Let's do some HAIR STUDIES! How does blondeness recruit and convey power? When is curly hair a signifier of unruliness — and when does it say Cool Girl? Will we ever be free of the tyranny of the beachy wave? What's the New Karen Cut? Should we talk about Julia Roberts' hair in Pretty Woman for a solid 10 minutes? (Yes!) Sarah Mesle joins the pod to talk about her new book, Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women's Hair and What They Tell Us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity, parse "good" blonde dye-jobs, wonder what happened to the Old Lady cut, and answer all of your questions about the politics of white lady hair.
Anne Helen Petersen: This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Petersen.
Sarah Mesle: And I'm Sarah Mesle. I am the author of the new book, Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women's Hair and What They Tell Us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity.
Anne Helen Petersen: Sarah, did you notice that my hair was, like, beautiful and blonde?
Sarah Mesle: It was so beautiful and so blonde.
Anne Helen Petersen: I'm being facetious here, but -
Sarah Mesle: Yes, yes ...
Anne Helen Petersen: I got it balayaged for the first time in five months. Like, just a lot of life was in the way.
Sarah Mesle: Uh-huh.
Anne Helen Petersen: And I didn't realize until I came home, it felt like I had, like, renewed myself. Like restarted my life.
Like, I had felt so drab and sad about how I looked. And I'm like, this is so frustrating to me that getting these painted blonde things in the roots of my hair somehow reactivate my sense of self, and it really pisses me off. But also, at least I recognize it.
It's real.
Sarah Mesle: It is real. I mean, one thing I was... My first response, Annie, of course, was an astonishing overwhelm at your beauty and its blondness. But also, when I'm doing this, I just got new podcast headphones, and I have not figured out what the fuck to do with my hair when I'm wearing these headphones.
Anne Helen Petersen: Oh, I know.
Sarah Mesle: So the first thing I noticed was, oh, she just has the ponytail. So I was really responding to the style, not the color. But also, I think of you as being beautifully blonde. I would have guessed that you just woke up like this every day.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. Well, in my head, that is who I am. Right? This is, like, my self-conception, and I think a lot of people with similar hair to mine, and I know you talked to Sarah Petersen about this as well. She has similar hair to mine. Like, we, at some point in our childhood, were blonde -
Sarah Mesle: Uh-huh.
Anne Helen Petersen: - and our understanding of self is very rooted in that blondness, which many scholars, and especially Tressie McMillan Cottom would argue that -
Sarah Mesle: Mm-hmm ...
Anne Helen Petersen: that's, and you point this out so beautifully in the beginning of your book, like, part of our relationship to blondness is a relationship to the ideal, which is also a relationship to power, and specifically white power, and -
Sarah Mesle: Mm-hmm.
Anne Helen Petersen: - you might not recognize it as such, but part of my affection for being blonde is an affection for occupying an ideal.
Sarah Mesle: Yes. Yes, that is correct, because it feels really good.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sarah Mesle: Right?
Anne Helen Petersen: But it also brightens my face, and it feels like the right color for, like, my complexion and it makes me feel like summer, right?
Sarah Mesle: I know. I know. Yeah, me too. I mean, I also bleach my hair. I never had blonde hair, so…
Anne Helen Petersen: Ah ...
Sarah Mesle: - it's different for me. I always thought of myself as having... But when I was a little girl, I really believed I had golden brown hair. Like, it
Anne Helen Petersen: Golden brown. That's so much better than dishwater brown or dishwater blonde.
Sarah Mesle: It was brown ... It was brown, but it was golden brown. Like, that was, in my mind, it was kind of shimmery, and it fit with the myth that I'd been told of, like, "Oh, you have such beautiful long hair like a princess," which is, I think, a kind of language that, little white girls, little girls are fed.
And so when my parents took me to cut my hair, I was like, "What the fuck is happening here?" Like, "This is not okay." Yeah, and now I get it blonde, and it's really… Yeah, I have so many thoughts. The main thing I feel about it is, it is my one cosmetic indulgence. I don't really do my hair, and I don't wear makeup, and this is the thing, this is where I put all my bank.
Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, emotional bank and also financial bank because it is not cheap.
Sarah Mesle: It's not cheap.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, I always think about Amy Poehler has recently talked on her podcast about, like, different types of blondes that you can identify like expensive blondes and cheap blondes. And even within Hollywood, how you can identify this, which is fascinating to me, that, like you can have, you can still pay a lot of money and it's still a cheap blonde. Ugh. But we are so ahead of ourselves, but I wanted to start with our own hair stories, because…
Sarah Mesle: Mm-hmm ...
Anne Helen Petersen: I have been so excited for your book for actual years. The way I first knew that you were working on a book about hair studies or about hair, and specifically white women's hair, was you would often screenshot things from different TV shows or awards ceremonies, and you would hashtag it hair studies.
Sarah Mesle: Mm-hmm.
Anne Helen Petersen: And the first place that I really remember you doing this was for Daenerys on Game of Thrones, who had -
Sarah Mesle: Yes.
Anne Helen Petersen: - very elaborate signifiers and going on with her hair. How did... Can you give us a little, before we talk about the specifics of the book, how did you first start really thinking about, like, hair studies and specifically, like, hair study at pop culture and and hair studies? Like, how did that first become really interesting to you?
Sarah Mesle: Was there a moment when I was not fascinated by hair? Like, I can't possibly remember a time before hair was something that seemed really important to how I thought of myself, how I connected to other people around me, how I imagined them looking at me.
And for me also, it's a real tactile pleasure. I love to have my hair brushed, I love to braid hair, I love to, just the intimacy of it is so beautiful and meaningful to me. So that is kind of the root of my questions. But I'm also not only a girl standing in front of a hairstyle asking to brush its hair.
Or it's, you know. But I'm also somebody who's trained in feminist and literary and cultural studies, and, as I was in the early 2000 moment starting to write a lot about popular culture, particularly television, Game of Thrones, it just became really clear to me that hair was a way that you could see what a piece of media, whether that was a book or especially visual media like TVs or movies, wanted to tell you was real or important about a woman character.
And I can say a lot more about that, but so I started getting very interested in the way that shows depicted the reality of women's lives. Like if they were, you know, stranded, let's say, on an island, could they still get their highlights done? Like mysteriously they could. How could they do that, right? They could have shaved armpits. How did they do that? We don't know.
So, there's lots to say about those kind of fantasies of reality. So I started thinking about hair definitely in terms of gender as an isolated quality. This is how media thinks about women. And then there was a specific moment in Game of Thrones, which as you know I recapped for many seasons, when Daenerys Targaryen, first of her name, is the queen, the Dragon Queen, is spending time with her friend who is also a formerly enslaved woman that she liberated, Missandei, who is Black and who has large, I would say like 4C curl hair. And Daenerys is doing Missandei's hair, and my jaw was just on the floor.
