The Feminism of Hair Color?

Recently at our face-to-face meeting for the group of women that co-author this site I mentioned that I was looking to start making my hair darker, to bring back the red that I used to love about it.

Everyone looked surprised.

For most of my 44 years I've never entertained the idea of dyeing or coloring my hair, not even for a costume party.  There were many reasons for this stance.

Disgust with the idea that women must be beautiful and that beauty = youth.

A sister who when training as a stylist shared horror stories of the damage done to her and other's hair by the harsh chemical used to perm and dye hair.  I loved my curly, auburn hair (not always but 95% of my life) and was afraid it might be damaged by such treatments.

Feeling that it is an expense that is unnecessary and thus as long as I'm not the primary income earner not really something we need to waste our resource upon.

My mother used to dye her hair as a way to hide her illnesses from us all. When I figured out what was happening this turned into one of our most intense fights of the entire time I lived with her.  How many times did her health get worse because she was hiding things and refusing to see the doctors?  How dare she lie to us this way on top of all the other lies she was telling us and herself?

I recently talked about this in therapy just a bit so if discussion of dead mommy issues distresses you, stop reading now.

One of the factors contributing to my auburn hair was the fact that my mother had strawberry blonde hair (my dad's was black).  In four of their five kids, four of us had auburn hair.  Natural auburn hair isn't common and I grew up feeling like it was a gift I'd been given.  While I never knew what my body should look like and was often told it was fat and ugly or too skinny and ugly, I was always told I had beautiful red hair.

My hair is the one thing I loved about my physical self.

Then it started to go white.

White not gray.  There is nothing in my hair to turn gray. It turns into a golden red, then a blonde, and finally a perfect white.  At first it was only on my bangs and I thought "Cool I can look like Rogue!"  Who wouldn't want to be her?  This image is the one I grew up seeing on TV shows by the way so you can see I was hoping the entire top layer of my hair would go white but not the rest... unrealistic I know but hey, it was a fantasy like the show right?

The whiteness increased as my stress from graduate school increased and then when I couldn't even get a job because none existed in my field right after I finished... don't get me started on that... I felt like it was all for nothing.

Still I didn't dye my hair.

Yet when I saw my friend who is a stylist we talked about dying my hair.  Oh, I asked all about damage and he looked at it and heard what I wanted -- natural, little to no difference from the current red parts of my hair -- but suddenly I was ok with dying it.

I'm not dying it however.  I have too much white now and it simply is unlikely to take but he did recommend this product:


I couldn't find that where he suggested but the good ladies at the shop he recommended suggested this and I am very happy with the results even just after three days!


So what's changed?  As I thought it about it therapy and today I realized what changed is that my mother is dead.

She can't tell me what I should look like anymore.

But more importantly I don't have that strong association of hair coloring = lying to your family.

While I'm not saying that my concerns about beauty and youth are invalid, indeed I think those are very important feminist and humanist concerns. But part of feminism is the idea that women should be able to choose free from pressures that only focus on their biology and attempt to shove them into tiny little boxes that dictate their lives. Now freed from the association between lying to martyr your health I have been empowered to choose and that is very feminist if I do for myself not simply because I feel I should or I must do it to fit into someone else's model of beauty.

So I'm trying it.  I'm using this shampoo and conditioner and I'll see what happens.  After all two days of it my family and therapist said I seemed younger, more vibrant... I think they may mean riveting, huh?

Exercise? YUCK!

Before my mother died I decided to lose weight.  I went back to teach at the university level for the 2012/13 terms and found that I must have found my tipping point in terms of weight.  Five pounds later the problems I was having stopped but I decided to try and keep going using a planning tool I found on WebMD.

My mother's death probably made it easier because now I just have me to decide if I'm fat or thin not her random proclamations..

I lost a good amount, half of what I wanted to lose in the course of the two and a half years I've given myself.  My doctor was pleased, I was pleased, we looked forward to my blood work.

That didn't please us; it shocked us.  How could it have gotten worse?  My doctor's suggestion is to add in exercise.

Exercise? YUCK!

I hate exercise for two simple reasons -- it is boring and it is a solitary activity. Boredom is something I've fought against my entire life right from the second day of preschool.  As a freelance author I spent most of my day, every day, very much alone so something else that I can do alone just seems like more torture.

I've tried to workout with others -- either I can't find someone, we start then they have to drop out or are inconsistent, or I end up harming myself because our differences in sizes results in my over-extending myself.  Injuries result in more doctors' appointments and gained weight.  In fact I've injured myself so much over my adult lifetime that I have to be very careful of what exercises I do.

Which brings me to another problem with this entire "exercise" idea....

I do exercise, multiple times each, and every day.

I have stretches I have to do for my arms and my hips (past injury treatments that allow me to continue to function) and I have resistance/weight exercises I do for my arms (again another injury).  Actually my typing that I have to do for my career has to be broken down into a regime basically making it do double duty as career and exercise; this also limits the amount I can type every day a very annoying problem as an author.

So adding in more exercise?  When? Where?  How?

Some folks say exercising is a matter of willpower -- nah, it's a matter of schedule, it's a matter of emotional needs, and it's a matter of not injuring or re-injuring yourself.  Finding a balance isn't easy but given how unhappy I was with my blood work and how well the WebMD plan is working in terms of weight loss I don't want to change my eating.  The only thing left if I don't want to do medication is to try exercise.

As I wrote last time on this blog I'm trying to be more scheduled so I looked at my schedule.

I try to get up at 7am any way so could I fit a "first-thing" exercise into it which wouldn't interfere with other things on my schedule.  Moving some things back such as laundry doesn't work because that's an all-day thing and pushing it back even an hour runs into family time which is necessary for my emotional health. Then there's my volunteering at the IUAM and I need to have a firm schedule to make those plans.  Let's be clear traveling to any gym is a level of insecurity in terms of schedule -- traffic, weather, emergencies, these are too much to plan around and keep with the rest of my schedule.

In my basement is my recumbent exercise bike.  It doesn't aggravate my hip, it doesn't hurt my lower back, it is right here in this house, just steps from the laundry room and the rest of the things I have on my schedule.  It is easy to go from it to the shower and to get ready to go to the museum or out to shop or simply be ready to write for the day.

I started using it (again) this week and I'm aiming for 20 minutes, three times a week and getting up to 30 minutes by the end of this month.  Then I'll see how that seems to be working into my life, into my loneliness, into my health.  I've written it on my schedule, I've told my family, now I'm telling you.

Help me stay on track please and don't ask me to do things for or with you before 11am so I have the time to do this and still do my daily writing, previous exercises, and any chores that need to be started by then.  When you see me, ask me how it's going, let me know if I'm doing well, encourage me if I seem to be faltering (but don't nag or criticize because those are the fastest ways to get me to stop period).

Now you tell me what you need my help with in 2014.