Among what Durkheim ([1901] 2014) called social facts, culture—or expectations in the form of internalized beliefs, wants, and feelings—is part of the collective consciousness that shapes our actions.1 Across history and cultures, both short and long hair have been gendered in arbitrary ways. There is nothing natural about women having long hair and men having short. Long tresses have been the crowning glory of both genders, and hair as symbol interweaves with culture, from Medusa, Gilgamesh, and Samson to Mia Hamm, Oprah Winfrey, and Beyoncé. On Polynesian Tikopia prior to European colonization, females wore long hair only through unmarried adolescence, but males always wore long hair, which was sometimes bleached golden with lime. After colonization, these norms reversed,2 as many Western cultures followed the Saint Paul, who declared in his letter to the Corinthians that it was natural for men to have short hair and women to have long (Morris, 1987; Sandin, 2019; Synnott, 1987; Weitz, 2004).

In the twenty-first century, it is tempting to consider Saint Paul’s guidelines as outdated. On the European soccer pitch, men sport hair buns and half-lengths. In the National Football League, athletes tackle and dive with hair flowing from their helmets. Women’s hair fashion, too, is quite diverse, but in the research literature and data compiled for this project, the expectation for women to have long hair seems very much alive.3 Perhaps it is true, as critical theory might indicate, that long hair represents a beauty myth, and the women who literally and figuratively buy into that myth, regardless of intent, reproduce their own and other women’s oppression. Or is long hair a means to meet expectations through an active process in which we match experiences of social facts with our many cultural options (Alexander, 2004; Raud, 2016)? The ponytail icon is widespread, but considering its wide variation and flexibility, it must permit agency.

We now start a slow-moving study of how expectations for long hair are utilized in a wide variety of contexts and how this variation may explain the deeply emotive, semiotic ways in which we come to terms with the modernity’s social facts. On our road we will meet glossy pop stars and the toy industry’s dolls that some say portray our ideals. We also will see women who seem equally norm-abiding, even though they can be quickly passed off as critical superstars, anti-heroes, or boringly healthy, conventional girls next door. This combination of ponytailed antagonists and protagonists becomes this study’s center as we delve into how, when, and where the existential and moral binaries of ponytailed desires and beliefs appear. Ponytailed expectations that express certain stands to social facts must be scattered within our “natural” geography, everyday economic life, and social organization. Here, custom and fashion allow the ponytail wearer to engage in a bricolage of seeing, revealing, and using hair to anchor the spirits of the time in real life experiences.4 Here, the ponytail receives and exerts its polyvocal and performative power and materializes and roots our personal and group stands among the social facts of a collective.

The gendered ponytail is an aesthetic expression, a codified femininity, and fashionable display of women’s so-called nature.5 In stressing polyvocality and symbolic dynamism, I see this process as contingent on how performances generate the ponytail’s highly varied uniformity. While Chap. 2 showed how meanings move through objects affect us as hermeneutically sensing individuals and communities, this chapter examines more closely the cultural pragmatics of the ponytail (Alexander, 2004, 2017). How do actors imitate beliefs and desires when they adopt a ponytailed uniform as the fashionable response to social settings? The answer resides in the feedback loop in which actors imitate custom to make fashion and imitate fashion to remake customs (Tarde, 1903, p. 206). Social change, then, is the result of culturally structured imitations in which we intensify, weaken, and rearrange the mythical, narrative, and aesthetic shape of material and biological life. Therefore, we need to study how the ponytail shifts via its fashionably gendered interpretations from a practical costume to a custom that meaningfully commands a generation.6

The Materiality of Expectations

The ponytail is a small, but vital part of the gendered fashions and customs that attract and repel us. Reporting on July 25, 1953, from Paris, the City of Love, for the newspaper VG, Aage Friis spotted a soldier in boots that were undeniably tormenting him on the warm summer day. The young soldier partly reads a newspaper and partly gazes at “a small mademoiselle with her hair shaped like a ponytail. She shyly looks down at her own shoes that below her red-painted nails are made of two flat soles with laces climbing all the way up her calves.” Gendered expectations like this one often come in oppositions: A French soldier with tormenting boots; a ponytailed woman with laced sandals. They perfectly fit and describe our expectations of young heteronormativity. In this landscape of journalistic poetry on gender expectations—tormenting and attracting to some—anticipations materialize in hair.

Despite the obvious gendering of long hair, to limit the symbolism of the ponytail to a constraining social fact such as heteronormativity masks its performative potential. The ponytail can maneuver gendered expectations in democratically constraining and empowering ways as it comes in and out of fashion. On July 5, 1954, VG noted, “For the blond, a ponytail with a small ribbon is very modern,” and on June 4, 1955, VG’s Lilleba Brynildsen wrote, “The beloved ponytail stays a horse head length [a marginal lead] ahead of the Jeanne d’Arc … and the Audrey [Hepburn] hairdo.” Reasonably, not all 1950s Norwegian women and men were familiar with the dramatic, unfair, and gender-biased trial of Jeanne d’Arc7; however, many would have recognized her as a champion of freedom and gender equality, and therefore, equally considered her short haircut as a stance against everchanging oppression and constraints.8 Thus, in the 1950s, the Jeanne d’Arc hairdo became a deeply felt statement of women’s emancipation.9 Nonetheless this stance-making short cut trailed “a horse head behind” the ponytail in 1953 Norway, if we take Brynildsen at her word. Should we then, perhaps, equate short hair with empowering the few bold and long hair with constraining the masses?

In a Calcutta barbershop, Norwegian tennis star and journalist Finn Søhol (VG, January, 21, 1956) witnessed a man receiving a tonsure, but who kept a “powerful ponytail on the back of his head,” which plays a specific role in Hindu religion. When a believer walks the liminal space between the profane and the sacred worlds, “God will get a solid grip to pull him up. Maybe Norwegian girls’ ‘ponytail fashion’ is of Hindu origin,” Søhol pondered. Although his wondering might be unrefined, even downright wrong, Søhol linked this snippet of hair ethnography to the spiritual sphere. Just as Jeanne d’Arc’s hairdo can signify democratic ideals, Søhol saw how the ponytail remained transcendental amid a hair-cutting ritual that signified purification, gratitude, humility, and rebirth.

Similarly, the act of cutting women’s hair is imbued with beliefs and desires of rebirth and renewal,10 which is somewhat paradoxical, considering long hair’s enduring association with feminine beauty, sexuality, and a conspicuous vanity. For example, take the song from the Broadway musical (and 1958 movie) South Pacific, “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,” and the statement from a 1990s woman, “I had to get rid of everything that he likes, and I started with my hair” (Weitz, 2004, p. 108). Women’s displays of tradition and renewal, submission and empowerment, generate an oscillation between the irreconcilable opposition of existentialism and quite tangible social facts. 11 Hair by its very growth allows new starts and ongoing transformations in our social lives that can be tied to a multitude of public and personal symbols of purification, transcendence, and social power.