I have read and watched so much media, and I really, I asked everybody I knew, like, "Can you think of any 19th century story where a white woman does a Black woman's hair?" I couldn't think about, couldn't find one. I mean, there might be one, but I could not think of one. And that was the moment where I really realized that this whole time I'd been thinking about gender, but in fact I was thinking about race and gender, and I had my framework that I had grown up with never forced me to think about my hair as an expression of my racialized gender rather than just my gender, and that was really the root of this book.
Anne Helen Petersen: Ugh. Yes, and we're gonna talk about this throughout. This is part of the reason why I knew that we would get great questions from our listeners, but I also knew that some of them would be like, "Oh, why," like, "Why am I into this hairstyle?" Or, "Why do I not like this hairstyle? Why am I fascinated by this hairstyle?" And some of it, I think our surface level appreciation or rejection has to do with sometimes some unexamined understandings of popularity or I'm thinking about your reaction which you describe in the book to Jennifer Aniston's Rachel haircut.
Which you're like, "Oh my God, it's so basic." Right? Yeah. But like, what is the deeper story? And each chapter in your book looks at, is it the last 40 years? Is that right?
Sarah Mesle: Yeah. It goes between 40-ish years, the election of Reagan and the first election of Trump.
Anne Helen Petersen: And looks at different, very, very visible white lady hairstyles.
Sarah Mesle: Yeah. Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And unpacking their meaning, their reception, just thinking of them as cultural objects, right, with so many different inputs and outputs.
Sarah Mesle: Yeah. I mean, I think one way to think about the book is it's seven essays about seven iconic moments in white women's hair in this 40-year span between '79 and 2016. And another way of saying that is that it's a book about how whiteness has transformed and wrestled with itself. And I think that white women's hair is a great place to look at how whiteness thinks about itself, because as I was saying, I spent my whole life thinking about my hair, writing about hair all the time, and never thought I was talking about race.
I thought I was talking about gender power, thought I was talking about aesthetics. I thought I was talking about class and taste. And all of those frameworks, all of those ideas or languages are ways that whiteness can talk about itself without using the word white.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Sarah Mesle: And whiteness loves to do that because whiteness does not want to think about itself as a race.
It wants to erase its racial identity at every turn, and especially because women's hair is often seen as the realm of the trivial, the aesthetic. It's like fun, it's pretty, it's just popular. It seems very aslant to, as I say in the book, the university, the courtroom, the business -
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm.
Sarah Mesle: - the place where real decisions are made. White women's hair is also not a place that thinks of itself as powerful.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sarah Mesle: And whiteness loves to disavow its own power. So precisely because of all of the reasons it seems counterintuitive, it's actually really fruitful. And let me say here as a caveat, I think it's really important for white women like myself to learn how to do this.
Really the risk of the book though is that white women have been very carefully trained by people who didn't realize they were doing it to be bad at talking about race, to be bad at thinking about race, and to obscure and occlude it. So I'm really trying to make it my good faith best effort here. But the book is really a risk.
I'm sure I'm getting a lot wrong. I'm really looking forward to what talking about the book helps me learn.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. No, that's what…
Sarah Mesle: Which is the cheerful way of saying, like, I'm also quite anxious about it in my white lady way.
Anne Helen Petersen: I'm always conscious of the way that talking about whiteness, especially as both of us as white ladies talking about whiteness, that it sometimes reproduces this... well, we're always centering whiteness, right? And I'm conscious of one of the first scholars who made me think of whiteness as whiteness was Richard Dyer, his book White. It's about all cultural artifacts, but he is precious to me as the person who introduced me to star studies.
Sarah Mesle: Uh-huh. Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: But he writes too, he's like, "There is a risk of this being white supremacy studies," right? Of reproducing the importance of whiteness as the object of scholarly concern. But at the same time, if we don't turn the lens on whiteness and understand it as a place of replicating power and value, then we're just erasing its power constantly, right?
Or disavowing that, what's going on with blondness? I'm like, "Oh, I just like how it looks, makes my face look," right?
Sarah Mesle: Right. Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Which is kind of like whiteness.
Sarah Mesle:. As Tressie McMillan says, "I just like what I like," is always a capitalist lie.
Anne Helen Petersen: Totally. Yeah.
Sarah Mesle: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Totally. No, and I was gonna say that it reminds me too about how sometimes we talk about thinness, right?
That like, “I just like being in this body,” right?
Sarah Mesle: Very related. Very related.
Right. Just a coincidence.
Anne Helen Petersen: I just like it, right? Instead of, I like all of the privileges that, that accompany it.
Sarah Mesle: Right. Sure. Yeah, and that it is not a coincidence that all seven of the women who are at the center of this book's chapters, not only do they have hair that became famous, but they are all quite thin. And some of them, the story of their thinness is also a part of their fame. I often joke about I mean, this is something that we could dilate on, and I don't know where we wanna get into, but another thing I will often tag things on social media in addition to hair studies is hair thigh nexus, because there's a real correlation between women flaunting their hair, especially white women.
White women flaunting their hair and the perfection of their hair and the thinness of their thighs. And I'm very interested in this. An example that I, you know, people don't wanna brag exactly about their thinness, but they will brag about their hair or they'll show it off.
Demi Moore recently was on, I think it was Milan Fashion Week, I could be wrong about the specific fashion week. But showed up on the catwalk, carrying a dog in a black leather catsuit, looking… and she had bobbed her long hair, right? And everyone's like, "Demi Moore shows new hairstyle," but that allowed people to put the image over and over and over again, rather than saying, "Demi Moore is remarkably thin."
Right?
Anne Helen Petersen: Right. Right, right, right. It changes our conversation
Sarah Mesle: ... skeletally dangerously thin. So, it's okay to talk about hair. Right. But really what is being circulated is the thinness. I have a lot to say about this correlation between bodies, but…
Anne Helen Petersen: Paula Pell was just on Good Hang with Amy Poehler and Amy was complimenting Paula on her beautiful hair, and was like, "You and Tina Fey have some of the most renowned beautiful hair in our friend group." And Paula said very explicitly that like, "Because I was fat, I worked really hard on my hair because if you have beautiful hair and you cherish your hair, it allows you to deflect people's attention and actually their eyes away from the rest of your body." And so it was her almost like a coping mechanism to be like, this makes me into something, not only desirable, but also respectability to have beautiful hair, right? Like if we're thinking about unruliness of the body, like…
Sarah Mesle: Uh-huh.
Anne Helen Petersen: “But my hair is exquisite,” is a way to recenter attention in that way. It's very interesting.
Sarah Mesle: Yeah. There's a great essay, and I will have to send you the name, but by a media studies scholar who talks about hair and fat as being what she calls motile parts of women's bodies, which means that they're always changing.
