Every infant is social from birth, and without crucial interactions with an intimate caretaker, it will grow up to be severely disabled. Although the parts of the brain that control autonomic functions are quite mature at birth, emotional responses, language, and cognition develop through experience with others, and those experiences are physiologically coded in brain and body. The lullabies, head and hair stroking, rocking, cooing, playing, talk, and babble that take place between parent and baby during infancy are accompanied by synaptic brain connectivity unique to a particular individual. The cultural-social is not a category beyond the physical; it becomes the physical body itself. Human perception develops through a dynamic learning process, and when perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills are learned well enough, they become automatic and unconscious—part of implicit memory. It is when automatic perceptual patterns are interrupted by a novel experience, however, that we require full consciousness to reorder our expectation, be it about hair or anything else.
When Sophie went off to school with her two long, neat braids swinging behind her, she did not disturb anyone’s expectations, but when the psychologist Sandra Bem sent her four-year-old boy, Jeremy, off to nursery school wearing the barrettes he had requested she put in his hair, he was hounded by a boy in his class who kept insisting that “only girls wear barrettes.” Jeremy sensibly replied that barrettes don’t matter. He had a penis and testicles and this fact made him a boy, not a girl. His classmate, however, remained unconvinced and, in a moment of exasperation, Jeremy pulled down his pants to give proof of his boyhood. After a quick glance, his comrade said, “Everybody has a penis. Only girls wear barrettes.” Most boys in contemporary Western culture begin to resist objects, colors, and hairdos coded as feminine as soon as they have become certain of their sexual identity, around the age of three. Jeremy’s fellow pupil seems to have been muddled about penises and vulvas but adamant about social convention. In this context, the barrette metamorphosed from innocuous hair implement into an object of gender subversion. The philosopher Judith Butler would call Jeremy’s barrette wearing a kind of “performativity,” gender as doing, not being.
Girls have more leeway to explore masculine forms than boys have to explore feminine forms. Unlike barrettes on a boy, short hair on a girl is not subject to ridicule, noteworthy because the “feminine” has far more polluting power for a boy in our culture than the “masculine” has for a girl. During the three or four years before she reached puberty, another niece of mine, Ava, had a short haircut and was sometimes identified as a boy. One year she played with gender performance in the costume she chose for Halloween: half of her went as a girl, the other half as a boy. Hair was a vital element in this down-the-middle disguise. The long flowing locks of a wig adorned the girl half. Her own short hair served the boy half.
I began the fifth grade with long hair, but at some point in the middle of the year, I chopped it into what was then called a pixie cut. When I returned to school newly shorn, I was informed that the boy I liked, a boy who had supposedly liked me back, had withdrawn his affection. It had been swept away and discarded at the hairdresser’s along with my silky locks. I recall thinking that my former admirer was a superficial twit, but perhaps he had succumbed to a Goldilocks fantasy. He would not be the last male person in my life to fixate on feminine blondeness and its myriad associations in our culture, including abstract qualities such as purity, innocence, stupidity, childishness, and sexual allure embodied by multiple figures—the goddesses Sif, Freya, and the Valkyries of Norse mythology, the multitudes of fair maidens in fairy tales, numerous heroines in Victorian novels and melodramas, and cinematic bombshells, such as Harlow and Monroe (both of whom I love to watch on-screen). The infantile and dumb connotations of “blond” may explain why I have often dreamed of a buzz cut. The fairy tale and mythological creatures so dear to me as a child may explain why I have had short hair as an adult but never that short and did not turn myself into a brunette or redhead. A part of me must hesitate to shear myself of all blond, feminine meanings, as if next-to-no hair would mean severing a connection to an earlier self.
Iris, the narrator of my first novel, The Blindfold, crops her hair during a period in her life of defensive transformation. She wanders around New York City after dark wearing a man’s suit. She gives herself the name of a sadistic boy in a German novel she has translated: Klaus.
