New hair

[evilgerbil]

After months of threatening, I got a drastic hair cut on Friday. Here's what I look like now, minus the giant glowing ball because I can't turn off the flash on this camera. It's amazing how much better I feel about myself, and suddenly I'm having fun being creative with clothing and jewelry and ways I can wear my hair.

Comments

[argentla]

Nice. It suits you well.

[evilgerbil]

Thanks! It's odd that I didn't want something that would make me look butch, but I've been having fun styling it in such a way that I *do* look rather butch.

[evilgerbil]

(which is different than it looks here)

[argentla]

Well, short hair is not intrinsically more butch -- look at Audre Hepburn, who could scarcely have been any less butch. It does frame your face in a way that connotes more confidence, though. Having long hair in a ponytail does tend to soften your overall appearance, especially if you're blonde (as I well remember), whereas having it short like that keeps pushing the eye toward your face. It reads as more assertive -- I suppose you could call that more butch, but I think for you it tends more toward what a friend of mine used to call "power femme."

[evilgerbil]

Hah, power femme, I like that. I used PhotoShop to try some hairstyles on before I went in for this cut and I'm not sure what it was about some of them that immediately registered on me as butch. Maybe it was the chunkiness. Most of the people I see who look good with short hair have small, delicate, feminine features, which I don't have, so I thought a "pixie cut" might make me look too masculine. I think it has done the opposite. I should have consulted you before I went in, you really know a lot about this!

[argentla]

I thought a "pixie cut" might make me look too masculine. I think it has done the opposite.

It really depends on the person. Butch and femme have more to do with energy (which I suspect has something to do with basal hormone balance) than with hair or dress. If you take a very femme woman, even giving her a really short haircut and putting her in menswear isn't going to make her butch. Conversely, if someone is really butch, putting her in a frilly dress with lots of makeup is not going to magically make her femme.

One of my former coworkers was a 6'1" biker chick (I'm not kidding, she rode a Harley to work), very butch, very muscular. At one point she was going to some kind of party, and she was all dolled up (I think she may have been doing Marilyn Monroe for a costume party, but I don't remember). She said, "Hey, how do I look?" and I made the mistake of blurting out "kind of like a drag queen." She nearly beat the snot out of me, which -- while certainly deserved -- kind of proved my point...

[evilgerbil]

I guess I don't really know where I stand between the two. I've always been uncomfortable "dressing up" but only recently have I begun to see it's because I feel like I'm in drag. part of me gets excited, because I feel like I am "passing" and I'm waiting to be discovered. And sometimes I feel ridiculous, like I am wearing the costume of another culture.

[argentla]

Well, as with a lot of things in life, most people fall somewhere in the fat middle of the bell curve. Relatively few people are really ultra-butch or ultra-femme, and I think for many people, there ends up being a strong element of costume and performance, although a lot of straight, cissexual people wouldn't necessarily articulate it that way. It's a byproduct of trying to wedge a broad range of gender identities into a binary system, like trying to reduce the entire RGB palette into three uniform hues.