Your hair is always growing, and your body is always metabolizing, so they're constantly in motion, and because they're constantly in motion, that means that they can always be regulated. You never get to the end, right? So they're always sources, sites of pleasure and possibility, that can get shifted towards anxiety and regulation.
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm. So like I said before, we got so many great questions that are gonna allow us to delve into so many different corners of your book and of your work, so, so excited. We talk about color, texture, length, age, conformity, identity, so many things. So we're gonna start with a question about color, and this comes from a listener named Rachel.
Rachel: I've spent a large portion of the last two decades turning my hair from brown to blonde. It always feels like an uphill battle. It goes yellow, orange, purple, fried, and I look around and think many other white ladies seem to be having the same trouble. My question is, why are we all doing this? I briefly tried heading back to my natural brunette and thought it didn't suit me.
I noticed with Sarah Pidgeon’s transformation from brunette to blonde for Carolyn in Love Story, everyone seemed to think she suited a blonde better too. Why, oh why, are we all obsessed with blonde hair? And importantly, how can we free ourselves from this obsession?
Anne Helen Petersen: Ah, so many... We've already talked about a little bit of this, but, the thoughts about Sarah Pidgeon in Love Story, the JFK story -
Sarah Mesle: Uh-huh.
Anne Helen Petersen: like, this is also wrapped up in our thinking about Carolyn Bessette, right?
Sarah Mesle: Uh-huh.
Anne Helen Petersen: And that ideal of, like, a certain type of WASPy womanhood of the '90s.
Sarah Mesle: Yeah. Well, yeah, and earlier too. I mean, I'm the 19th centuryist here, but I'm gonna take it back.
Do it. Okay, so, I love that this person called it this uphill battle. So the thing I think is useful here is to think about race working in two ways. We often think about it as an identity or a category, something you are. Like, you can check the box on the census and it says, "I am white." Done. And we need to think about race that way because it helps us check differences between, like, for instance, maternal mortality rates. We need to know the difference between white and Black. But whiteness specifically isn't just an identity. It often works, Cheryl Harris would say, like a property, something that you own.
In my book, I talk about it like a currency, something that you invest in or something that you accrue. And if you think about race that way and whiteness that way, it helps us understand how our whiteness isn't just something that we are, it's something that we have in relation to other people.
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm.
Sarah Mesle: And so it's sort of like how rich people aren't just be content being rich, they wanna get richer. And a white woman like me, I want more of whiteness's privileges, or I want to feel more secure in my whiteness, so I get my balayage done. And that's the kind of thing, this uphill battle that we're chasing.
You can never really get there because it's not something that you can ever become. It's a status that you have in relation. That's really, I think, what's at root of this question about why we're… so many of us.
Anne Helen Petersen: Maintenance, maintenance.
Sarah Mesle: Maintenance, maintenance, but, also accrual, right?
Interest would be the other thing to say. Like, not only not letting your savings account drop, but also trying to get more and more and more of it. And it's really old. So the epigraph that starts my book is from a poem by Phillis Wheatley Peters, who some of you may have heard of.
She's an astonishing poet of the revolutionary era who was enslaved. But she has a poem where she talks about freedom of liberty, and she talks about the goddess Freedom. And this is what she says, "The goddess Freedom moves divinely fair, olive and laurel bind her golden hair." Right? Right there in this enslaved girl's poem is the image of American freedom, blondness.
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mesle: Right? And we are, and I mean, I use that “we” cautiously, but me is really in a pursuit of that all the time.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. And I think too, especially as we age and that particular blondness, and the power that accompanies it becomes more difficult to accrue, right? Because your adherence to other ideals for women, at least, is more difficult. So I think you spend more time, even uphill battle, right? Like, your hair is thinning, your hair is graying, your hair is doing these things that are actually trying to decrease your power, and so you are fighting even more. But…
Sarah Mesle: Right. Right. Yeah, you know, the thing that, I say in the book that there are three things that I think are really interesting about hair, that it's And the first word is the slipperiest, but that it's natural, that it's expressive, and that it's temporal. So by natural I mean that it comes out of the inside of you, but we could see it. So it seems like it's this special, magical inside part that we could look at. Like, I can't look at your genetic code, I can't look at your brain, I can't look at your soul, I can't look at your intelligence or your heart, but I can look at your hair.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sarah Mesle: So there's something that it signifies something about what's inside you. But unlike most of these other parts of ourself, it is very available to our expressivity. I can, Annie, we were just discussing, you and I both dye our hair blonde to be like... well, is my nature really look like the goddess of freedom? It does. Or it doesn't quite, but I know what it should like, so I can express my respect for that sign in what I do to my hair. But then it's also in time, right? It takes a long time to grow out. Or it grows out too fast or whatever it is. So that special intersection of naturality and expressiveness is really what makes hair this really interesting part of our bodies, because it's a place where we can show we understand what our culture's values are.
We can show that we wish we had them, even if we don't. But we can show that we believe in this currency, and that when we do that, culture rewards us in all sorts of ways.
Anne Helen Petersen: I keep thinking of the phrase, "Do your hair."
Sarah Mesle: Uh-huh. Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right? Like, you do it. You act your hair. Yeah.
You either do it or you don't do it. Like someone who does their hair. And even when I was, it's still a way that we talk about it within our friend group or…
Sarah Mesle: Mm-hmm.
Anne Helen Petersen: - when I was in high school especially, like, "I gotta go do my hair." But also that person does their hair, that person doesn't do their hair.
Who could quote unquote afford to not do their hair?
Sarah Mesle: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't really, I do get my hair, I get my hair cut and colored really about once a year, sometimes every other.
Anne Helen Petersen: You get your hair done. Like think about that phrasing.
Sarah Mesle: I get my hair done. Yes, I go to Ashley and I get my hair done, once, sometimes twice a year, and that's really it.
I feel, and that's partly because of my professional sphere as a professor. You know, somebody once told to me, like, "You can work the shoes, but you can't work the hair. If you're putting a lot of time into your hair as a professor, it means you're not really serious."
Anne Helen Petersen: This is so funny because earlier this summer I was doing an interview about summer camp and we were talking about the sororities, the Southern SEC sororities and how you can't leave the house with one, two out of... You have to leave the house with two out of three, quote-unquote, done.
Sarah Mesle: Mm.
Anne Helen Petersen: And one of those things, like you have to either have your outfit done, your hair done, or your makeup done - your face done.
Sarah Mesle: Right.
Anne Helen Petersen: And first of all, we can also talk about, like, done as, like, it's finished.
Sarah Mesle: Right.