The ponytail’s materiality of expectations anticipates its cultural power to maneuver social power. Through the 1950s, the hairdo became a symbol that subsumed images of an active, privileged leisure time and leisurely state of mind, representative of those fortunate enough to engage in an intellectual exploration of the temples of Calcutta or to go on a “well-deserved” summer vacation. With a humorous take on the city slicker and summer guest “that belongs to the ponytail-class,” VG ghostwriter EDITH (July 7, 1956) described the visitors to the warm, lazy towns of Norway. They “thunder down the entry door” of the shop, and completely disregarding norms of politeness, stampede over the civil queue of regulars:

Dancing into [the shop] are three of the summer’s young women with—yes; you guessed right—ponytails … “Let me see that one. No, not for me. God that is awful. No one can seriously wear that!” they loudly declare and bounce back towards the exit with shorts tightly hugging their tails and pale thighs. Grabbing the door, they fire a last shot, “So tiring, seriously. God how tiring it must be to live in a small town.”

As an icon, the ponytail sways with its wearer, gains its own movements, and moves us into recognized social positions.12 Whether the wearer bangs down the doors of a local shop or walks with a whipping gait down the big city pavement, the ponytail snaps our attention to the aesthetics of a woman’s leisurely stride. To some, this ponytailed state of mind might be taken for granted; others might be aware of its privilege. Long hair demands time, energy, and resources to stay groomed within a distinct social, gendered, and healthy class.13 Hair’s codes of shame and glory can, therefore, naturalize disparities in consumption and health (Daloz, 2010, p. 91). We do not really know these women, but the ponytails’ visual aesthetic catches our attention and allows us to sense how they engage with their social life. The ponytail projects forces that are independent of the actor and allows us to read these invisible meanings from its visual existence (Alexander, 2012; Sztompka, 2012). Its iconic power radiates without the apparent aid of the woman who wears it or the journalist who depicts it.

Although some of the ponytail’s iconic power resides in allowing the wearer to meet gendered expectations, it materializes multiple anticipations in a woman’s whole way of life. In VG’s “movie corner” on June 13, 1960, Margaret O’Brien, one of Hollywood’s most beloved child stars, discussed becoming 22 years old and the problems she faced as an adult actor. “Only sex sells in today’s movie industry,” she said. “I don’t want to play those kinds of roles. I don’t want to act as something I am not.”

O’Brien had plenty of money in the bank, and there was no need to rush into an unwanted job, the reporter rather sarcastically wrote: “With her ponytail, big eyes and cute voice she earned about 3,000 dollars a week at the top of her career as a child-star.”

The ponytail evokes and condenses our notion of a girl child, much the same way as big eyes and a cute voice. O’Brien’s horsetail elaborates a lost childhood and the pressures and expectations of young heteronormative adulthood in the movie industry.

As the Danish-Dutch calypso duo, Nina & Fredrik, pursued alternative career options, they too told of the ponytail’s semiotic limitations. Their heyday was over, and they admitted there were many singers out there who probably had better vocals.

It was simply “not enough to have a ponytail. People soon get tired of that,” Nina declared. “I cannot risk a long-term commitment [to music]; I might have children and if so, I want to dedicate my life entirely to the child” (VG, October, 51,960, p. 7).

If this meant Nina was chasing alternative hairstyles, too, we are not told. Seemingly, the early 1960s ponytail radiated youthful expectations; in another instance, it is a dead object. In both cases, expectations of a woman’s way of life materialize in hair. The expectations these longhaired women face and the journalists describe are more than constraining. Even though hair is a dead materiality, it grows and moves. In meeting heteronormative expectations, the ponytail’s multitude of contradictions and symbolisms provide existential grounding and shape anticipations of social life.

Fashionable Ploy or Democratic Credibility?

Hair expectations are many and overpowered by existential moods. Hair loss can make us feel fatigued. “Dead hair” can make us feel dead. We can keep hair snippets to retain the life spirit of our youth or of someone who has passed away (Tarlo, 2017). The meanings that we fuse in the materiality of hair enable us to sense the existence of individuals but also social spirits.

As Hjalmar Söderberg’s 1906 play “Gertrud” was made into movie by Denmark’s acclaimed director, Carl Th. Dreyer, it received a dismal welcome. Critics found Dreyer’s Gertrud to be “cold and distant.” Although the critics did not mention anything about Gertrud’s hairdo, Dreyer made this defense of his work: “One has to consider the circumstances these people [depicted in the movie] were living in. They didn’t walk around with their hearts on their sleeves.” The critics were blind, Dreyer argued, and could not “see Gertrud for all the ponytail-girls of today … We walk past the girls from good homes with long traditions of good manners … I feel Gertrud still exists today. What happens in the movie still happens today” (VG, January, 14, 1965, p. 11).

In frustration, Dreyer claimed the audience could not see the profound existential dilemmas he was depicting. Perhaps the movie was too old, yet too provocative all at the same time? Is it better to be overwhelmed by a ponytailed display of social feelings of “sexual emancipation,” than thinking that women, regardless of their hairdos, struggle emotionally and relationally? To Dreyer, the ponytail seemed to depict an “emancipated” woman, but that in this news article, a totem of his bewildered contemporaries who were blinded and confused by the stark impressions of the latest fashion: the pervasive emotive register of the ponytail.

Under the heady spirit of second-wave feminism, boundaries between the public and the private exploded to emancipate women from traditional gender roles, capitalist and state-governed injustice, but not from fashion norms (Weitz, 2004). Fashion reports through the mid-1960s to the early ‘80s steadily included the ponytail, and short hair trends were replaced with longer styles, either loose or ponytailed (VG, August 11, 1966, p. 12).

American actor Candice Bergen proved to all skeptics “that not all hippies are ungroomed, on LSD, and with wide-legged pants, but can be groomed movie stars with ponytails” (VG, December 12, 1967, p. 24). Long hair can be free or bound, like the horses of fairytales—saddled and disciplined or unsaddled and free (Franz, 1964). Fashion writers describe the ponytail as “a fashionable add-on on the catwalks of Paris” (VG, November 1, 1968, p. 16) and “a natural extension of the darkhaired” American movie star, Kathryn Leigh Scott (VG, June 25, 1969, p. 14). Plenty of silver-screen heroes were wearing the style, as well as Norwegian urban-dwellers like Gryne Movig, an actor living in culturally exciting, cosmopolitan, up-tempo Stockholm (VG, October, 20, 1973, p. 38), her jeans, light-green nail polish, and ponytail indicative of her own creativity.