The gap between what I was forced to acknowledge to the world—namely that I was a woman—and what I dreamed inwardly didn’t bother me. By becoming Klaus at night I had effectively blurred my gender. The suit, my clipped head and unadorned face altered the world’s view of who I was, and I became someone else through its eyes. I even spoke differently as Klaus. I was less hesitant, used more slang, and favored colorful verbs.
My heroine’s butch haircut partakes of her second act of translation, from feminine Iris to masculine Klaus, a performance that belies the notion that appearance is purely superficial. By playing with her hair and clothes, she subverts cultural expectations that have shaped her in ways she finds demeaning.
Short hair or long? Interpretations of length change with time and place. The Merovingian kings (c. 457–750) wore their hair long as a sign of their high status. Samson’s strength famously resided in his hair. The composer Franz Liszt’s shoulder-length hair became the object of frenzied, fetishistic female desire. The mini-narratives of television commercials for formulas to cure male baldness reinforce the notion that the fluff above is linked to action below. Once a man’s hair has been miraculously restored, a seductive woman inevitably appears beside him on the screen to caress his newly sprouted locks. But then shampoo commercials for women also contain sexual messages that long and sometimes short, frequently windblown tresses will enchant a dream man.
Because of its proximity to adult genitals, pubic hair is bound to have special meanings. Turkish women, for example, remove their pubic hair. In a paper on the meanings of hair in Turkey, the anthropologist Carol Delaney reported that during a visit to a public bath for a prenuptial ritual, the soon-to-be bride advised her to bathe before the other women so they would not see her “like a goat.” The expression moves us from the human to the bestial. Metaphor is the way the human mind travels. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued in their landmark book Metaphors We Live By, “Spatialization metaphors are rooted in physical and cultural experience.” Head hair is up on the body; pubic hair is down. Humans are superior to animals. Reason is a higher function; emotions lower ones. Men are associated with the intellect—head—and women with passion—genitals. Hair above can be flaunted; hair below must be concealed and sometimes removed altogether.
Sigmund Freud’s brief interpretation of Medusa (1922) with her decapitated head, snaky mane, and petrifying gaze operates through a down-up movement. For Freud, the mythical Gorgon’s head represented a boy’s castration fears upon seeing “the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of the mother.” The source of terror (the threatened penis) migrates upward and is turned into a maternal head with phallic serpents instead of hair. The horrible countenance makes the boy stiff with fear, a rigid state that nevertheless consoles him because it signifies an erection (my penis is still here). Indeed, Jeremy’s classmate, whose anatomical beliefs were predicated on the idea of a universal penis, might have been stunned by a girl with no feminine accoutrements, no barrettes to signal girlness and no penis to boot. Would the child have felt his own member was threatened by the revelation? There have been countless critiques of Freud’s brief sketch, as well as revisionist readings of the mythical Gorgon, including Hélène Cixous’s feminist manifesto “The Laugh of the Medusa.”
What interests me here is the part of the story Freud suppresses. The mother’s vulva, surrounded by hair, is the external sign of a hidden origin, our first residence in utero, the place from which we were all expelled during the contractions of labor and birth. Isn’t this bit of anatomical news also startling f
or children? Phallic sexuality is clearly involved in the Medusa myth, and the snake as an image for male sexuality is hardly limited to the Western tradition. (In Taipei in 1975, I watched a man slice open a snake and drink its blood to enhance his potency.) The Medusa story exists in several versions, but it always includes intercourse—Poseidon’s dalliance with or rape of Medusa and subsequent births. In Ovid, after Perseus beheads the Gorgon, her drops of blood give birth to Chrysaor, a young man, and Pegasus, the mythical winged horse. In other versions, the offspring emerge from the Gorgon’s neck. Either way, the myth includes a monstrous but fecund maternity.
