KIDIST PAULOS ASRAT, here and here, writes about the long and often tousled hairstyles of female anchorwomen and Ann Coulter. She speculates that this loose, unrestrained bedroom look on women in power is an effort to recapture lost femininity. The more manly women become, the more they feel the need to flaunt their sexuality.

Kidist’s pieces remind me of a radio interview I heard this weekend of a woman who was once a musician in Tommy Dorsey’s band. (Unfortunately, I did not catch her name.) When she was hired by Dorsey, she was one of the few women in the band and he was adamant she cut her long hair, apparently because it was too sexual and feminine. She refused and he agreed to let her work for him only if she wore it tied back in a ponytail.

One night, on her wedding anniversary, the woman decided to defy Dorsey and came to the stage with her hair down. Her husband was also in the band. Dorsey walked up to her husband and asked him, “So do you like your wife’s hair down?” The husband said, “Yes, I do.”

Dorsey replied, “Good, because you can see it down as much as you like now. She’s fired.”

Imagine a man acting like that today and daring to tell a woman employee that her hairstyle was too provocative for a work setting.

Kidist writes:

One point I might not have made clear in my posts is how aggressive women are about this. It’s like the very high heels (5 inches+) that are in fashion these days. Hair and heels become a kind of weapon, almost masculine despite their extreme femininity. No one can argue that a woman’s hair is one of her great assets, and who else but women wear high heels, but these extremes go beyond the norm of femininity, and almost become a war cry. I’d be pretty scared to be near such aggressively ultra-feminine women!

Laura writes:

The delicate foot, the breast, the flowing curls – all become the trappings of power and marketability if flaunted. 

Lawrence Auster writes to Kidist:

Are these nine photos of nine different women, or nine photos of one woman, or something in between? I can’t tell. [See photo below.] The top row looks like three different women (but I’m not sure). In the middle row, the second and third photo could be the same woman. I think the bottom row is all the same woman.

 At a maximum, I’d say there are eight different women (since I’m sure that eight and nine are the same woman). At a minimum, I’d say there are six different women, (i.e., number one and three could be the same; five and six could be the same; and eight and nine are definitely the same, adding up to six individuals in nine photos).  

How useful that you posted this right after my comment that one can’t tell the Fox women apart, that they all look as though they came from a factory that mass produces Fox News Commentator Babes.

Laura writes:

News is a very serious business, as you can see.

Karen I. writes:

Hair extensions and even wigs play a role in at least some of the long hair on the women over 40 especially. Most beauty magazines and advisors tout long hair as a way to maintain a youthful look and cutting it is equated to admitting one is old, unless the short cut is very edgy (razored, drastic colors, etc). If women who want the long look can’t get it any other way, they buy it. Raquel Welch was on Oprah yesterday, sporting a very long, colorful and flowing style for her 69 years. She owns a wig company and apparently, she was wearing one of her artful creations. She obviously has had a lot of “work”, but she looks great for 69. 

Welch was promoting her book Beyond the Cleavage, and between talk about herself and her great beauty, she admitted her many failings as a mother. Welch gave herself credit for working hard to repair the damaged relationships with her children, while still making excuses for her behavior that damaged them in the first place, including signing their birthday cards “Raquel” rather than “Mom.”

Laura writes:

Beyond the Cleavage? Is this a joke? Or is it the one and only possible title for a memoir by an aged Raquel Welch?

Lisa writes:

A friend who had spent time in an Old Order Mennonite community once told me that part of the reason the women covered their hair (not at all odd in light of the long-term history of women) was to prevent having an alluring look. Amy Carmichael, the missionary to India in the late Victorian age, did not cover her head, but she was aghast that young women were beginning to “come to church services with their hair all down their backs.”