In the 1960s, jeans occupied a central position in a more androgynous, mobile attire that symbolized freedom of choice and a challenge to traditional gender norms.14 In a 1989 interview in VG, Clint Eastwood said he not only like to play tough guy movie roles, he also liked, independent and tough women:

He does not like the silent and halfhearted woman that dwells in the home and keeps her mouth shut. He wants mature, independent girls with guts, like his ex-wife Maggie, whom he divorced straight after their silver wedding. “Personally and professionally, I am attracted to the independent girl. In the ‘70s, they ran around in jeans, sweaters, and ponytails. They found conflict and left their husband sitting alone with all his problems,” says Clint. (VG, February 18, 1989, p. 28)

Eastman waves goodbye to the woman homemaker and greets a new expectation of woman’s liberation in a pair of jeans and a waving ponytail.15 In this public discourse of the 1980s, to be and dress like a “liberated woman” was fashionably sober and a practical custom.

As with Dreyer, fashionable emancipation can be deeply upsetting when it tweaks traditions and expectations in feedback loops of change. One journalist of the 1980s found great joy in vividly reporting on the vacation attire of Katharine, Duchess of Kent:

What was left of the British imperium has been shaken, to its very foundations by an event beyond comparison in the glorious history of its Kingdom. A member of the Royal family, the Duchess of Kent, appeared in a very tight-fitting dungaree. Observers with an appreciation for tradition can inform us that never have we seen such an outfit, by a member of this circle, in public. Fair to say, the Duchess is an in-law. (VG, March 19, 1981, p. 18)

The Duke and Duchess had returned from Barbados with lovely tans, and the Duchess with “sun-bleached hair in a ponytail” and, yes, those dreadful dungarees.

The Duchess was not alone in enjoying the fashion. As the summer of 1987 moved on, the whole first half of the nineteenth century seemed to return with “inspiration from the ‘50s, wide young-girl-skirts with stiffened petticoats. On to Bardot’s high ponytail and pale pout” (NTB, September 2, 1987).

Indicative of the times, the beauty myth and heteronormative expectations were tweaked into an “agentic” maneuvering of a specific female form and a seemingly endless array of attires.16 A prime example of the many possible women included in the beauty industry’s contraction of the public sphere, is the one-sized plastic Barbie doll, which was 30 years old in 1989 and had more than 450 million sales worldwide. Ruth Handler, Barbie’s creator, said the doll was intended to give girls the opportunity to role play:

Slim, long legged, but curvy. Characterized by a super slim waist and sprightly breasts. Obviously inspired by ‘50s ideals of womanhood … standing on her toes (waiting for those high heels), with a bathing suit, sunglasses and a ponytail … The teenage girl Barbie was thus soon placed in new contexts, with matching outfits and proper accessories … She has been a flight attendant, an astronaut, a veterinary, ballerina, waiter, singer, and doctor, to fit every possible “dream of the future” that girls might have. (Aftenposten, December 9, 1989, p. 18)

Another example—perhaps a makeover of Barbie—is the tougher, stronger, smarter, and more independent (she has no Ken) Lara Croft of the Tomb Raider, the lead protagonist of the video game’s second launch in 1997. With multiple identities, Lara Croft is an archeologist, bestselling writer, world-class gymnast, expert shooter, and avid motorcyclist. She embodies an untouchable and unachievable male sexual fantasy that can be interpreted, imitated, and used in as many ways as all of the uniforms and traits she possess.17 This electronic “Barbie” with slightly more muscles, bigger breasts, and a very long, brown ponytail was portrayed by Angelina Jolie in several movie productions. In the new game, a newspaper critic said, “Lara has gotten some new outfits, a longer and more agile ponytail, an expanded range of weapons” (Dagbladet, November 21, 1997, p. 10).

By the end of the ‘90s, this commodified woman archetype was efficiently split into five versions—the Spice Girls. Emma Lee Bunton, aka “Baby Spice,” is not all that kick-ass, but she has a ponytail. She is “the youngest, most childish and most blue-eyed in the group. We are told that she awakens the mother instinct in the rest of the Spice girls. When it comes to flirting, she smiles, waves with her eyelashes and gently, coquettishly pulls her ponytail” (Aftenposten, October 30, 1997, p. 19). “Sporty Spice,” aka “Mel C, is the least glamorous of the Spice Girls bunch. She “thrives in a ponytail and a sport suit,” and “does not spend much money on makeup. She is much more of a tomboy then the rest of the spices. ‘Pay attention—the best pickup line is to invite me out for a football game. I am not much into restaurants, romance, and all that stupid stuff,’ she says in the official Spice-book. ‘I like to be sporty. It feels good to be able to move well in my clothes’” (VG, February 21, 1997).

Critical theory explains that these molds and “spices” both shape and are created by beauty ideals in specific, quite constraining ways. The vast array of Barbie’s and Lara Croft’s attires and skills, nor the five possibilities of the Spice Girls, are not totally convincing because the range of feminine identities they offer are highly stylized and commercial. They create expectations and role models that patriarchies and neoliberal capitalists plausibly find quite useful.18

Nevertheless, expectations can be met and made meaningful in various ways. Line Strange, a 13-year-old Norwegian girl from Hoksund, agrees with Spice Girl Melanie C, that sporty clothes are best. Enjoying the skills of imitation, she was selected as Norway’s “Melanie C” and said, “Mom thinks I fit [the description of Melanie C], because I usually walk around in sports apparel and a ponytail. It is because I do gymnastics and work out all the time” (VG, August 2, 1997, p. 49). This pleasant unity the ponytail’s form with its depth of meanings confirms Strange’s enactment of “Sporty Spice” as a true signification of her performed being as a girl.19 Her audience—at least a selection committee and her mother—agreed upon the similarity of Mel C and Strange. They both perform feelings about an active lifestyle.

The fragmentation of the female ideal into five categories allows a wider range of ordinary girls to become extraordinary. Are Spice Girls an empty commercial ploy or a democratic recovery and proliferation of the word “girl”?20 You can gently, coquettishly pull the ponytail, or let it swing during sports play and gymnastics. It can make an iconic “Spice” normal and allow the girl next door to embody its charge. Seemingly, the ponytail defied the idea that only short hair could challenge old, uniform gender relations. Its beauty ideal and gendered expectation was highly profitable as it not only allowed girls more images to choose from, but also made them available for purchase.

Advertisers and commercial interests jumped on these new fashionable notions of femininities, full of vigor and social force, and stretched them farther along the age continuum to target both young and old consumers (Tincknell, 2013; Wolf, 2002). In the late ‘80s, adult women commonly wore ponytails (Aftenposten, September 2, 1989, p. 33). Fifty-five-year-old Brigitte Bardot appeared on French television “with her long, blond hair in a ponytail and a simple brown shirt dress … insisting that her fellow countrymen (and women, we assume) help save France’s stray dogs and cats” (NTB, October 21, 1987). Sixty-year-old Audrey Hepburn, the woman who “infatuated the world” with her short cut, wore her hair “brushed back in a simple ponytail, more refined than ever” (Aftenposten, May 3, 1989, p. 40). And 51-year-old Jane Fonda was bouncing with life, “looking as impolitely fit as she does on the cover of her fitness videos. In the morning, she has had a 15k run. Her ponytail is wild, makeup is absent, no face lift done. We can see the crow’s feet around her steel blue eyes,” the charmed reporter wrote (Aftenposten, May 24, 1989, p. 57), recounting Fonda’s tales of Røros, where she was starring in a rendition of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” with a feminist vision.21