Hair has and continues to have sexual meanings, although whether there is any universal quality to them is a matter of debate. In his famous 1958 essay “Magical Hair,” the anthropologist Edmund Leach developed a cross-cultural formula: “Long hair = unrestrained sexuality; short hair or partially shaved head or tightly bound hair = restricted sexuality; close-shaven head = celibacy.” Leach was deeply influenced by Freud’s thoughts on phallic heads, although for him hair sometimes played an ejaculatory role as emanating semen. No doubt phallic significance has accumulated around hair in many cultures, but the persistent adoption of an exclusively male perspective (everybody has a penis) consistently fails to see meanings that are ambiguous, multilayered, and hermaphroditic, not either/or, but both-and.
One of the many tales I loved as a child and read to Sophie after our hair-braiding ritual was “Rapunzel.” The Grimm story has multiple sources, including a tenth-century Persian tale, “Rudaba,” in which the heroine offers the hero her long dark tresses as a rope to climb (he refuses because he is afraid to hurt her) and the medieval legend of Saint Barbara, in which the pious girl is locked in a tower by her brutal father, a story that Christine de Pizan retells in The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), her great work written to protest misogyny. Later tales—“Petrosinella” (1634) by Giambattista Basile and “Persinette” (1698) by Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force—are much closer to the Grimm version (1812), which the brothers adopted from the German writer Friedrich Schulz (1790).
In all of the last four versions of the tale, the action begins with a pregnant woman’s cravings for an edible plant (rampion, parsley, lettuce, or a kind of radish—rapunzel) that grows in a neighboring garden owned by a powerful woman (enchantress, sorceress, ogress, or witch). The husband steals the forbidden plant for his wife, is caught, and, to avoid punishment for his crime, promises his neighbor the unborn child. The enchantress keeps the girl locked in a high tower but comes and goes by climbing her captive’s long hair, which then becomes the vehicle for the prince’s clandestine entrance to the tower. The final Grimm version, cleansed for its young audience, does not include Rapunzel’s swelling belly or the birth of twins, but “Petrosinella” and “Persinette” do. When the enchantress realizes the girl is pregnant, she flies into a rage, chops off the offending hair, and uses it as a lure to trap the unsuspecting lover. The heroine and hero are separated, suffer and pine for each other, but are eventually reunited.
Rapunzel’s fantastical head of hair figures as an intermediate zone where both unions and separations are enacted. A pregnancy begins the story, and the lifeline between mother and fetus is the umbilical cord, cut after birth. But an infant’s dependence on its mother does not end with this anatomical separation. Rapunzel’s hair or extensive braid is a vehicle by which the mother-witch figure comes and goes on her visits, an apt metaphor for the back-and-forth motion, presence and absence of the mother for the child that Freud famously elaborated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle when he described his one-and-half-year-old grandson playing with a spool and string. The little boy casts out his string, accompanied by a long “oooo,” which his mother interpreted as his attempt to say “Fort,” gone, after which he reels it in and joyfully says, “Da,” there. The game is one of magically mastering the painful absence of the mother, and the string, which Freud does not talk about, serves as the sign or symbol of the relation: I am connected to you. Rapunzel’s hair, then, is a sign of evolving human passions, first for the mother, then for a grown-up love object and the phallic/vaginal fusion between lovers that returns us to the story’s beginning: a woman finds herself in the plural state of pregnancy.
The story’s form is circular, not linear, and its narrative excitement turns on violent cuts: the infant is forcibly removed from her mother at birth, then locked in a tower, cut off from others, and jealously guarded by the story’s second, postpartum maternal figure. After the punishing haircut, Rapunzel is not only estranged from her lover but she loses the sorceress mother. Notably, Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force reconciles the couple and the enchantress in “Persinette,” an ending that not only is satisfying but dramatizes the fact that this is a tale of familial struggles.
A child’s early socio-psycho-biological bond with and dependence on her mother changes over time. Maternal love may be ferocious, ecstatic, covetous, and resistant to intruders, including the child’s father and later the offspring’s love objects, but if all goes well the mother accepts her child’s independence. She lets her go. Rapunzel’s long hair, which belongs to her, but which may be hacked off without injuring her, is the perfect metaphor for the transitional space in which the passionate and sometimes tortured connections and separations between mother and child happen. And it is in this same space of back-and-forth exchanges that a baby’s early babbling becomes first comprehensible speech and then narrative, a symbolic communicative form that links, weaves, and spins words into a structural whole with a beginning, a middle, and an end, one that can summon what used to be, what might be, or what could never be. Rapunzel’s supernaturally long cord of hair that yokes one person to another may be assigned yet another metaphorical meaning—it is a trope for the telling of the fairy tale itself.