We as women have generally lost the knowledge of how to care for long hair so that it is truly lovely and not a thinning, scraggly mess. Nutritionally supperior diet (unprocessed, non-adulterated food) pure soft water, chemical pollution-free environments, natural hair applications, and gentle grooming techniques enabled more women to grow easily the lovely, long, thick locks of several hundred years ago.

Laura writes:

There is a lot of misunderstanding about why women in traditional cultures covered their hair. It was not because hair was shameful, but because its beauty was recognized as powerful. I wear a black lace veil to church on Sundays.

Jenny writes:

I have long, thick, natural blond hair. All my life, men and women, young and old have complimented me on it. I wore it down when I was a girl and later in my twenties. By the time I reached my thirties, I realized that I wasn’t a girl, or even a young lady anymore. I wanted to formalize my being a grown lady. I’m quite old-fashioned and decided that I would wear my hair in a bun, like the ladies of yesteryear. In the past, I think young ladies began wearing their hair up around eighteen, and at this time, too, they lowered the hemline of their dresses to the floor, or at least quite near it. My skirts are already quite long enough (mid calf to ankle depending on the skirt) and wearing my hair up makes me feel quite mature and even professional when I go about my work tending my home.

Since becoming more modest in dress and hair, my confidence has grown and I feel that I garner much more respect from people, especially men. I’m no longer worrying about my hair being a mess or getting in the way nor am I tugging at revealing clothing. Every morning when my husband turns on Fox News, I look at those women and wonder how on earth they can think they are being taken seriously when they dress like they will be going out for drinks after the show or to lunch with their girlfriends. The women don’t even look dress casual in my opinion. Until I read your blog, I never thought about their being overly feminine as a way to gain more power. Long, unruly hair and high high heels are certainly powerful looks. What’s funny to me is that in my opinion, hair and heels like that aren’t even feminine, since feminine to me is more about delicacy and gentleness than overt sexiness. I guess in their own warped way they feel feminine. Maybe my definition of feminine is off or old-fashioned.

I remember my own days of dressing immodestly — men looking at my cleavage no matter the setting, men turning their heads to watch me walk past….. I felt so uncomfortable all the time even though I looked great by modern standards. Now, the only people watching me walk past and giving me the once over are women! I wonder what they are thinking and imagine it’s either “Yuck, how can she dress that way” or “I wish I had the confidence to tone it down a bit.” I don’t know what they are thinking, but I do know that men never make me feel uncomfortable anymore; the most forward behavior I ever get is an opened door, a tip of the hat or nod of the head, or allowed to go ahead in line. That is what I call respect and being taken seriously.

As for Ann Coulter, I can’t even watch her. When I see her cross necklace dangling between her breasts, I just have to turn the channel or leave the room. That is just gross to me and very inappropriate.

Laura writes:

Yes, it is disgusting.

Jenny brings up an important point. I agree with Kidist that women are dressing aggressively, but I think many are swept into the stiletto-and-open-bodice look unthinkingly and feel the sort of discomfort Jenny describes. Most women feel the gaze of others on their exposed cleavage. It’s distracting. I don’t know how these women on television concentrate, but the answer is they probably don’t or they do so at tremendous cost to their own peace of mind. I often think, “What are their boyfriends or husbands thinking as these women brandish their sexuality on screen? Are these men alive?”

Truthfully, the sight of breasts has started to sicken me. The most beautiful part, or at least one of the most beautiful parts, of a woman’s body has been trashed by overexposure. My physician said this may be because not enough people were breast-fed as children and now we’re all collectively sucking at the teat. It’s a funny theory. I believe he was joking. But it is as if we are gorging on mammary flesh out of some dark, atavistic need. If anything, that need is for comfort, the cushiony pleasures and warmth, of social order.