Wearing ponytails, these fashion icons and conventional embodiments of the beauty myth, sing a different tune. Bardot promotes animal rights, Hepburn children’s rights for UNICEF, and Fonda women’s rights. At the Cannes Festival, Fonda promotes the movie “Old Gringo” and wants nothing less than to unite her artistic, commercial, and feminist capabilities: “I am driven by a compassion for my sisters. Women are still supposed to be caring, attentive and patting our tired men on their shoulders. We make half the money, but do not have half the power and influence we should” (Aftenposten, May 24, 1989, p. 57). Feminism initiated a civil repair of the destruction made by male dominance and aimed to reconstruct women’s status (Alexander, 2006, pp. 235–264). Not only did first- and second-wave feminism mobilize social power and legal rights, it also attempted to redefine womanhood and better incorporate women-centered issues into the public sphere through recognizing and honoring women’s voices (Alexander, 2001). Media portrayals show Hepburn, Bardot, and Fonda as iconic women fighting injustice with their hair pulled back into ponytails. Plausibly, feminist and capitalist narratives of emancipation have changed ideas of women’s freedom by creating distance from tradition and state-governed rule, and by transforming emancipation’s idealistic expressions and responsibilities in health and social life (Crawford, 1980; Fraser, 1990; Fraser & Gordon, 1994; Riley & Evans, 2018).

Too many fashion reports lead us to believe that the ponytail simply has a pop cultural magnetism, inspiring the fashionably aware or the fashionably duped. This is hardly the case. Celebrities like Hepburn, Bardot, and Fonda are not the only feminist and human rights fighters. Some might argue that there are not enough, in contrast to those championing the beauty industry, but I found quite a few. Far away from the pop culture industry, 23-year-old Siri Martinsen works at the Norwegian Animal Rights Organization in “a Spartan office with a phone that never goes silent. Everyone is concerned with animal rights these days. Martinsen runs from one call to another. Chemically free from makeup, and her hair tightly collected in a ponytail, it is obvious that she is concerned with other things than her morning reflection in the mirror. She has a burning passion. She wants people to have the right idea about how animals suffer in captivity and under the knife at research labs, in cosmetics. She works for animal rights, to better their life” (Dagbladet, October 4, 1997, p. 6).

Another example of the justice fighter is the political rookie who became a major name in Norwegian politics for the Progress Party (FrP) and served as Minister of Finance from 2013 to 2020. Siv Jensen, after only a month in the Parliament, had become a prominent and “furious” actor in the political play, “appearing at the end of the hall with her easily identifiable turquoise dress jacket and a waving ponytail” (Dagbladet, November 17, 1997, p. 8). Some critical scholars might think it is a shame that such media accounts reduce democratic work to the ideological swing of ponytailed consumerism and longhaired normativity. However, if we see the ponytail as an icon that materializes a woman’s maneuvering of gendered and capitalist expectations, then we can stop painting these women with the same brush and recognize how ponytailed women—and the ponytail itself—staidly relocate themselves in relation to ideology. The ponytail icon indicates that women have entered the scene of public power. Whether she professes neoliberal or social democratic politics is not the issue. Then the ponytail can represent a commercial ploy or democratic credibility, and therefore, allows both commercial and democratic agency in the specter of the conventionally attractive woman’s multiple femininities.

Fashionably Extraordinaire and Deceptively Normal

We find role models beyond the polished pop culture industry. This is common knowledge, but it nevertheless seems important to make this explicit if we are to understand the full range of options that the ponytail’s expectations allow.22

When Norwegian Princess Märtha Louise entered Nijmegen College in the Netherlands at age 23, the Norwegian press came to visit. At the media’s request, the Princess displayed some of the tricks she had picked up in her physiotherapy studies. She asked a fellow student to play her patient and then requested that she undress in front of everybody, laughing so hard of her own joke that “the Netherlanders almost fall of their chairs.” The Princess caused a stir and “the Netherlanders gape … obviously surprised by how cute and normal she is with a pair of jeans, a ponytail, and funny comments” (VG, April 21, 1995).

The ponytail fashion not only holds a fashionable sway, but commands customs of fashionable (hetero)normalcy. The ponytailed body is a body that matters (Butler, 1993) as it conceals its social and imitative construction under the category of a “natural fact” of normalcy (Butler, 1990, p. 95). The ponytail commands social life through an aesthetic surface that in embodied and culture structured ways organizes social life (Douglas, 1966). The longhaired fashion so prominent of power in religion and myth, is surprisingly normal, and makes the Princess seem normal too.

We can observe both how the ponytail icon normalizes extraordinary women and, in contrast, gives quite ordinary, “natural” women exceptional qualities. The ponytail oscillates between normative and quite spectacular expectations of gender. Consider media accounts of Norwegian Crown Prince Haakon’s courtship of an ordinary, non-royal girl:

They could have been anyone as they walk around with a hidden smile on their face. Mette-Marit with a long, dark blue jacket, a big scarf, grey pants and a black band around the grain-yellow ponytail (Aftenposten, October 17, 2000, p. 3).

Mette-Marit, the crown princess-to-be, “is naturally beautiful with delicate skin and reminds us a bit of Grace Kelly … She has hair like most young girls of today. Straight down and into a ponytail. Long hair is beautiful, but demands grooming and should be cut every sixth week,” an observant hair stylist announces in evaluating the prince’s fiancée. (Aftenposten, October 29, 2000, p. 19)

They make a lovely couple, “he is tall and dark. She is light and slim … A pink top and a simple ponytail with a rose. Yes, she is still ‘just an ordinary girl.’ An ordinary girl who has made the prince fall to his knees and propose, and thus given all regular girls in Norway a renewed faith in the fairytale of Cinderella.” (Dagbladet, December 2, 2000, p. 4)

The ponytail remains fashionable at the turn of the twentieth century (Fig. 1).23 Extraordinary yet ordinary, Super Sexy, yet down to earth might just be the perfect combo, at least a perfect arsenal of femininities. Super stars Naomi Campbell and Alanis Morissette sport “down-to-earth ponytails” and sunglasses to avoid too much attention (Aftenposten, March 10, 1996; VG, July 1, 1996, p. 43). Janet Jackson visits Oslo in a “cap, pulled down on her forehead, designer sunglasses on that little nose, and no diva behavior. Her long beautiful hair is tied back in a ponytail” (VG, March 8, 1995, p. 50). “Comely” Camron Diaz, “smiles prettily, has a rough laugh and a small ponytail” (Dagbladet, November 5, 1997, p. 54). Supermodel Cindy Crawford, in a minute of mundanity, is spotted running in and out of LA shops, wearing a ponytail (NTB, December 11, 1998). Renée Zellweger “is natural, no makeup, and a ponytail. She is evocative of everything else than a feted Hollywood star: She is liberatingly the real deal” (VG, July 15, 2000).