My daughter is grown up. I remember combing and braiding her hair, and I remember reading her stories, stories that still live between us, stories that used to soothe her into sleep.
Sontag on Smut: Fifty Years Later
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WHEN Susan Sontag gave her lecture “On Classical Pornography,” one of five she delivered at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, she was thirty-one years old and had published her first novel, The Benefactor, a book that received mixed reviews but had been highly touted in the New York literary world. She had written for the New York Review of Books and published an essay, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” in the Partisan Review that had jolted the chattering classes. She spoke as a champion of what lay beyond both the taste and ken of most literate, middle-class Americans. She was on a mission to shake up the staid truisms of the contemporary realist novel, and she found herself in a position to do it, a wondrous position if you think about it. A crowd turns out to listen to a young, very well-read intellectual woman lecture on the merits of pornography, albeit a circumscribed form of it, what might be called literary pornography. Listening to the tape of her talk fifty years later is a fascinating gauge of difference and sameness, of what has been swept away and what remains.
As she began to speak on the tape, I remembered her voice. She was much older when I knew her, and I never knew her well, but her voice sounded just the same to me, a nice resonant measured voice. Her delivery of the lecture surprised me a little, however. Her tone is calm, academic, qualifying, but less commanding than the one of the older person I remember. There is little humor in the talk and no rhetorical flights. She is not reading her text, but my guess is she is sticking close to it, and she wants to make sure that each of her points is clearly understood by her audience. She emphasizes that her adjective “classical” for pornography is something of a joke and that her definition of porn is unconventional: It is a literary form that must embody or act against the idea that lustful acts are inherently immoral. Unlike the erotic texts of China and India, she tells us, works that celebrate sexual joy, pornography pits virtue against vice in an ethical struggle.
Like comedy (the subject of her pre
vious lecture), she argues that pornography partakes of a necessary distance: its readers do not enter the internal psychological reality of the characters. The flayed, abused, pierced, and violated victims of the Marquis de Sade don’t really suffer. They are creatures of endless repetition—more machine than human. And when the victims have been beaten senseless, cut and gored beyond endurance, a magic salve appears to renew them for further violation. Sade’s parodies of Enlightenment discourses are also forms of removal from psychology and interiority. (Sontag doesn’t mention the Enlightenment, per se, but the long-standing scholarly interest in Sade lies in his critique of the era’s idea of natural law.) Sade’s form, Sontag argues, creates a democratization of the text’s landscape, in which human beings and things mingle without defined borders in an abstract, unfeeling engine that churns out forbidden sexual pleasures. Sontag makes a foray into sexual guilt and anxiety as states related to the ego, to the personal or subjective aspect of being as opposed to a being that is “an instrument of the life force.”
With her earlier points clearly in mind, Sontag moves her listeners into modern artistic territory. In its indifferent mingling of objects and humans, its leveling of all in its sight, Surrealism can be linked to pornography in its objectification of persons and their equality with things. The goal of the movement was “a programmatic search for estrangement.” After a moment of hesitation, she misattributes Lautréamont’s description of Surrealism to Breton: it is “as beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.” She points out that “copulation” between the objects is implicit in the image and goes on to mention the peculiar world of our dreams, in which our emotions do not correspond to the circumstances we find ourselves in. By waking standards, we may have intense emotions about the apparently trivial event or thing and an absence of feeling for the genuinely grotesque. She doesn’t parse this further, and it isn’t entirely clear how nocturnal dreams relate to pornography, but the Surrealists were definitely interested in them. (They tried to enlist Freud as an ally, but the upright Viennese doctor wanted nothing to do with the young French poets.)
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