{"id":6543,"date":"2021-05-14T07:02:20","date_gmt":"2021-05-14T11:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.silvercentury.org\/?p=6543"},"modified":"2021-05-14T07:02:20","modified_gmt":"2021-05-14T11:02:20","slug":"the-year-of-letting-our-hair-go-gray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/2021\/05\/the-year-of-letting-our-hair-go-gray\/","title":{"rendered":"The Year of Letting Our Hair Go Gray"},"content":{"rendered":"

Six year ago, on an escalator coming out of a weekday movie matinee, I had a wild idea. Despite the fact that the entire audience was older, I spotted only one gray-haired woman. Covering the gray, I realized, is a way we women collude, <\/span>en masse<\/span><\/i>, in making ourselves invisible as older women\u2014and when a group is invisible, so are the issues that affect it.<\/span><\/p>\n

This behavior is understandable, to say the least. Powerful forces are at play: capitalism, sexism, ageism, misogyny and a multibillion-dollar, anti-aging industry, to name just a few. Economists have a name\u2014the \u201cattractiveness penalty\u201d\u2014for the fact that women are judged far more harshly than men for \u201clooking old,\u201d and for the costs of not conforming. <\/span><\/p>\n

So millions of women spend millions of dollars and millions of hours in hair salons or over the sink, coloring their roots. For some, it\u2019s fun; for others, a burden; for many, a costly tyranny. Those forces are extraordinarily hard to buck.  <\/span><\/p>\n

But what if\u2014<\/span>what if<\/span><\/i>\u2014we acted together? What if all the women who disliked covering the gray acted together, creating the Year of Letting Our Hair Go Gray. The world would see how many we are, and how lovely, and how powerful! It would be transformative!<\/span><\/p>\n

I posted the idea on my <\/span>This Chair Rocks<\/span><\/i> Facebook page . . . and I got a ton of blowback. Which I deserved. Who was I to tell women what they should or shouldn\u2019t do? Why didn\u2019t I go first? Which I did that spring (and described in <\/span>\u201cSo I Dyed My Hair White<\/a>\u201d<\/span>), continuing to bleach batches of hair in the years that followed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then along came COVID-19. During lockdown, as my bleach job grew out, your gray grew in. Millions of you\u2014you know who you are\u2014turned 2020 into the Year of Letting Our Hair Go Gray that I dreamed of on that escalator in 2015. <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m sorry it took a pandemic. I know many of you couldn\u2019t wait to get back to the salon. No judgement, I swear. But I\u2019m thrilled to see so many women outing themselves as older in this way, making peace (or more) with what they see and claiming their full identities as older women. We are a force. The Year of Letting Our Hair Go Gray is just one way of making it gloriously visible.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Six year ago, on an escalator coming out of a weekday movie matinee, I had a wild idea. Despite the fact that the entire audience was older, I spotted only one gray-haired woman. Covering the gray, I realized, is a…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more The Year of Letting Our Hair Go Gray<\/span> ›<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n

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