Fig. 1
A photograph of a young woman with a ponytail taking a selfie.

Fashionable ponytailed expectations. (Picture credit: fotokostic via Getty Images)

Full size image

In addition, everyday women, the girl next door, has a ponytail. “Mother and daughter. Both with red, long hair gathered in ponytails. So alike, so natural in their colors and posture. They belong together, but also tell a story of two generations” (Aftenposten, March 15, 2000, p. 12). The ponytail bridges generational clefts and is still iconic of the early rock and roll and Grease era (Aftenposten, May 30, 1998, p. 29). When Grease, The Musical premiered in September 1999 in Lillehammer, Norwegian youth were encouraged to “get out those leather jackets, empty that grease in the hair, and put on those swinging skirts and ponytails” (NTB, January 1, 1999). Rock girls, with the “‘60s still clinging on to their rhythms and outfits, still have those dotted skirts and dipping ponytails that we suspect have been hanging onto since, well, the ‘60s” (Aftenposten, July 14, 2001, p. 21). There is a clear cultural link between the “rock music area” and the ponytail in Norwegian media. But journalists also recall the ponytailed, “preppy” and intellectually assertive Nancy Drew in a trench coat (Dagsavisen, September 7, 2002, p. 20) and of “raunchy” Madonna of the 1994 Bedtime Stories, her tight ponytail and Gaultier metal bra (Bergens Tidene, July 9, 1998, p. 10). Other accounts include:

Norwegian popstar Lene Grawford Nystrøm, aka Aqua Lene, “looks fresh with shiny, dark hair in a ponytail and signal red mouth and sunglasses matching her outfit.” (Dagbladet, August 20, 2001, p. 54)

Christina Aguilera, who leans towards an African style, wears needle thin braids in her long light hair … that under the MTV Awards were joined in two thick braids. Kylie Minogue chooses a more classic hairdo with braids that wreaths her crown and ends in a small ponytail, while her remaining mane hangs loose. (NTB, March 14, 2002)

And who can forget the platina-blond kick-ass punk-musician Gwen Stefani who “slings her ponytail.” (Dagbladet, July 5, 2002, p. 8)

In the new century, “shoes from Jimmy Choo, worn-out grey sweatpants from Nike, a white Dovre singlet (a Norwegian down-to-earth undergarments company) that is just a little bit too big, Swarovski jewels and Tiffany diamonds in my ears, hair in ponytail” will make you “street glamorous to the fullest.” (Dagbladet, September 6, 2002, p. 8)

The woman cast in these accounts is emblematic of mythical duality. Actors’ ponytail imitations can transform the customary to the fashionable, the polite to the naughty, the coy to the kick-ass, and back. Immobile Barbie and animated Lara Croft, “preppy” Nancy Drew and “raunchy” Madonna, naturalize longhaired, gendered expectations and a fascination with the maintaining the polyvocal ideal. From 1945 and into a new millennium, ponytailed women are imitated by daring fashionistas who in turn inspire routine life. Better put, heterosexual normativity expands, constricts, and proliferates though custom normalization, fashionable intensification, and daily imitative bricolage. Therefore, the ponytail’s iconic charge can be used and seen as we feel and enact both mundane gender expectations and amplified versions of heteronormativity.

The ponytail shapes social life with an iconic radiation that pulsates—sometimes highly charged, sometimes barely recognized—looming in our side view. How does its owner feel it shapes her own social life? We know that a horse’s tail can give a feel full of anticipation and community, like when Ørjan prepares to ride horseback with his nurse Aanderaa (Chap. 2). The idea of a ponytailed community is so pervasive that the hairdo itself can represent belonging. In an interview about isolation and bullying at school, an adult woman shared a poetic recollection of school-girl loneliness and her image of breaking free from alienation involved a dream of joining a moving body, a fish-school of children, with “laughs and ponytails swaying from side to side” (Sarpsborg Arbeiderblad, February 9, 2012, pp. 22–23). Similarly, Simon (2000, pp. 2-3) described herself as a curly-haired daughter of straight-haired parents whose frizzy curls among a class of 20 sleek-haired elementary-school girls made her feel like “a stranger in the straight-hair world.” Her only wish was for “a neat facial profile backed by a separate knot of smooth, swingy hair.” The ponytail allows meaningful belonging in a community who relates to specific gendered expectations.

We can also hide behind long hair, like Violet in the Pixar movie, The Incredibles, or any teenager with low self-esteem. Movie star Halle Berry reportedly said, “I find when I have short hair, I feel like I have nothing to hide behind.”24 A ponytail has the same “uncovering” effect, as it pulls all, or most, of the hair away from the face and to the back or to the top of the head, revealing the face.

In a 1997 news article, Toni Andersen, a 23-year-old women, described her battle with low self-esteem. Despite the somewhat uncanny, gendered sensationalizing in this journalistic piece (not to mention the deeply troubling belief that biomedical techniques can restore more true “biological realities”25), the article is illustrative of the ponytail’s effect as a personally meaningful technique to display a publicly recognizable character. Andersen has what she, her physician, and the journalist described as “extreme hair growth.” She has shaved her face since she was age 13 “in the morning, midday, and the afternoon, and her doctor confirmed that she has male hair growth.” Whatever that meant in 1997 or today, Andersen is offered laser surgery, for 10,000 NOK [1500 USD] to allow her a public face that “children and adults no longer turn and stare at,” Andersen said.

“Obviously, it causes a mental strain, having all that hair, but I have tried denial. I have told myself that it is just how it is. That was before I learned that I could do something about it,” Andersen said. She still shaves, but now only once a day. “After only five treatments, that is a huge improvement, and for the first time, she wears a ponytail and shows her face!”

“Now it is fun to dress up,” she said. “Now I can look like a woman instead of looking like a man” (Aftenposten, June 8, 1997, p. 34).

In many ways, the analyses in this book elucidate how social facts and expectations can be met in diverse, meaningful ways. In modern societies, technology plays a huge part in this cultural manipulation of “what is natural.” Despite the many sober and lively ways that girls and women employ to meet longhaired expectations, the ponytailed expectation is very real.

The ponytail pulls the hair back and reveals the face for all to see. Not only is there less material hair to hide behind, but the contemporary ponytail spirit—true or not—shows us, persuades us that its wearer “is not hiding.”26 As an icon with performative power, the ponytail allows “the crucial transformation of vision and hence of reality by change in emotional register” (Stang, 2009, p. 60). Therefore, the ponytail enters, changes, and leaves social realities with several options at hand. It is transient in and of itself. It can, at any time, be bound or unbound to allow change in diverse, yet deeply felt ontologies. Its code of normality and exception, condensed in a maneuverable binary of custom and fashion, both expands and constricts available affective communities of identity and belonging (Alexander, 2006).