Anne Helen Petersen: Which, another thing. But the inverse is true for the people who are instructing those students that, like, you can't work, you can't do all three. Right. Otherwise, it looks like, it decreases your intellectualism. And you know, you and I had this experience, I think, when we would attend conferences that like, oh, like there would be conversations like, "Oh, well, those grad students are treating this like a fashion show."
Sarah Mesle: Yeah, or they're gunning. Right.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right?
Sarah Mesle: Right. Like the gunning is really serious.
I mean, yeah. But I wanna get back to this great part of the question, which is, I loved the how can we free ourselves of this obsession, right? And I wanna say a couple of things about that. And I feel this, right? I really feel this.
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mesle: I was really remembering that when I was a girl with brown hair, which, despite how I wanted to think of it as golden brown, I read this fantasy novel, by Melanie Rawn, I think it was called Dragon Prince.
But I will mention that Leigh Bardugo also mentioned this same series when she was on your podcast. But in the book, there's a prince, and he's hanging out with all these princesses, and they all have different colored hair. And there's one, and she's very beautiful, but the prince thinks of her as merely brownish.
Anne Helen Petersen: Oh my gosh.
Sarah Mesle: And I have been running away from that.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Sarah Mesle: That, well, there's the red-haired one, and there's the blonde, and the black hair. Then there's the one who's merely brownish. And that's me. But the thing to say is, like, how can we free ourselves of this obsession.
Well, one, on the one hand, it's hard because our culture for two, American culture for 200 years has been telling us that freedom itself is blonde. So how do you get free from the sense that freedom is blonde when your world tells you that freedom's blonde?
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Sarah Mesle: So it's very hard on the one hand, and on the other hand, our desire to have ever more status is not actually oppression.
It's not. To say like, "I am freed, I need to get free." I mean, yes, that is powerful. Like, I do need to learn how to value myself in other ways outside of this corrupt value system, but I am not oppressed by my proximity to blondness. It is a privilege that I can trade on, right?
And I think it's very common for women to, for white women to think of the ourselves as, we only register the pressure to be ever more idealized white rather than acknowledge the extreme privilege that bolsters us every moment we pursue that.
Anne Helen Petersen: No, and also the mistaking pressure for oppression.
Sarah Mesle: Yes. Right.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right?
Sarah Mesle: Mm-hmm.
Anne Helen Petersen: That's a difficult one, I think, for many people who are occupying these spaces to recognize. And that I think we should just let sit there.
Sarah Mesle: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Cause I think it's a really a good one if you are in one of those places. Whether, whatever, like…
Sarah Mesle: Mm-hmm.
Anne Helen Petersen: - if it's about thinness, if it's about whiteness, like that's-
Sarah Mesle: Right ...
Anne Helen Petersen: - pressure is not the same as oppression.
Sarah Mesle: Yeah. Right. And I really appreciate... I'm not, whoever asked this question, Rachel, I think. I think that framing is actually so perfect as in a sense of the affectation of… like, it perfectly captures the experience, and framing it that way is the necessary step to moving towards a different framing, which is also the answer to the question.
Anne Helen Petersen: Love it. Okay, our next questions are about basically, like, grandma cuts, mom cuts. We're gonna read them back to back.
The first one comes from Elise.
Elise: "I always thought when I got older, I would suddenly cut my hair short and get it set every so often, like my grandmother and so many of the older women I knew. However, not long ago at her 90th birthday, I saw photos of her when she was 20, and she has had the same hairstyle for 70 years.
I was baffled by this, but came to realize I wasn't going to change. I was observing a whole generation's hair instead. So what is the future of millennial old lady hair? Will we all look exactly the same, as ourselves now or as each other? How does ethnicity impact old lady hair? I am most commonly aware of white old lady hair."
Anne Helen Petersen: And then our next question is related to this, and it comes from Elizabeth.
Elizabeth: "Can we talk about the mom cut? I feel like this was a thing in the early 2000s. I distinctly remember the day my own mom came to pick me up from second grade after the big chop. I didn't recognize her, and I was so sad that because my hair was still long, we didn't look the same anymore.
Lots of women framed this haircut in terms of practicality or streamlining a busy routine. Was it also a rejection of additional labor, a mark of rebellion? And where did the mom cut go? I feel like this trend has phased out, even though many of the factors seem the same."
Anne Helen Petersen: Okay, I know this is a triple-decker, a quadruple-decker question. But I like thinking about, like, as we age, or even just generational hair trends or that sort of thing. I like pairing these together, so…
Sarah Mesle: Yeah. Well…
Anne Helen Petersen: Where do we start? Where do you wanna go first?
Sarah Mesle: Well, I guess I have a question for you. Did you, do you have a sense of, when I'm an old lady I will wear purple and I will get X haircut? Sorry, that was a real Gen X reference. I don't know.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah, no, I get the reference.
Sarah Mesle: But do you have a sense of this is what I think my future is? Someday I'll be done with this and I'll get X.
Anne Helen Petersen: My future, I thought that when I was older, and again, I grew up almost entirely surrounded by white people, and I thought that when you're older, when you go to the grocery store, you wear the plastic thing over your hair.
Like, the, almost like a kerchief, a plastic kerchief, which I understood when I asked my mom that that's because those ladies were getting their hair set, and they were covering their hair to protect it from getting wet when they were at the store. And so I thought again, short hair for sure, and then maybe a little curls.
Sarah Mesle: Fascinating.
Anne Helen Petersen: But I do think that that mom cut experience is not something that happens as often now because of the things that Elizabeth is pointing out in terms of, like, millennial hair. Now the expectation is, like, oh, well, you should always have hair that looks like an 18-year-old's.
Sarah Mesle: Right. Yeah. Okay, well, so here, I mean, again, as every time we talk, I am a crucial, I think, six years older than you.
So I'm definitely young Gen X. And so for my mom, when I was young, had what all my friends referred to as cut and perm.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. My mom also tried to get a perm.
Sarah Mesle: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So short and permed. And then sometimes curled on top of the perm. And so that was what I remember from my young childhood.
So it was not just mom hair at that moment, but the early '80s were a huge moment of haircutting. And I mean, I really talk about this with Mary Lou Retton, and in the book and what it meant for this figure of girlishness to not have a ponytail but to have this short practical do that looks a lot like Nancy Reagan or something like that.
Nancy Reagan and my mom and Mary Lou Retton all had similar hair. Now, I will say my mom has, a few years ago, it's so great. She was like, "I don't wanna spend the rest of my life coloring my hair." And she stopped dyeing it, and she has a great bob, and it looks... just very casual.
So for me, it's completely goals. You know, it was really only reading this question from Elise made me realize that I have often thought that at some point I'm gonna retire. And the whole, the fullness of my vision, Annie, is that I'm gonna start volunteering full-time at a museum and wear, like, a scarf and a piece of jewelry that's silver with a dent.
