Clever Mind and Coloured Locks: Why Brains and Beauty Isn't Just a Pithy Phrase

You know, I spend a fair bit of time thinking about this blog of mine.  I love writing, I love sharing ideas, and sometimes I even believe some of the people who are reading this genuinely like it and that just makes me feel good.

In any event, quite often when I’m thinking about this blog and about whether or not I have anything to say I find myself leaning towards my own issues – hating stick figures, existing in a generation of perpetual slackers, and about, basically, being a girl.  I know I've posted a fair number of times about feminist sentiments.  A far more interesting number, though, is the number of times I consider a feminist issue, and sit down and write a blog, but when it comes time to hit the “Publish” button I can’t do it – not for fear of speaking my mind, nor because I think I’m being repetitive, and not because I think I’m on about a sob story.  The actual reason is because I have this worry that you, potential male reader, will read it, roll your eyes and think I’m a silly little girl finding adversity where simply none exists.

What is so interesting about that is that, even if you, potential male reader, did in fact read any of this and think that, it really wouldn’t matter.  It seems so readily apparent that women, even in enviable first world countries such as this one, are still suffering systemic problems on a day-to-day basis, the outcome of a general lesson we’ve somehow been learning since we were little girls of not taking up too much space and of not being too noticeable, and of being pretty, and of being clever but not so clever as to outshine.

And if we have somehow forgotten the role inscribed in us – that we ought not to be so bright that we outshine – we had better at least have out intellect firmly rooted in models that are not reminiscent of a man, lest we let our legions of sisters down.  Because we are supposed to embody the characteristics of the maternal, even when we are crossing lines and being bright and shiny and sometimes too bright and too shiny, and fighting the fight of oil tycoons simply isn’t the stuff that warm, cuddling mothers are made of. 

Interestingly, we are much more likeable when the reason why we dye our hair and wear makeup is because those things actually indicate elements of ourselves – that we are womanly enough to care how we look because we are supposed to look this way.  We are not supposed to be proud to be grey.  To be grey is offensive to the sensibilities of good people who want to believe that even if we are smart, capable, and intelligent, we are still demure, not entirely self-confident, sweet, sensitive and worried about our fleeting beauty.  Those two and a half hours we spend beautifying with chemicals four times a year are indicative of qualities that we are supposed to possess as women who are sufficiently womanly to serve as role models.  Neil McDonald wrote, in beautiful, fist-pump-inducing language about Christine Lagarde:

“The first female director of the International Monetary Fund is a fiscal conservative of intimidating intellect, so impossibly self-possessed that, here in Washington, where your television image matters more than just about anything, she leaves her hair grey”

This balance of brightness and strength is required to totter precariously on an overly taut tightrope of compassion and femininity, because to lack such qualities is strange and absurd and offensive not only to the man who is thusly emasculated, but to the girls.  Oh for heavens sake, could someone think of the girls?  How are they to understand Christine when her hair is so offensively, obnoxiously, unapologetically grey?  One cannot be a role model when one is simply trying to be a man.

I don’t endeavour to say this confusing dark abyss of gender role chaos and cruelty is unique to women.  These intrinsic anti-strong-female societal views, however, lend so easily to beating down all of the Christine Lagardes and Marissa Mayers.  We struggle to say no no, but we’re equally capable - this is what we all believe!  And yet, every shot we’re given to prove that we actually believe what we say we believe, we take and we hand back – gently – to the man in the driver’s seat, calmly suggest Lagarde dye her hair back to that luminescent shade of black it obviously used to have, insist that Hilary Clinton just put down the scrunchie already, and discuss Michelle Obama's interesting decision to cut her bangs and then grow them back out.  I can only assume this whole time, then, I've been wrong.  It's not you, potential male reader, that I should be most nervous of backlash from.  The fact of the matter is it's not just the patriarchy that insists we maintain the patriarchy.