Although the Norwegian press might be somewhat dissimilar to the “red-top” press elsewhere (Allern & Pollack, 2019), sex and violence sells in Norway, too. Not all ponytailed women are good, heteronormative girls next door. There are dangerous ponytailed women out there. In 1997, the Norwegian press reported on the difficult task the Danish police faced in proving that a 32-year-old female nurse had killed 22 residents at a care facility for the elderly. All the dead were cremated. The nurse was also suspected of having embezzled amounts up to 629,000 Danish kroner from the deceased and other residents. The nurse’s log showed evidence that powerful pain killers were distributed without any reported need, and despite physicians’ prescriptions. Notably, the patients’ health markedly improved whenever the suspected nurse went on vacation.

The accused’s attorney reportedly made quite an effort to convince the judge and jury that the nurse was no monster. However, the three judges “where not persuaded by a mild looking woman, with jeans, a pink sweater, thick-glassed glasses, and ruffled blonde hair in a ponytail” (VG, October 25, 1997, p. 18).

The ponytail is highly recognizable as potentially persuasive, and therefore, is subject to interpretation. Aesthetic shapes are always in the middle of semiotic processes (Alexander, 2010b) in which we criticize and interpreted cultural dualities. The woman cast, Beauvoir ([1949] 2011, p. 81) argued, allows her to become “queen of the heaven, a dove is her symbol; she is also the empress of Hades, she comes with a slithering, symbolized by a serpent.” Just like the ponytail shapes its wearer’s emotions and feelings, it creates her own and others’ social existences. The normative expectation of the ponytailed girl next door can easily fool you. If you stop to look, or do not use the shield of jurisprudence, her Medusa-like hair may turn you to stone.

If you are not alert, the ponytail can seductively persuade you to mistake the fashionable lure of custom—Nancy Drew for popstar Madonna. In late summer 2000, two “ponytailed and mild looking teenagers” robbed a Norwegian clothing store of 25,000 NOK. The girls asked a gullible clerk for different-sized clothing, and the clerk left them alone in the store. They quickly acquired the keys to the safe and ran away with its content (Bergens Tidene, August 30, 2000, p. 5). By evidence of the senses, the clerk left the girls alone. By evidence of the safe, the clerk was fooled. The clerk’s attention was not exactly turned to stone, but it was definitely not focused on the girls.

Another surprising report was of a mother and daughter who robbed a taxi driver. “The 14-year-old girl child had a stiff look as she drew a gun and threatened the cab driver. None of them wore masks, so the police had little trouble finding the little girl with a ponytail and her mother” (VG, February 27, 2000, p. 11). Who would have guessed ponytailed girls could commit such crimes?

Imitative capabilities can be used in attempts to persuade. Therefore, the ponytail icon is also charged by its deviations, fetishes, and evils that repel and compel us (Beauvoir, [1949] 2011; Katz, 1988; Smith, 2008). The two young women from Målselv, in northern Norway, who were featured on the cover of the men’s magazine, Vi Menn [Us Men], are described as “two completely ordinary girls, no makeup, with ponytails and sweat pants” who “work as strippers” at night. Thus, the male reader is assured that any girl out there might be ordinary by day and exotic by night (Nordlys, March 28, 1998, p. 30). This existence of others who are different from or alike us is what allows identities. It generates an ambiguous magic and magnetism between fear and desire, repulsion and attraction.27 This does not mean that an interior core of identity is a complete illusion, but that it is lived through a culturally formed fantasy of a fantasy, and that gender is itself an imitation generated by our human compulsion to repeat the code of custom and fashion—with a twist.28

Ponytailed Men and Women

If identity is a product of difference, if imitation can be either acting like one’s model or doing the exact opposite (Tarde, 1903, p. xvii), then who are the ponytailed men appearing in the Norwegian press? If we assume Norwegian journalists tend to think in gender binaries, what do they say about men with ponytails? To my big (prejudiced) surprise, during the ‘70s, ‘80s, and well into the late ‘90s, men with ponytails were the subject of news reports more often than women. In 1994, hairstylist Alf Johan Fjeld provided a history lesson and reality check. During the hippies’ era, ponytails for men were quite popular. Then the yuppies with ponytails, waving from their Mercedes convertibles, made the hairstyle common across social divisions. Fjeld stated that men with ponytails take better care of their hair, “Well, perhaps not the case for hippies.” The high point for men with ponytails may not be 1994, as the style is still popular for Norwegian men of all ages in many occupations, especially creative, artistic, and social service jobs. Museum curator Holger Koefoed eventually cut his hair based on his family’s popular demand telling him that he was not “the right animal to wear a horsetail.” Asked why he had one in the first place, he replied that he was advised to grow a ponytail because of his “weirdly shaped head” and that he could just as well “get outed” with a pulled-back hairstyle (VG, December 18, 1994, pp. 44–45).

The man with the ponytail performs a creative and rebellious masculinity; he shows us something about his inner “essence.” Yes, he may also be a bit crazy: like Marlon Brando thinking he can evade the press at Heathrow Airport (VG, March 9, 1971, p. 9); or like 71-year-old Duke Ellington wearing a “hair whip” accompanied by a “hippie outfit” as he conducts the jazz orchestra (VG, November 9, 1971, p. 23); or the male robber, looking kind of weird with a long ponytail, black ashes in his face and a black glove on his left hand (VG, September 20, 1974, p. 7). During the 1980s, the ponytail was considered fashionable for girls, but boys’ hair “should be short” (Aftenposten, April 11, 1988, p. 9). Bad boys, of course, can rebel against short hair and still be quite “popular with the young women” (Aftenposten, May 4, 1988, p. 14). Ponytailed men could be found as hippie musicians and artists on the summer streets of Oslo (Aftenposten, July 22, 1988, p. 9), and yes, as occasionally playing a pirate role in an amusement park (Aftenposten, August 30, 1988. p. 13). Others were simply a little off beat (Aftenposten, September 26, 1988, p. 6). Some men grow a tail to display creative spirit, but may not convince everyone: Reporting on an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, director Morten Eid commented on all those men who walk around pretending that they understand art, you know, “especially those young men with a ponytail” (VG, August 3, 1995).

Even as part of what is often considered and criticized as a super-straight, masculine male sports milieu (Messner & Sabo, 1992, 1994), we find something a little bit out of the ordinary: Erik Kvalfoss, biathlon athlete who has “a ring in the ear and a ponytail. He stands out. ‘I just want to be myself, but I do not want to provoke anyone,’ he apologizes. ‘And I do take sports as seriously as all the others’” (VG, March 5, 1990, p. 25). Thank heavens. In contrast to the many analyses of women’s apologetic behavior, which uses heteronormative adornments and symbolism as evidence (Daniels, 2009; Davis-Delano et al. 2009; Sisjord & Kristiansen, 2009), Kvalfoss is quite explicit. Motorcyclists, however, need no excuse. “With the leather suit as armor, a head band covering up a mean scar, and a gust of wind ruffling his ponytail,” the biker roars unapologetically down the street (VG, April 27, 1990, p. 40).