And I'm gonna have a really good bob. That was always my future. I always thought, like, at some point you do get to maturity and you have, like not just my... I've had the same hair since I was - since ever. But now I'm like, "Well, I don't know. What's gonna make me give up my hair?" I'm think I'm gonna go full Patti Smith, like really go crone.
That's my goal.
Anne Helen Petersen: I remember asking my mom, like, "Why don't old people have long hair? And she said, you know, when you get older your hair gets a lot thinner and so there's just so much that you can do with it. And then from that point I just, like this is all coming back to me as we're talking.
When I was walking down like the pews I would be from, I don't know, going to children's time or something, I could see the tops of the ladies hair and you could see their scalps. And I was like, where did the hair go?
Sarah Mesle: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right? And this idea like what, how, like a fullness of hair, right, this aspiration for thick hair.
You can't just have long hair. It also has to have this like voluptuousness. But not too much voluptuous, right? It has to be like a specific type of, now the ideal is beachy waves. Still. Somehow this hold of beachy waves on us, I see as you touch your beachy waves.
Sarah Mesle: I was like, that's what I'm going for. I'm like kind of pulling it out of the way. Yeah. Beachy waves. Woke up like this.
Anne Helen Petersen: And I do think that like it's a holdover from cool girl stuff, right? Mm.
Sarah Mesle: Yeah...
Anne Helen Petersen: And I know that Julia Roberts' chapter is like hovering over us, but we're gonna get to curly hair, so I think this…
Sarah Mesle: Right. Yeah. So your body should be thin, but you should be abundant in particular ways, like you need to be soft and welcoming, comforting. I'm trying to think about how all these things fit together. A thing that-
Anne Helen Petersen: Well-endowed ...
Sarah Mesle: Right. But also not too much, right?
Like not falling over. A thing I really, I didn't get to write about in the book, but I was reading a lot about Gibson Girl hair and turn of the century ideas of hair. And one thing that we would just note, this is prior to the book, but historically is that a particular silhouette of the wasp-waisted woman with really big hair was made famous in around the early 20th century, particularly by this, for a lot of reasons, particularly due to this illustrator, Charles Gibson.
And I, just as a peg here, I think the best person to read about this is Sabrina Strings, in her book about fearing the Black body and this particular moment, as whiteness was kind of transforming itself, and American whiteness was trying to distinguish itself from British whiteness, and it just, she's so smart about the historical moment.
But the thing I wanted to say is that I found this wallpaper that Gibson had designed, and it was for a bachelor apartment, and it was kinda like soft porny. But it didn't show the women's body at all. It was her torso and her face, her beautiful face, and this huge bun sweep of hair.
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mesle: And it's a perfect illustration of how the full hair is standing in for the not pictured body in terms of how much she might desire you, how much you desire her. I think a kind of sexual appetite that, again, needs to be enough, but not too much, not too unruly. Annie T.'s one of your words. Right.
So like that fullness is, that's part of the hair thigh issue as well, right? If your body could be really bony but you're still full of appetite if your hair is thick.
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, and this is like the post-menopausal woman. Like before you were referencing Patti Smith, like going full crone. Like part of that is like…
Sarah Mesle: Yeah ...
Anne Helen Petersen: or people who I just see like the, like man repellent hair, like whatever the style of hair is, whatever people call it, or…
Sarah Mesle: Right.
Anne Helen Petersen: - that rejecting fullness is in some ways rejecting that fullness ideal. Does that make sense?
Sarah Mesle: Yeah. Yeah, totally.
Anne Helen Petersen: Um-
Sarah Mesle: And I think broadly culture is really trying, has really reshifted how it thinks age should work in all sorts of ways. Which doesn't mean that the pressure to stay young has diminished, but, I think there's a lot of stuff that's up for grabs in what the trajectory of life should be like.
How long should different life phases at end? And that's partly because holding onto youth has become a sign of class as other class signs have -
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mesle: It's easy for anybody to buy a bag, right? Like they are much more, I mean, not some bags. But, some signs of consumption and wealth and status have spread out.
But having time to do, to eat well, to do yoga, right? All of those things are incredibly narrow still. So holding onto youth as a way for class privilege, which is usually also white privilege, to continue to express itself as other signs have slipped away. So that would be my cynical read on why the moment of youth is prolonging as something that's both an opportunity and a pressure.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes, absolutely. So this next question is actually related, and this question asker wants to be anonymous, so Melody’s gonna read it.
Melody Rowell: How do you think white lady hair is related to Mar-a-Lago face? Are they one and the same?
Anne Helen Petersen: Okay, can we define Mar-a-Lago face? I think of it as like Kristi Noem's face.
Sarah Mesle: Uh-huh.
Anne Helen Petersen: But also, maybe like a little bit of Ivanka face in there, like Fox Newscaster face.
Like, it's conformity, but there's also, there's a tackiness element involved, which we can unpack my use of that word, right?
Sarah Mesle: Well, yeah, so things that I would say about it, one is that it is conformist. It's the style. It's recognizable as such. It is visibly artificial. It looks like you have had work done.
Nobody is pretending that they haven't had work done. They're showing that they have, and also that they can afford to.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yep.
Sarah Mesle: And it is a slant to conventional beauty norms in a way that we could find tacky that, I mean, I do think it's really... I find it offensive. I mean, I often describe it, and people talk about this with Mar-a-Lago makeup as well.
I was talking about it once with a friend, Christian Richardson, who I think you know, who's great. And we were like, "It's kind of like, if you made a Cybertruck a face." Highly planed, right? Very visible, aggressively demarcated lines.
Anne Helen Petersen: And it's announcing itself, right?
Sarah Mesle: Right. Uh-huh. It's a flex, in much the way that the Cybertrucks does.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes.
Sarah Mesle: And I think in that regard, I mean this is the face, but the slight, the way that it is a flex of resources that works against what most of the rest of culture has trained most of us to consider beautiful is part of it also because it is… I mean, I think this happens on both the right and the left, that by embracing counterintuitive aesthetics, it has a coercive pull. Like, if you want to be attached to the resources that we have, you need to abandon your taste, all ye enter, who enter here, and accept this other thing that the rest of the world doesn't see as beautiful, but we do.
And if you agree that it is, you can be one of us and maybe have access to our resources.
Anne Helen Petersen: That's such a compelling read on it. I also think of it in some ways as camp, not low camp. Like, they don't realize it's camp. You know what I mean?
Sarah Mesle: Well, it's certainly artificial. And so in that regard it's camp. But I don't think of camp as being coercive in that same way. Or, and maybe...
Anne Helen Petersen: How do I wanna say? I feel like it's... My sense is like it's so inflated that it looks like drag performance... because the way that it underlines these markers of masculinity or femininity are notched to 12, right?
