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Ronald-Ann, fighting the good fight.
If you’ve read any of my Eden’s Root trilogy, then you know my main character, Fi, has curly red hair. When I began writing her, there was no doubt in my mind that she was a girl with a head full of curls. Recently one of my beta readers pointed out that I use gals with curly hair rather frequently. (She did allow for the fact that not all of my female characters were curly girls — Sara, for example, has straight hair.) She asked me why I was so hung up on curls. (Actually, I’m sure she said something much more lyrical than that.)
It started me thinking…
1.) Why do I use curls so much for my female characters?
2.) Why would someone notice that? It’s not like it’s weird for an entire book of characters to be assumed to have straight hair.
So begins the cultural discussion. You see, I’ve experienced the “curl” bias first-hand and I find it odd. Not that it’s odd when you consider the racial and ethnic underpinnings to this bias, but rather, that it still exists. In full force. Let me elucidate as I have been on both sides of this rather interesting divide.
As a child I had pin-straight hair. So much so that when my mother used to roll my hair in the little soft pink rollers for Easter and Christmas photos, those carefully constructed curls would fall right back out in about 10 minutes. (“Take the picture, fast!”) THAT is straight hair. I had such straight hair that when curls became popular in the 80s, I got a perm. It was TERRIBLE. (They are nothing like real curls unfortunately. Not to mention the stink.) I looked like Hall. Or Oates. Whichever one didn’t have the mustache.
Then something magical happened: hormones. In my teens my hair seemed to get frizzier and fuller, and eventually I noticed…it was freaking CURLY! (This happens to women sometimes. Their hair follicles — the quality that determines curl — change shape. It can happen during pregnancy and menopause as well. Quick Biology FYI for y’all.) I remember staring in the mirror at camp and fingering the amazing barrel corkscrews that had begun to descend from my brow in AWE. It was a dream come true, a prayer answered. My hair was full and curly and beautiful. I have no idea how I got so lucky.
Ever since, my hair has been my vanity. (Humbled by chemo, much?) But the interesting thing is that ever since, I’ve felt the “curl” bias. I’d never realized when African-American women (or others of ethnicities with kinkier hair) would complain that no one knew how to handle their hair (cutting, styling, etc) and that no one respected their natural hair, that they WERE TOTALLY 100% RIGHT.
WHAT??? We have a cultural bias in favor of straight, Caucasian hair? In America? Still?
YES!
1.) Hair Salons. I have NEVER been to a single hair salon (that wasn’t specifically for African-American women) that had magazines showing possible cuts for curly-haired girls. No lie. Try it sometime, ladies. Flip through those books of “cuts” and tell me how many curly ones you see. Usually no more than 3 curly styles out of hundreds and ALL of those are *fake* curls created with curling irons.
And I have NEVER, repeat, NEVER been to a hair salon where the stylist didn’t finger my gorgeous hair and offer to straighten it for me…as if it were not awesome the way it is. I’ve started telling stylists the moment I sit down that I love my curls, I don’t want them straightened ever, and that if they suggest it, I’m going to get back up and leave immediately. I get mouths dropping open on that one, let me tell you.
2.) Fashion/Style. I remember that I once looked at fashion magazines to see if I could find a curly haircut I might like. You know what I realized? There were NO natural curly cuts shown in fashion or style magazines either. Even African-American women’s hair was usually (except in high-couture), shaved into a fade or straightened.
By the way, just so the fashion gurus and stylists of the world know, FAKE curls don’t look like REAL curls. Not that curling-iron curls aren’t pretty, but they don’t look anything like real curls. Real curls are less regular. Some of mine actually reverse direction (the whorl) at random intervals.
3.) Celebrities. I’m going to start with Nicole Kidman because she was the one I noticed first. If you’ve ever seen Far and Away, she was supposed to play an Irish woman, so they let her wild curls fly free. And she looked amazing. That was the last time she ever let her hair look natural. And actually, her hair is brown so that wasn’t totally natural. Google her old movies in Australia and you’ll find a girl with brown, VERY CURLY, KINKY hair. Nicole Kidman? The queen of sleek? Really? Yup.