Christopher Roach writes:

One thing about provocative dressing I’ve noticed is that there is a strange demand to be noticed and not noticed all at once. To “have it all” as they say. It’s like junior high, where the little girls tease the little boys as “pervs” after deliberately getting them all hot and bothered. One must make a decision as a woman in life, professional or otherwise, of whether your sexuality and femininity as a woman are a gift to a man you love, or a tool to get ahead, the ultimate expression of unhealthy and unbalanced love for the self. If it’s the former, then modesty and restraint of some sort or other is de riguer. If it’s the latter great disappointment is in store, and sometimes much worse, as evidenced by the phenomenon of date rape. Much of modern feminism is not about protecting and helping women–who would do much to avoid male violence by following common sense–but about consciousness raising and brain-washing. Young people by the tens of thousands are all taught in Orientation Week at college that “rape is a crime that has nothing to do with sex,” yet women who are strippers, who frequent night clubs, who invite strange men home, who drink to excess, and all the rest are far far more likely to get raped and hurt than women who exercise basic common sense and are aware of their combination of sexual power coupled with their physical weakness. But the latter path would quickly lead women back to chastity, modesty, and patriarchy, and this would be unacceptable to the minority of women who are natural feminists: unfeminine, career obsessed, and scared of male authority and of authority in general.

Laura writes:

“One must make a decision as a woman in life, professional or otherwise, of whether your sexuality and femininity as a woman are a gift to a man you love, or a tool to get ahead, the ultimate expression of unhealthy and unbalanced love for the self. If it’s the former, then modesty and restraint of some sort or other is de riguer.”

That is very well said. Everybody wants something for nothing. The possibility that you can have one man’s devotion and yet swing away at other men and attract their attention is greedy. 

But women are so uninformed about men today they truly do not know that men prize modesty. How would they know? Who would tell them? Their mothers? Not likely. Mothers worry that their daughters won’t survive unless they are aggressive and manly, while being pretty at the same time. All things at once.

Kristor writes:

It has always amused me somewhat to hear feminists complaining about how in the old days women had to cover their hair in church, wear veils, even sit apart from the men, or behind them. The root of the complaint is that it imposes constraints upon women that are not imposed upon men, treats them as second class citizens. But really the constraints went both ways. Their purpose was, of course, to reduce the natural inclination of the men to divert their attention from the liturgy – from the otherworldly, the eternal – to the worldly, to their women; and, conversely, to reduce the natural inclination of women to respond to the attention of their men. The constraints – particularly putting the men in front of the women, so that they could not even see them except by craning conspicuously around – are a recognition of the immense power women have over men. It is difficult to pray, difficult to focus one’s attention away from the world and its alluring suasions. For men, in particular, this difficulty is greatly compounded by the presence of women. That women should be expected to veil their glory in church, for fear of being seen to compete with God, should be interpreted as a peculiar honor. The whole point of church, after all, is not to puff us up with vanity and vainglory, but to strip us of all our fine chicanery and reveal us to ourselves as miserable, sinful, lowly, in comparison to the unalloyed glory and goodness of God; so as to engender in us a proper gratitude for his loving kindness to us, who have never deserved it. Church is supposed to be a vacation from the worldly pursuit of power, and an antidote thereto.

Laura writes:

The veil is a reminder that a woman’s outward appearance is just that. Outward. Appearance and not essence.

Here is from Martin Mosebach’s The Heresey of Formlessness:

Veiling, in the liturgy, is not intended to withdraw some object from view, to make a mystery out of it, or to conceal its appearance. The appearance of veiled things is common knowledge anyway. But their outward appearance tells us nothing of their real nature. It is the veil that indicates this. If one draws this veil aside, and the veils that lie behind it, like peeling an onion, and penetrates to the core of the mystery, one is still confronted with the veil….” [emphasis mine] (p. 172)

Sage McLaughlin writes:

The veil somehow invokes the presence of the sacred, and it inspires such reverence in me that I find I can only approach a veiled woman with a due sense of respect and even trepidation. 

Which is, of course, the point. Anyone who believes the veil is not a tool of real feminine empowerment is probably too literal-minded for a genuinely religious appreciation of reality.

