runs with pink ladies

To speak through Anaïs Nin: “I’m easily obsessed.” So it is with running. I’ve been running regimentally enough now (5.5 mile-trail, three times a week, since June, pace whittled down from 49 to 41 minutes) for the activity to gel into an identity. As a form of physical exercise, running of course carves fat off: my body feels almost Lindsay Lohan-ish now. As a form of psychic exercise, I could feel it adding to my hips and boobs. I knew this I became just as, if not more, excited about the September issue of Runner’s World as I was with that of Paris Vogue: Lara Stone styled like Scarlett O’Hara? Lovely, but I’m too busy reading up on the dangers of overstretching and the new Nike Lunarglide sneakers. So, as with all things in my life, it is time for me to measure the distance between “runner” and “girl.”

I suppose that the first and simplest way in which an activity becomes feminized is by being performed by females. In that, I felt vindicated upon learning that Mia Kirshner, a.k.a. my femme namesake, Jenny Schecter of The L Word, is also a runner (a triathlete to be exact). But of course, that an activity becomes gendered by the gender of its practitioner is a pretty boring, and I think, ultimately inaccurate concept. Rather, I find that more often, an activity is already gendered as a process, which gives gendering shape to its practitioner. But running seems pretty gender-neutral: moving your legs on a path while sweating doesn’t seem particularly feminine.

Or perhaps, moving your legs on a path while sweating isn’t recognizably feminine. In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, his memoir as a runner-writer, Haruki Murakami writes: “I run to acquire a void.” He’s referring to the luxurious blankness of his mind while running, and I love that idea. But “void” is also the way in which women have traditionally been figured in Western thought, along with “hole,” “lack,” “castrated.” I like thinking about jogging’s mental paving as a paving of a brain-vulva: the vulval void as a luxury item rather than a handicap.

Weirdly enough, there’s another moment in Murakami’s book which displays a tangential awareness of this feminine link. Here, Murakami describes some fellow runners who pass him as he is jogging in Cambridge: they are girls, “Harvard freshmen,” he guesses. These girls are “healthy, attractive, and serious, brimming with self-confidence.” To top it off, they are “small, slim,” and have “blond hair in a ponytail.” What’s interesting is that this sketch is lodged in a chapter titled “Even If I Had a Long Ponytail Back Then.” Murakami, an Asian man, compares himself, rather competitively, with these gals. They might pass him in running, but he passes them in life experience: “these girls probably don’t know as much as I do about pain.” And sure enough, the girls’ inexperience with the dark side of life is symbolized by their running hairdos: “their proud ponytails swinging back and forth.” Murakami differentiates himself:

“But even if I had a long ponytail back then, I doubt if it would have swung so proudly as these girls’ ponytails do.”

This is probably why I hate symbols: it’s so laden, too easy. The ponytail here functions rather like a butt-face: you know, the frat house-y joke of magic-markering faces on beer bellies or butt cheeks. Here, the ponytail gets read as if it were a face. It is easy to scapegoat the ponytail as an emblem of the (presumably) white upper-middle class privilege of these Harvard freshmen because the “proud ponytails swinging” have the perky provenance of 50s white femininity. The original Barbie, Sandra Dee, and Olivia Newton-John as “Sandy” in Grease: bouncy, blond, innocent. The ponytail indeed swings up, balancing out their pert little ski-slope noses.

I like it that even though he is disidentifying from these ponytailed girls, the male Murakami (no femme is he judging from author pics) imagines himself with a long ponytail. Gender doesn’t seem a barrier to identification—even if he identifies to back away from that identification. Still, when Murakami says that his ponytail wouldn’t have a proud swing, I wonder if he takes his own metaphor seriously enough. Does he imagine that his ponytail wouldn’t swing “proudly” or that it wouldn’t swing at all—the swinging itself a prideful act akin to flagwaving? But if he still imagines himself a jogger, what else is a ponytail to do but swing?

Take it from this crow-haired ponytailed runner: the runner’s ponytail swings. When I used to run regularly six or so years ago in San Francisco (all those fucking hills!!), I was just growing my hair out for the first time, and also just beginning to accept my identity as a girl. When I’d suit up to run, I’d either braid my hair in a taught immoveable rope or a tight immoveable knot. I thought that to run with a ponytail swinging behind me would weigh me down. Boy, was I wrong. This year, I said Fuck It for the same reason I do most of the things in my life: I’m lazy. To my pleasant surprise, I found that the ponytail didn’t weigh me down at all. Actually, I rather enjoyed the swing of weight behind my head. It made me feel like Black Beauty, or Wonder Woman. I wouldn’t call this feeling “pride” but it wasn’t “shame” either.

And the ponytail doesn’t always “swing;” it also “whips.” Running by the bay, the winds can get awful fierce sometimes and many a day, my cheeks would get slapped by my own hair, or I would take in a mouthful of ponytail with my running inhale. Others might see a runner’s ponytail as swinging smugly, but to the runner, to the serious femme runner, the ponytail is like femininity itself: a thing that hurts you but a thing that allows you to make yourself.

Personally, I have two rather different, darker associations with ponytails. One, Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Rabbit Catcher”:

It was a place of force—

The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,

Tearing off my voice, and the sea

Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead

Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.

I like to think that the void I’m acquiring while running is putting me in touch with this “place of force:” when the torque of the jog feeds me my own hair, I’m being possessed so hard by the women who lived before me that it feels like erasure.