But Nicole is not nearly as obvious as another example: Jennifer Aniston. Jen is super-famous for her gorgeous, slick, straight hair, right? Well, she’s freaking GREEK people. Go Google old images of Jen before the nose and hair were “done.” She had thick, dark, CURLY hair. Guess that wasn’t as marketable, huh?
(By the way, the BLOND thing in Hollywood is also pretty annoying. Not that I blame them ALL for going blond because if you can pull it off, you get more jobs and make more money, but it’s tiring to watch the beautiful parade of young actresses all dissolve their uniqueness into the bleach cycle.)
4.) Makeover Shows. Almost all makeover shows intended to make a woman more beautiful and put-together will take a curly-haired woman and straighten her hair. NOTHING like saying, “The way you were born isn’t good enough.”
The Source of the Bias
In addition to Jen and Nicole and many, many others, there are millions of American women across the country who blow dry and flat iron and perm and go to the salon for blow-outs and who generally try to wrestle and subdue ANY sign of curl in their hair. It’s a WAR. And at what cost? To what end?
Confession time… I’ve been guilty of perpetuating it myself.
I have been in business for 10 years. I have never ONCE worn my beautiful, point-of-pride hair DOWN in a meeting. Why not? It’s too wild. Too unkempt. Too natural. Too…not SLICK. I pin it back into ponytails or buns. I SLICK the roots to make sure no wild frizz manages to wrangle it’s way free.
Why? Because I’m afraid that I won’t be taken seriously by colleagues. *record scratches* WHOA! HOLD UP THERE.
THAT is a pretty serious statement. But it’s true. I have an underlying sense that wearing my hair down wouldn’t be ok. Why is that? Because NO ONE else wears curly hair down. We’re all trying to cover it up and somehow, someway, we’ve managed to convince ourselves that straight hair is a sign of someone who is serious, thoughtful, and capable, and curly hair is not…
We have GOT to start getting this idea out of our consciousness. It’s not SURFACE culture for us, it’s DEEP culture and it’s rooted in racism. Period. Curly hair is more commonly found in non-caucasian ethnicities. Our bias against it still lingers from those days. I used to be a fan of Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County cartoons. His character, Ronald-Ann (pictured above and named by an over-optimistic mother for Ronald Reagan), once has a moment (the characters are revealing deep-dark secrets) when she says, “I wish I had long, flowing hair like Christie Brinkely” and then claps her hand over her mouth.
If a male cartoonist was this keenly aware of this problem in the 1990s, then the rest of us certainly have got to become more aware of it by now, decades later. I know it’s changing. Many African-American women and men wear their hair “natural,” but the bias is still pretty persistent. And it has to be stopped. There is nothing inherently awesome about straight hair and nothing inherently bad about curly hair. It’s ludicrous really. It’s just hair.
When we see a woman (or person, probably) with naturally curly hair, we have to stop thinking, “wild, crazy, unfocused, not serious, not trustworthy, and not grown-up.”
I have made it a personal vow that I will wear my hair down in my next business meeting. Why? Because the only way to break a cultural bias is to flout it. AND, if there are any other young women in the meeting with me, I want them to see my example: a woman with curls who is serious, thoughtful, capable and quite frankly, as much of an executive as anyone with a sleek cascade of Pantene-Pro-V perfect hair.
So I’m giving a SHOUT OUT to the curly-haired girls of the world. I encourage you to join me in pushing back on the “rules” that say that straight hair is better. The only way to prove it wrong is to go out there and show people.
Be free. Be happy. Be curly…
Technorati Tags: Fi Kelly, Rachel E. Fisher, Curls, Cultural Bias, ethnicity, fashion, style
Source:
http://rachelefisher.com/a-shout-out-to-the-curly-haired-girl-examining-cultural-bias-from-the-inside/