Sarah Mesle: Right. Turn the volume up to 11. Yeah, we wish it were camp. We wish it were in a, you know, we wish it were Spinal Tap, you know? And then… But it's not. It's not Dolly. Okay, but the relationship of white lady hair to Mar-A-Lago face is really interesting, and I wanna get to that.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sarah Mesle: I wanna say two things. One, you know, I said that hair has this natural quality, an expressive quality, and a temporal quality. And the length of the hair that almost always goes with Mar-A-Lago face, both of them combine as expressions of temporal commitment. How committed am I to this administration?
To Trump's hyper-loyal... Like, he wants everybody to be ultimately loyal. How loyal are you? I put it in my face. How loyal are you? I've been growing out my hair this whole time. Look how long it is, right? Even though it's fake, right? It's a sign of a long-term commitment.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. Even though it's extensions, right.
Sarah Mesle: Even though it's extensions, right. I worked... So I had all this money, and I got the really good extension. No matter, even if it's not your time, it is an expression of a commitment of time and resources, right? And as such is a sign of loyalty to an administration for which that is maybe the most prized value.
But the other thing that I think is really interesting about this, when I talk about how hair is a sign of nature that allows us, it's not just what our nature is, but it also allows us to express what we would like our nature to be, right? When you look at me, you can see, okay, well, her hair is brown, but she thinks blonde is beautiful, so she's showing...
But she's a little ambivalent about it, but she shows that she gets that blonde is beautiful, right? And that's true, right? Like, I'm showing my hair because I can bleach it. It's available to these permanent transformations, that makes it a really important site of cultural discipline, and it has been uniquely that, for, let's say, all of human history until, I'm not quite sure the exact date, but till whenever Botox maybe, let's say.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sarah Mesle: Right now, I think it would, you know, it costs me, including tip, about $500 to go, get my hair done. My hair's long. And I think that would be about what it would cost to get filler.
So, I did run the math on this. I've never done any face stuff like that. But, what used to, hair used to be uniquely available to transformation, and in fact we were pressured to transform it, but kind of judged, like doing plastic surgery, other bodily things. They were really expensive, they were not very well controlled and they were not available to most people.
But now there's a huge number of cosmetic surgeries that are available and that not only are not judged but expected, at least in some communities. I mean, that's what I learned from my students. So I think that we're actually at a end of one way that hair has meant. I don't think it's unique compared to the rest of the body in the way that it used to be.
And that doesn't mean that hair is not important in the way that it was. It's just not unique in the way it was. And in fact, we need to understand how hair worked because now increasing parts of the body work that way.
Anne Helen Petersen: This also just allows us to think of, like, Mar-a-Lago hair as in concert with Mar-a-Lago face. Like they have to be in conversation with one another.
Sarah Mesle: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Okay. We really have to talk about curly hair. We got so many curly hair questions. Ugh. And I am obsessed with the Julia Roberts chapter, and not just because I think Julia Roberts is, like, just this incredibly pivotable moment in the history of stardom. But, ugh. Okay. So we have to... We're gonna read these two questions back to back and then discuss them together. This first one is from Willow.
Willow: "Why did so few white women with wavy or curly hair learn to take care of it as kids or teens in the '80s and '90s? Why did I grow up learning to straighten or brush out my curls?
I'm 48 now, and in the last few years I've learned how to embrace my natural curls by taking care of them, which essentially means one thing: not washing them very often. Also conditioning them or moisturizing them really frequently since dryness is the main enemy of curly hair. Why did I never know this before?
I can't help thinking maybe it was the advertising around shampoos when I was growing up and companies selling us the idea that you had to shampoo your hair every day or two Even more mysterious to me, my own mother has hair that's more curly than mine and has worn it curly most of my life. Why did she never teach me how to take care of my curls?
Anne Helen Petersen: And then the second question is from Zoe.
Zoe: “As a curly-haired white Jewish woman who was a teenager in the early 2000s when all my peers were straightening the shit out of their hair, I've always understood curly hair as a deviation from the ideal, which I now understand is deeply rooted in white supremacy, of course.
But curly hair had a moment in the '80s and early '90s, and if the TikTok hair tutorial girlies making videos about discovering that they have curly hair are any indication, it is again, or at least was a few months ago. What explains curly hair coming in and out of acceptability? The current iteration feels a bit like Kardashian-inspired white girls talking about what a big butt they have, but I'm not sure if I'm just being a jerk.”
Anne Helen Petersen: Okay, where do we start? Ah, there's so much good stuff here.
Sarah Mesle: Mm-hmm.
Anne Helen Petersen: The chapter, you talk a lot about how race scientists actually came up with, like, hierarchies of the curls, right? So can we start there just to talk about a little bit of that?
Sarah Mesle: Yeah. So I mean, again, my specific breed of nerd specialty, nerd is my highest praise, is American women's popular media, particularly literature, before the Civil War, which is entirely inflected by race and I mean, and it's really the moment where we see the rise of the media culture that we live in now as the first moment of mass media. And also a moment of really intense preoccupation by science with trying to rationalize, let's say, a belief in racial hierarchy, sometimes by being fully polygenic, by which many, many people thought that actually the Black race and the white race were, like, had no common origin.
They were just like a completely different quality of people, with different mental capacities, different emotional illnesses, different physical realities. And so if your whole world order and all of your privilege depends on believing that it is okay to keep some people enslaved and some people continually pressed off their land and some people, in specific geographic hierarchies, you know, even amongst what we might call whiteness, there are definitely hierarchies within this as well. You really are gonna put a lot of work into proving that you're right.
And so, people like Samuel Morton developed really intense hierarchies of hair, and how the follicles worked and how the root of the hair worked and how the pigment worked. And you would literally get in trials where people were, court cases where women or people were trying to say, "No, no, no, this person has enslaved me falsely. I am white. As you can see from my skin, I'm white." Hmm. And people are like, "I don't know. Is she white?" And you would get people to come in and testify, like, "She has been very proper. She has only acted in a way that only a white woman could act this way."
And then you would also get people to come in and say, "I cut off strands of her hair, and I looked at it under a microscope, and yes, she's definitely white. I can tell you because of the follicle of her hair." And when the follicle is also connected to the question of whether or not it will curl and how it curls.
So, this is a long way around to your question of, the question of is it curly, is it not curly? What's, how do we know what it is? What does it mean if it is, are tied to huge questions of just what kind of autonomy you could have, what kind of property you could own, how you could be treated by every institution in American culture.
So the intensity we feel about curly hair is not bullshit, right? We feel intense about it because it is carrying this huge weight.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. And also the way that it becomes desirable, but only in specific iterations, right? So can we talk a little bit about that and -
Sarah Mesle: Uh-huh.