At this point in history, there is an impressive number of men in ponytails. “The frenetic guitar player Adrien Belew has been Bowie’s mate since the ‘70s … and still creates magic guitar riffs as whipping as his ponytail” (NTB, August 22, 1990). Even the rather boring Morten Harket of the world-famous Norwegian band Aha had one (NTB, October 14, 1991). Movie stars Val Kilmer, Al Pacino, Antonio Banderas, and Sean Connery in the Medicine Man (VG, February 17, 1992, p. 37–38), and Michael Jackson, too (NTB, July 14, 1992). Oslo’s chic Theatercaféen draws an ensemble of “women in manly hats and men in womanly ponytails” (Aftenposten, March 20, 1993, p. 42). On the soccer pitch, there are Italian beauty Roberto Baggio, aka “the divine ponytail” (Aftenposten, May 6, 1993, p. 18), and England’s prima bad boy, Paul “Gazza” Gascoigne (NTB, August 17, 1993). David Seaman, the Arsenal goalie, receives considerable attention for having a ponytail and for removing it (Dagbladet, March 25, 2001, p. 40; April 5, 2001, p. 24; Nettavisen, October 30, 2002, p. 30). Nevertheless, as museum curator Holger Koefoed discovered when his family disapproved of his ponytail, it’s only the not-so-average Joes who wear them, like “that weird guy who stood up and played air-guitar at the Eric Clapton concert” (Aftenposten, April 2, 2001, p. 24).

Most notably, a vast amount of the men ponytails reported on in the Norwegian press through the ‘80s and ‘90s were worn by criminals.29 These ponytails appear in the news as signaling descriptions of terrorizing rock throwers (VG, December 16, 1993, p. 14), thieves (NTB, August 29, 1988), and rapists (VG, September 13, 1994; Aftenposten, September 15, 1994, p. 6). Ponytailed men are true bad boys, at least some of them. A Norwegian man who attempted to rob a jeweler in Copenhagen, “can thank his own ponytail that his attempt at robbery failed”; the shop clerk grabbed his ponytail and held it tight until the police arrived (NTB, December 13, 1995).

The ponytail is such a vivid signifier of the White bad boy that statistics from the Norwegian customs office show that only 2 percent of the 9029 Norwegian citizens who were asked to strip for inspection in 1997 actually carried contraband. Attorney Ellen Moen is shocked by what she calls a ponytailed prejudice: “Whenever I am on a plane, the people stopped by customs are so easy to spot. I usually never get it wrong. If I were to ship drugs to Norway, I would use one guy with a ponytail and an earring, and one guy with a suit and briefcase. I would let the man in the suit carry the drugs since, rest assured; it is the man with the ponytail who is stopped” (VG, March 9, 1998; Aftenposten, March 10, 1998, p. 2). No wonder, perhaps, that male police officers who want the right to sport a ponytail face big problems. But in Norway, gender equality naturally triumphs (NTB, September 24, 1999) and male and female officers who want to wear ponytails can, of course, wear them.

The ponytail shows how bodies are subjectively experienced as objective carriers of meanings that shape how we sense, enter, and sustain social worlds.30 Although the ponytail is a sex cue (Friedman, 2013), it is not, by any means, a univocal one. A quick peek at men who wear ponytails exemplifies this claim. A ponytail in and of itself does not make a body female, but it certainly shapes our being and thinking about women and men. Men with ponytails are deviant, rebellious, bad boys, creative, or blatant criminals; girls and women with ponytails are quite normal. In its sacred, pure form, a ponytail on a women signals a confident, heteronormative, creative, and assertive person, either the ordinary, morally good yet charming girl next door or the fashionista with a ponytail whip that commands our attention. In its sacred impure form, a ponytailed woman can be a femme fatal or a morally dubious woman in the disguise of the morally good girl. Read through the symbolic layers of altruism or commercial ploy, ponytailed women may be role models fighting for human or animal rights or a plastic mold shaped by neoliberal-cum-patriarchal ideology. Thus, the ponytail does not override polyvocality to subsume all men and women into some bad boy or Barbie doll ideal; rather, it can hold both evil and good. It crowns idealistic women who work in dingy offices, the liminal exotic dancer, and the downright criminal femme fatal. What directs the use and understandings of the ponytail’s expectations are its countless imitations guided by culture structures.

As the ponytail is used to maneuver gendered expectations, two concurrent forces generate its performative power and half-life: The ordinary ponytail can become extraordinarily fashionable and the extraordinarily fashionable ponytail can become customary. The ponytailed woman stripper and the criminal are, in (cultural) fact, simply ordinary females who have stretched their imitative capabilities and the audience’s identification of what is a “natural” custom into a fetish or an evil. The princesses of royal families and the super stars of pop culture stretch our iconic consciousness to let us see and feel that they are really just ordinary, authentic ponytailed women. They all reveal how femininity is made through imitations of untouchable fantasies and ideals that can materialize and therefore be sensed on a desirable (for some) aesthetic surface. The ponytail is felt as a social-cum-kinetic movement between custom and fashion. It performs a self-confident maneuvering of modernity through imitations and counter-imitations of beliefs and desires (Butler, 1993; Mead, [1934] 2015, pp. 166–167) that are under the control of fixed ideas and their theses and antithesis (Tarde, 1903, p. 159).

Fashion takes custom and amplifies it. As a process of myth-logics, images of the ponytail are elaborated and twisted (Alexander, 2004; Freud, 1950). Therefore, the ponytail can command attention and compel attractions as its silhouette communicates moral power and an archetype that allows affective participation in an imitative community.31 In a fragmented and conflictual modernity, multiple symbolic layers ensure that we can adopt the ponytail in varied contexts and with various intents. Wearing one becomes a performed choice, conscious and unconscious, that itself performs tradition and innovation, and like fashion itself, allows us to see and feel nostalgia without forsaking progress. “Under” the visible aesthetic surface of the ponytail are “invisible” codes and narratives (Alexander, 2010b; Champagne, 2018, forthcoming). Through the culturally structured options described in this chapter, we see how the ponytail’s meanings can reflect normality and sympathy or dangers and deceit. Our ponytailed choices can therefore ignite joy, irony, anger, and resistance.32

The ponytail is a floating signifier that allows us to stitch and restitch together cultural bits and grammars, allowing us to feel, show, and shape an existential oscillation between fashion and customs. It compels us as it holds possibilities both to operate a massive array of individual and social selves and to shape social life.33 Ponytailed women, in style or simply by habit, can fight for democracy or represent commercial interests, and media critics ensure we see this wealth of prospective role models: some standing on the barricades and some imitating neoliberal and patriarchal ideals (Figs. 2 and 3).

Fig. 2
A list of longhaired expectations. 1. Custom. Fashion. 2. Altruistic. Commercial. 3. Normality. Deviance.

The codes and symbolic layers used to interpret and enact practical womanhood

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Fig. 3
Three spiky circles are labeled as follows. 1. Custom. Fashion. 2. Altruistic. Commercial. 3. Normality. Deviance.