Kristor writes:

We veil the inmost, most hidden truths, that lie at the roots of our lives, because they are dangerous. The veil a woman wears has exactly the same function in social and spiritual life as the veil of the Temple, and of the vestments worn by priests, which are cut from the same cloth. Our flesh too is a veil; we enter Heaven through the veil of Christ’s body. And the bound of the cosmos, that conditions and keeps it ordered in brilliant array – both the Greek “cosmos” and Hebrew “Sabaoth” mean “host arrayed for battle” – is the veil of the firmament, a wall of crystal. “Paradise” is Persian for “walled garden.” All veils, all tabernacles, all temples, houses and walls, are types of the archetypal bound of existence, the Logos himself. 

Why then are men expected to bare their heads in church? The same reason they are expected to doff their caps when greeting either a woman or a man whom they respect. It is a gesture of submission. The custom began with taking off one’s helmet before one’s lord, and then bowing to him, so as to give him power and permission to strike off one’s head should he find such a thing needful or appropriate. It is an offer of oneself as a sacrifice. This is what men are expected to do: to go first to the altar as sacrifices, or to the van of the host, as priests blowing shawms led the host of Israel into battle. They are expected to sacrifice their lives, first to their Lord, and second to their women, both of whom are in the Temple veiled. To approach a veil is to risk one’s life. Easy to see why approaching a woman might feel perilous to a man; he might lose himself to her. But the altar is far more dangerous than any woman. The High Priest went through the veil only once each year, in fear and trembling, prepared to die, ready to feel the flesh being peeled away from his bones, blasted by coruscating light.

Mabel LeBeau writes:

It’s interesting about the English word ‘veil’. When someone advocates wearing a veil, the picture that comes to mind is that of a short black chapel mantilla such as worn American Catholics in the 1960’s as a convenient adaptation of the elaborate headdresses worn by elderly Spanish widows or the French Châtelaine, fastened with decorative combs atop piled dark hair, or a veil as part of a religious habit such as in ‘wimple and veil’ featured in 15th century Itailian tapestries and paintings. Veils as typified by the Madonna and Child or bridal veil characterize a costume, even as the powdered or exotic wigs of English Lords and Japanese nobility.  [Laura writes: A costume in the sense that they were not purely functional.]

When considering Van Gogh’s working women in the fields or kitchen, protected by thick items of clothing and haircovering, the veil as a baboushka or utilitarian garment for maintaining cleanliness and obviating need for much additional grooming, especially in non-intellectual societies where a woman’s hair may indeed may be her greatest asset, for whom the essence of beauty might require a great deal of time-consuming care.

Use of the term ‘veil’ as a verb is synonymous with mystique, a shroud of secrecy, subterfuge, or even associated with something sinister meant to provide a shadowy indeterminate form to a dark or substantial shape.

Hannon writes:

Laura wrote:

 “There is a lot of misunderstanding about why women in traditional cultures covered their hair. It was not because hair was shameful, but because its beauty was recognized as powerful.”

This speaks to how poorly both women and men understand the idea of strength in beauty. The balance of power has shifted.  Women have the lion’s share of it by dint of appearance and often the subtle (and not-so-subtle) sexualization of their behavior. (Lawrence Auster made cogent observations recently about the awkwardness men are faced with in dealing with these aggressive neo-feminine traits). Men, by contrast, have been cowed by these incessant displays into near-submissiveness and show few comparable signs of social and masculine prowess. They have given these up for the soft tolerance and understanding of universal liberalism. In other words, they have been feminized.

I agree entirely about modest attire and hairstyles for women. These generate engaging complexity– but maybe this effect is in part due to the contrast it provides against what we typically experience today? I believe that the brassy women who barge into our consciousness on a regular basis naturally “partner” with their male counterparts who are just as vain and lost as they are. I also believe that a great many of us see through that particular type of veil and reject it naturally.

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