IN MY SHOES: Flow It, Show It, Long As G-d Can Grow It
Dominique Browning, who writes a column for the Environmental Defense Fund Web site, has gone and done something really subversive. In a New York Times op-ed, the 55-year-old admits she not only let her hair go grey, but violated a taboo and did something her mother ‘hates,” her sister “worries about,” her agent thinks she’s “hiding behind” and a friend suggests “undermines my professional credibility.”:
I have long hair. I’m not talking about long enough to brush gently on my shoulder - when I tilt my head. I’m not talking about being a couple of weeks late to the hairdresser. I’m talking long. Long enough for a ponytail with swing to it. Long enough to sit against when I’m in a chair. Long enough to have to lift it up out of the sweater I’m pulling over my head. Long enough to braid. …
No one seems to have any problems when a woman of a certain age cuts her hair off. It is considered the appropriate thing to do, as if being shorn is a way of releasing oneself from the locks of the past. I can see the appeal, and have, at times in my life, gone that route. Some women want to wash the men (or jobs) right out of their hair. Others of us have to have at them with scissors. Again, I do not judge. Go right ahead, be a 60-year-old pixie.
So why do people judge middle-aged long hair so harshly? …
Long hair is not the appropriate choice of grown-ups. It says rebellion. Hillary Rodham Clinton softens her do, and sets off a bizarre Howl of Angry Inches, as if she had betrayed some social compact. Well, my long hair is indeed a declaration of independence. I am rebelling, variously, against Procter & Gamble, my mother, Condé Nast and, undoubtedly, corporate America in general.
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