Anne Helen Petersen: - how Julia Roberts' hair, I mean, again, I just recommend this chapter so strongly, becomes this signifier of like -
Sarah Mesle: I'm so glad you said that. I really, really worked on it hard. I really, I wrote it forever. I feel like I've never finished writing that chapter. It was so hard for me to write.
Anne Helen Petersen: And I mean, so much ideologically happening with not only her star text in that moment, but also with the narrative of Pretty Woman and, like, how it was, how the script was originally so fucking dark.
Sarah Mesle: An original rom-com of the '80s.
Anne Helen Petersen: The screen, it was so dark, and then Disney bought it and was like, "Let's turn this into, like, a post-feminist fairy tale." And then you connect this to, like, financialization, all of this different stuff.
But, like, even if you weren't looking at this movie super closely, people, if you've watched it, you remember she has this blonde bob, and then reveals, like, the true beautiful self, which is a seemingly wild, unkempt, absolutely exquisite head of just gorgeous hair.
Sarah Mesle: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And gorgeous red curly hair that flops around the way that I always dreamed.
Like, oh, this is, when you were a toddler. Hair flops.
Sarah Mesle: Every dream. This is exactly what I wanted. Yeah. The flops.
Anne Helen Petersen: And so like what made…
Sarah Mesle: And she just scratches it and it looks better. Like that's what I want too, is like, ugh. I'm just so like free, wild woman. You know, there's a Patti LaBelle song, Wild Women Do and They Don't Regret It.
Yeah. That's what my hair says. Yeah. Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: But why was like... And this, I think we get this too with like what good, quote unquote, like well taken care of curly hair can look like now. And a lot of it has to do with the pristine quality of the ringlet. So can you talk a little bit about this?
Sarah Mesle: Right. Yeah. Okay. Well, so the main thing I have to say is that I have extremely straight hair, so I am very ignorant about curly hair. I'm very ignorant about the caretaking of curly hair. So I have a lot to learn from these questions and from everybody and from my friends. I will also say that I have a son with very coarse, thick curly hair, which does come from my side of the family.
My brother has that, but I don't have it, and I had no idea. And my kid, who had his hair long and he was constantly trying to make it less frizzy, and he would brush it and brush it and brush it. And if I tell that story in a room full of people with curly hair, they all start flinching.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sarah Mesle: 'Cause they're like, "No, no, no, that's not right. That's not right." But I didn't know. I was like, and at one point my friend Lauren, who has gorgeous thick, curly hair, took me aside and was like, "Sarah, you're a wonderful mom and you're failing your child." And she was like, "Can I help?" And she sent all of her favorite curly hair products and a comb, and she's like, "This is what you do."
Yeah. So I don't know. But it was definitely hard-won knowledge for her too. I have a couple of friends with curly hair. I guess I would say I, so I don't feel like I have all the answers for this. My editor for the book also has very curly hair, and this was the chapter that she pushed back against more and more and more because I kept expressing the fantasy of, and then if you have curly hair, everything is great, which I believed, and she was like, "Sarah, you have no idea how hard it is to regulate and all of the work and the time." And it's true. That is not a part of how I have to spend my days.
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, it's appropriative, right? It's like you want the part, like, that you understand as, like, the exoticism of curly hair but you don't want the other components of the identity as well, right?
Sarah Mesle: Right. Right. So I guess I would say there are two women in the book whose star power, whose hair star power has to do specifically with curls: Julia Roberts and the Rachel, or Jennifer Aniston.
And Jennifer Aniston did not have curly hair ever as Rachel. She mostly had very blown out hair. She mostly didn't have the Rachel as Rachel, actually. It was fairly short-lived, as we all know. But, those are two different ethnic relationships, two white ethnic relationships to curl and two displays of how to make them valuable and attractive, and I really think they work in parallel together.
So on the one hand, I think it's really important to consider the way that Julia Roberts' star power had to do in both life and in that movie by the fact that she is Southern. And the character and the actress both come from Georgia. She presents herself as a character as being very... You know, like, her brother steals cars. She doesn't have much money. That was a big part of her star identity before that, except for Steel Magnolias, where she was rich, but also Southern. So there's a way that she, by virtue of her Southernness, stands in for... We see whiteness as something that has hierarchies within it in the way that she inhabits her whiteness. The movie racializes her in all sorts of ways, which I don't mean it makes her seem another race besides white, but it calls attention to her, to whiteness as a kind of racial identity that the narrative of the movie is about her learning how to perform.
Anne Helen Petersen: Whiteness. Yeah.
Sarah Mesle: And romanticizing in a whole series of ways. Right. Whiteness as a, particularly as Cheryl Harris would say, a property of eliteness that is both attractive and scorned in all sorts of media. Where, and that's what that movie is about, is about her learning how to be that version of herself with a little, just enough more self-respect so that the rich white man can come and find her, like be this perfect nexus of being drawn into his backed version of himself.
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, and also, like to have her hair in a perfect updo, like, under the hat in the scene where she's wearing the brown and white dress- which always sticks in my head.
So, like, respectable, but then, in the sheets, her beautiful hair comes out. It's very, like, virgin whore in some ways. Like this expression of wild sexuality, which is also her hair. As you're pointing out with her star image, like, the quote that always sticks with me when… So she had Pretty Woman. She had a series of flops after that. And her real, like, welcome back into big-time stardom was her doing the press tour for My Best Friend's Wedding, and she said, “My hair is, like, big and curly like you like it.” Like, she's speaking to her fans, like, "Please go see this movie."
Sarah Mesle: Yep.
Anne Helen Petersen: And I just, I was like, oh my gosh, someone who is so aware of her power as, like her star power, the center of her star power as her hair looking this specific way.
Sarah Mesle: Right. Yeah. I mean, right after, right in the summer, Pretty Woman came out in March of 1990. As I say in the book, it's the same month that Gender Trouble, Judith Butler's book, was released.
Anne Helen Petersen: Crazy.
Sarah Mesle: I know. It's, it's wild. But that summer in the height of Julia Roberts' ecstasy, she was on the cover of Rolling Stone, and she had cut her hair short.
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm-hmm.
Sarah Mesle: And she talks about it in the Rolling Stone profile, and she tells the reporter that she wanted to cut it off. It was damaged from a lot of dye jobs, and people said, "No, you can't do it."
Everybody had a fit, and she said, "It would be... People acted like I would be cutting off my personality."
Anne Helen Petersen: Yep.
Sarah Mesle: But then Kiefer Sutherland said, "It's totally cool. Cut it all off." Her boyfriend at the time.
Anne Helen Petersen: Oh, yeah. So. Her fiance Kiefer. It was just, she left it, like, basically at the eye level.
Sarah Mesle: I know. I know Can't blame her on that one.