The codes and symbolic layers of the longhaired expectation

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See also Lukes (1973, p. 12).

  2. 2.

    On tribal customs of the Tikopia Island in Polynesia prior to and after European colonization, see (Macdonald, 2004, pp. 886–887; Synnott, 1987; Weitz, 2004, p. xv).

  3. 3.

    (see Blackburn, 2007; Schultz, 2014; Simon, 2000; Sisjord & Kristiansen, 2009; Weitz, 2004; Whitaker, 2018).

  4. 4.

    I combine Alexander’s (2004) theory of cultural pragmatics with Lévi-Strauss’ (1966) notion of the “bricoleur,” a competent actor who shapes meaningful actions through symbols and symbolic systems. I also draw on theories about how myth is placed in the (sometimes aesthetically transformed) geographical, economic, and social landscape of its community (E. Leach, 1969; Lévi-Strauss, 1966, 1967).

  5. 5.

    According to Goffman (1976a), “women nature” is a social construction made up of iconic displays of femininity.

  6. 6.

    “In fact, primitive custom obeys, whereas custom in its final stage commands generation. The one is exploitation of a social by a living form; the other, the exploitation of a living by a social form” (Tarde, 1903, pp. 253–254).

  7. 7.

    At Jean of Arc’s 1431 trial, her short hairstyle was considered a heresy. Although her short hairdo and “cross-dressing” in a military uniform was a practical necessity in combat and prison, they did not fit the social expectations outside of brute, state-governed violence (Aquinas, Summa 44: 239 [2a2ae. 169, 2]) “The wearing of the clothes of the opposite sex is wrong … It is expressly forbidden in the law … However, it may be done without sin in case of necessity” (in Fraioli, 2000, p. fn. 130).

  8. 8.

    Smith (1999) showed how the meaning of the somewhat consistent materiality of the Place de la Bastille in Paris has changed throughout history, due to transformations in the natural surroundings and in meaning-making.

  9. 9.

    (Tarlo, 2017; Weitz, 2004).

  10. 10.

    (Tarlo, 2017, pp. 64–65).

  11. 11.

    Advertisers position women in various submissive and empowering stances to attract consumers (Goffman, 1976b). Harvey and Gill (2013) argued that the sexually empowered woman can be understood as a sales pitch that in its actuality disempowers through forced psychological dispositions and individual responsibilities to be attractive.

  12. 12.

    Gender performances invite immersion in ideal settings through an iconic expression (Goffman, 1976b).

  13. 13.

    Veblen ([1899] 1994, p. 105) argued that much extravagant women’s clothing and some women’s excessively long hair, are both expensive to keep and hamper the “wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for all useful exertion.”

  14. 14.

    (Hillman, 2013).

  15. 15.

    (see Lazar, 2013; Wolf, 2002).

  16. 16.

    Some scholars have called it the phenomenon of multiple femininities (Cox & Thompson, 2000; Daniels, 2009) and others have made note that the ever-changing woman is therefore an ideal neoliberal actor (Pickren, 2018; Rutherford, 2018).

  17. 17.

    Despite all of her “positive” characteristics, Lara Craft is an embodiment of an untouchable and unachievable male sexual fantasy (Greer, 1999 in Mikula, 2003). Nonetheless, Mikula (2003) argued that the Lara’s attraction resides in the many ways in which she is interpreted, imitated, and used by individuals.

  18. 18.

    (Gill, 2016; McRobbie, 2009; Toffoletti et al. 2018).

  19. 19.

    (see Alexander, 2010a, p. 327).

  20. 20.

    Many have discussed whether the Spice Girls merely signify an empty commercial ploy (Banet-Weiser, 2018) or a reclamation and recuperation of the word “girl” (Gillis & Munford, 2004).

  21. 21.

    Røros, a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its copper mines, was the filming location for Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, its authentic wooden buildings and a winter market called Rørosmartnan, drawing 60,000–70,000 tourists to the city of about 4000 inhabitants.

  22. 22.

    Hair is multivocal (E. R. Leach, 1958; Synnott, 1987) and meaning is composed of a fusion of personal routines and habits (Lizardo, 2017) with deeply felt public culture (Mast, 2019; Smith, 2008) to display group belonging and personal moods (Obeyesekere, 1981; Weitz, 2004).

  23. 23.

    Aftenposten, October 13, 1994, p. 56; Aftenposten, May 31, 1997, p. 46; Aftenposten, July 14, 2001, p. 21.

  24. 24.

    https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1285129

  25. 25.

    (Martin, 1991; Zola, 1972).

  26. 26.

    (Alexander, 2004; Butler, 1990; Goffman, 1976a).

  27. 27.

    Identities are the achievement of similarities and differences (Lawler, 2008). Difference is also what generates an equivocal magic and magnetism between fear and desire in the gendered relations between men and women (Beauvoir, [1949] 2011, pp. 170–176). These deep psychological and social landscapes of difference and similarities are put in play on the material surface of the body as an enacted fantasy (Butler, 1990, pp. 185–188).

  28. 28.

    Butler’s (1990) brilliant and psychoanalytically inspired work unfortunately completely dismisses phenomenology (p.45) and gives a bit too much weight to social structures through Foucault and critical theory (p. ix). Nevertheless, Butler’s work is inspiring and useful as it gives much weight to a deeply felt ambivalence in social encounters.

  29. 29.

    Aftenposten, April 5, 1991, p. 4; Aftenposten, February 24, 1993, p. 4; Aftenposten, August 27, 1993, p. 4; Bergens Tidene, September 14, 1994, p. 6; Nordlys, February 8, 1995, p. 11; Aftenposten, May 11, 1995, p. 9; Aftenposten, September 22, 1995, p. 12; Aftenposten, February 18, 1996, p. 2; Aftenposten, November 1, 1996, p. 3; Aftenposten, February 23, 1998, p. 4; NTB, May 7, 1998; Dagbladet, November 15, 1998, p. 14; Bergens Tidene, November 2, 2000, p. 5.

  30. 30.

    (Csordas, 1990; Merleau-Ponty, [1945] 2012; Turner, 1995)

  31. 31.

    Aesthetic surfaces communicate moral power and archetypes (Alexander, 2010a). Through cycles of imitation these surfaces, whether presented in magazines or on social media, allow us to make fashionable representations of ourselves and our communities (Surette, 2019; Weitz, 2004).

  32. 32.

    Greta Garbo ignites irony of an ephemeral yet enduring feminine ideal (Barthes, [1957] 2009). Fashion ideals ignite anger (Wolf, 2002) and resistance (Gill, 2016) in the ways it shapes toxic ideas about femininity and may deteriorate possibilities for solidarity.

  33. 33.

    Individuality is constructed through an interplay of ideas and ideals (Mead, [1934] 2015); through processes of egalitarianism (Bellah et al. 1996) and social problems that are made into psychological dispositions (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). A ponytail habit is therefore not merely the expression of its owner’s soul and faculties, but habitualized meanings (Mauss, [1934] 1973).