simply because Disney hijacked it.
I used to dye my hair damn near crayon red and I got 'Little Mermaid' or 'Ariel', the first if that person was trying to seem too mature to remember her name.
8 year old me would be psyched. I would memorize Disney songs then run outside to sing them with my friends. I'm not going to pretend to be embarrassed simply because PC groups want to turn being a Disney princess into an anti-feminist or white inclusive fantasy. Nor do I care that it's sometimes considered an insult, since I'm a 37 year old woman so shouldn't I grow the fuck up?
Here's the difference. It's not what I set out to accomplish. I found my first white hair and rather than mourn it like most people would, I was ecstatic. I wanted to go platinum! It's not my attempt to recapture youth. It's my attempt to embrace aging. Braids aren't just a young girl thing and it can't be helped that I have a young face. I'm not mortified by the princess comparisons.
I'm an artist. Comparisons are how people have always tried to break me down and if I let it get to me, I wouldn't have pursued anything. Creative pursuits are open season for critics that, even if they could do what I did or might have even done it better, still can't do what I do. Sometimes, all you have to back up why you do what you do is that you don't for yourself. While I don't owe everyone that story of my first grey hair or the braid, I'm well aware that no matter if I do or don't give them the long or short version (if I don't shrug them off entirely), people tend to fill in all the blanks or take their own creative liberties. In fact, the more thorough my story, the more likely the person is to be suspicious that I'm lying to cover up my real goal of looking like a Walmart Disney Princess, because why not also throw in that I'm always wearing pajamas if I'm not in a work uniform.
Crazy world we have, where people are so adamant about redefining what girls should want to be. Just the other day I saw this winner:
What irritates me is this idea that women would be more like men if we were allowed to be. In truth, sexuality and identity is neither that oppressed nor that fluid for everyone. Some people know they're straight or gay pretty clearly. Some people know which side of gender roles they feel more comfortable in. I mean, it does suck for the rest of us that aren't so neatly in those comfy niches, but part of what drives me isn't expecting a niche to form for me. It's my ability to adapt, to carve little dimples for other wanderers to find peace with being different.
Every little girl won't want a general either. Don't discount the princesses nor forget the value of warrior princesses. We can't lose masculine and feminine entirely. Those are someone else's comfort zones. I'm not out to take those away from people just because I'll never have a niche like that. Transsexual men and women often find comfort in the polar opposite sex to the one they were born into. Regardless of how you feel about their appropriation or adoption of gender roles, reducing all humans down to what is appropriate (rather than harmless choice) is not the solution anyone could think it is.
Of course people will bend what is good into something twisted and foul. Setting up unreasonable 'safeguards' doesn't really make it harder for predators to find a way. Desexualizing women role models doesn't make rapists forget that women have vaginas. What message really needs to get out there is that what is typically considered masculine or feminine is not a cage for boys or girls. People will judge and people will attempt to define things for everyone's (no one's) benefit but it's also okay for those roles to exist.
Some of the harder issue lie in Latin American culture, where the superiority and inferiority of masculine and feminine is hardwired into the language so much that we're getting the Latinx label so that neutrality doesn't create labels to assume such gendered ranks. I don't pretend to understand this entirely, but yes, culturally, North Americans have the most wiggle room in these gender politics. Everyone in the world wandered here to escape some form of oppression, yet the divisions aren't so easy to whittle down. Here, we're carrying all of those biases and still clinging to some shitty old cultural baggage.
It's not easy, deciding where princesses and warriors and generals fit. In my own experience, those types don't wait for permission--they go with their heart, their guts and their instinct and make their path. Pretty or gritty, she'll find her way.
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