Anne Helen Petersen: But, okay. Yeah. But then you contrasted this with the way that Rachel Green, the character of Rachel Green deals with her curls, which is, is the understanding, I don't remember this vividly, that she straightens it?
Sarah Mesle: Well, she definitely straightens it.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sarah Mesle: Right? I mean, you know…
Anne Helen Petersen: I mean, it was it was 1994, so yeah.
Sarah Mesle: Right. Right. I mean, she gets the Rachel right at the end of the first season, but if you look at what Jennifer Aniston's hair was like prior to Friends, when she was presenting Chris McMillan, her longtime hairstylist, the one who gave her the Rachel, the Lifetime Achievement Award for hair. I can't remember the... But it was, she was presenting the award, and she's like, "Before Chris, my hair was just," this is what she says, "Greek and frizzy."
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm.
Sarah Mesle: And that he was the one who found all these ways to manage it. And I think that a lot of what Friends is about, I talk in that chapter about that show as kind of a show that's not just about gentrification as a measure of white people in cities pushing out people of other races, although it is certainly that.
But also about the pressure of those white people to push out all of the markers within them of various ethnic signifiers that are not Anglo.
So that's cheerful.
Anne Helen Petersen: I could talk to you -
Sarah Mesle: No pressure
Anne Helen Petersen: I could talk, like, there's so many other examples. Like, I'm thinking of Anne Hathaway at the beginning of Princess Diaries and the way that her hair looks there.
Sarah Mesle: Yeah. I mean, in that chapter I also talk about Jennifer Beals. So, I mean, and I use Flashdance on purpose. I think that's a really important... The original version of this chapter was really going to be just about Jennifer Beals and Julia Roberts as these two sex workers, various sex workers who get swept up in these things. And the way, I mean, there's so many similarities between those movies and the the ways that they are both drawing on what I, as a 19th centurist, would think about this racial passing tropes and an ideal of delicacy that racially indeterminate women, they are vulnerable because of the way they are racially marked, but they still have these desirable white qualities.
So, they're really in this switch place that, I mean, I think is an incredibly hard burden to bear for women who inhabit that position for all the reasons that we're talking about. And it's not something that I have to navigate, so I guess I wanna mark it as really powerful and very persistent.
Right up, you know, like we were in the moment when Flashdance was coming out, that was also the moment when there was this huge upsurge in Civil War retellings like North and South, The Blue and the Gray.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Sarah Mesle: All of which had these tragic mulatta figures that they stage as stuff. Like, their grandmother was a prostitute, but they passed as white, right?
Like, that story we have, I would like to say we have moved past it. We are still living it very intensely, and it takes real pressure for women and not me. So I wanna be kind of humble about that.
Anne Helen Petersen: I wanna take a total right turn, and I know this episode is long. But we still have, like, 17 other questions. We're only gonna get to one more, but it felt very important to get to this. So this question comes from Marie, whose pronouns are they/them.
CLIP: "For the white lady hair episode, although technically I don't identify as a lady, I have a queer haircut, short and asymmetrical. Plus, I have curly purple hair, so that helps it flag as queer and not Karen.
But sometimes I have an existential crisis about why is my queer haircut so similar to the Kate Gosselin classic? How does asymmetrical short hair read so differently based on context?"
Anne Helen Petersen: This just felt so important to not only talk about queer haircuts, but also the rejection, the anti-Karen-ness, trying to figure out does my hair look too much like this haircut that signifies a certain type of white lady-hood that I wanna reject?
Sarah Mesle: Yes. Well, the good thing about that is that when you're seeing a counter culture and you can see the hair within it as a kind of costume that marks you as a part of that culture, it helps us remember that things that we think as normal are also costumes. Right? Not that all cultures and subcultures are the same or countercultures are the same, but they are about drawing people in and making people recognizable to each other.
Yeah, I mean, I will just say as a middle-aged person, I have several friends who have kinda, like, punk hair that they've had since the '90s, and they're like, "You know, now that I'm 50, I just look like Kate Gosselin." Just look like Karen. Right. It's tricky, and I was really thinking about that with the earlier question about when my mom had her hair cut, it was a cut and perm. But if it had been 15 years later, it might have been more of the Kate Gosselin, which is a very specific hair style. I think I wrote a lot that I didn't end up in the book, so I'm always glad to be asked it, about how I really see Jennifer Aniston with the Rachel as being a switch point between punks and Karens.
And she has this kind of like, it's aggressively layered, it's aggressively dyed, but normalized, and then a very aggressively white reactionary conservative slice of the population picked that up, made it actually more aggressively dyed, more aggressively razored, punked, propped up, and that they are filtering punk anger, which was against the norms, and rebranding it as a manifestation of right-wing conservatism.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Sarah Mesle: So it feels like an expression of freedom and rebellion even as it is aggressively monitoring everyone's freedoms. And like, in the typical Karen move of like, "You can't have a barbecue here. Nuh-uh-uh-uh. The volume's too loud." Right?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Sarah Mesle: That's the least punk possible thing, but the hair makes it seem like swaggery, powerful, tricky.
So I guess I would say to Marie that you don't need to feel bad. It's not your fault. I love purple hair, and the reason why you feel that proximity is because you have a rebellious power that the right wants, and fuck them.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. This is the best way to end this episode. You have a rebellious power that the right wants is so fucking good.
I cannot tell you what a pleasure this has been. I strongly encourage everyone listening, please pick up the book. I love that each chapter, it's obviously essays, but you think of it like a short story collection. Like, you can just read, like, one essay and then put it aside and then come back for more.
Like, it is devourable. So strongly recommend
Sarah Mesle: Oh, thank you so much. I worked really hard. I hope everyone likes it. Please tell me about your favorite haircuts.
Anne Helen Petersen: This too. We didn't even get to talk about Taylor Swift's hair, or Dolly Parton's hair.
Sarah Mesle: Oh my gosh ...
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, there's just so much more hair.
Sarah Mesle: So much to say.
Anne Helen Petersen: Where can people find you on the internet if they wanna hear more from you?
Sarah Mesle: Yes. My name is Sarah Mesle, and my handle is @sunsetandecho on Instagram mostly, nominally on Blue Sky. That's where I am.
Anne Helen Petersen: Instagram is the place to find you, for sure.
Sarah Mesle: Instagram is the place to find me, yes. Yeah. Yes.
And I will say that I'm rebooting a digital magazine called Avidly that I've edited for a long time, and I would welcome other people to pitch things to me that they would like to write about hair for the hairstyles vertical.
Anne Helen Petersen: Amazing.
Sarah Mesle: Yes.
Anne Helen Petersen: We'll put all of your contact info for that in the show notes and also links to everything that we talked about.
So thank you again for joining me. It's been a pleasure.
Sarah Mesle: Thank you. Take care, everybody.