The second, Helen Mirren on playing Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in the BBC television series Prime Suspect:

Well, obviously, it was important that I looked like a policewoman, and so the hair was an issue. I'd always had long, blonde hair, and the general feeling was that it should be cut as I knew policewomen didn't, and don't, run around with long flowing hair, as people can grab it. So if they have long hair it's either tied back, or it's short.

The ponytail is feminine accoutrement as flexible armor to patriarchal violence. It begins in the playground: long hair makes anyone vulnerable to grabbing and pulling. The ponytail, while still more dangerous than a bob, allows the woman to retain an obvious femininity while performing a traditionally masculine act. Like catching criminals. Like...long distance running?

So while I probably also have nothing in common with perky blond ponytailed joggers, I feel more akin to them when I run than I do to old Asian men. I mean, come on. I jog in one of my favorite t-shirts: a pink Belinda Carlisle summer tour shirt from 1986. (I’m trying to wear it down to a particular transparency, down from Pepto pink to strawberry ice cream pink) My new Indian name: Runs With Pink Ladies. When I run, I don’t feel like Olivia Newton-John in Grease, the goodie-two-shoes who has to be lured into being sexy by her desire for a guy rather than by the seductive attitude of the girl gang, the Pink Ladies. Instead, I feel like Michelle Pfeiffer in Grease 2: the leader of the Pink Ladies, the eternal bad girl, hair whipping in surly defiance.

maternamorphosis

The four scariest strung together words in the English language: “I’M BECOMING MY MOTHER.” Lately, I’ve been thinking without fear about becoming my mother, and not for the usual boring Oedipal reason. I’ve been having some trouble this year trying to get my book of gender-race theory published. While wallowing in frustration, I found that my mother was going through a parallel pain, trying to sell huge oil paintings in this particularly nasty economy. Before I think of this woman who birthed me as my mother, I think of her as an artist. She is a woman who has a degree in textile engineering, who married and gave up a career, followed her future ex-husband to America, then with a couple of weird kids in tow, went to graduate school, got an MFA, and followed her dream of becoming a painter. But my mother was never headhunted by major New York galleries, and making a living as an artist has been a tenacious crazy-quilting of teaching and self-promotion. For years I’ve watched her struggle, and actually be happy in this struggle. Now it’s hit me that I’m doing the same thing she is, except my paint is the keypad of a computer.

The protagonist of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy says of his mother: “I have taken her place. I must resemble her more and more. All I need now is a son.” With me, of course, my mother is still very much living, and to be completely “her” I would need a daughter as well. But I like this idea that becoming your mother (no matter your gender) occurs way before you become a parent. In the above picture, my mother is about the age as I am now, except that she already has two children, the elder of whom is 9 years old. In my mind, this is how I always see my mother: arms crossed in defiance, hard eyes, jeaned legs in battle position. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to become, considering that physically, it is what I’m destined for anyway. Looking at this picture of my flannel-and-jeans clad mother, I realized that I already dress like her: I am a flannel-and-jeans clad mother-minus-son-and-daughter.

I want to turn genetic destiny into a personal style. Lacking a uterus, and determined that my sperm will remain deadstock in this world, I want instead to dress like my mother in her 30s. But in copying her look, I don’t want to turn to any recognizably symbolic or iconic pieces of traditional femininity. For instance, I’m not going to do anything with her long-sleeved, high-necked dark butterfly print chiffon dress except keep it hung up like a painting. The femininity of my mother that I want to locate for myself is a less intuitive one. One that I know is there but was not always an apparent part of her life as “Mother.” I like to think about my mother as she would have been if she’d never married the man she didn’t like, if she’d aggressively used birth control nine months before my birth. My mother if she’d never been “mother.” I like to think about my mother as never needing to protect and swath her procreative areas with soft skirts, but pack them into a pair of hard tight jeans. I want to wear my mother’s jeans. Not “mom” jeans but “mother” jeans.

Not that “mom jeans” and “mother jeans” are unrelated. Mom jeans connote those jeans produced in the late 70s and most of the 80s, with a singular cut: high waist, give in the hip, restraining at the butt and thighs. The curvy silhouette that their seams suggest led to these jeans being named “Mom”—cuddly, nurturing, soft, feminine body. But the historiography of mom jeans is a little misleading, because they were actually not made for bodies intent on being comfortable as pie-baking moms. Look at this priceless instructive label from a pair of mom jeans made by Levi’s (from my personal collection):

What a cute text. The girl puts the jeans on and is sweating-crying in flabbergastation because they fit so ill; she looks like she’s wearing a barrel, an extra in a Loony Tunes cartoon. But never fear: the jeans themselves tell her to “wash ‘em HOT inside out” and tumble dry them until they have a HOT fit: “the MORE you wash ‘em the better they look and fit!” The “after” picture shows the same crying girl now all in smiles, with jeans tightly hugging her curves. This arduous process of making your jeans look HOT with hot water and air seems akin to churning butter. In this age in which elastine has invaded the jeans world, gals hardly need to go through a particular process in order to get the tight femininity they want from their jeans. But if this anachronism is what makes these particular jeans maternal, they are hardly “Mom.” “Mom” implies familiarity, ease, mundane comfort. These jeans are not actually that. These jeans are a process of becoming intimate with an unyielding and unfamiliar object, to make it get to know your body, to get your body to get to know the breathing pattern of a textile. So let’s give due dignity back to these kind of jeans, which were not always soft and comfy, but only became that way because their original identity is hard and unyielding: “MOTHER JEANS.”

The Welsh singer Duffy says of her own mother: “Always a good pair of tight jeans—that’s what she taught me. She used to sit in the bath for hours trying to make them fit.” I like it that maternal pedagogy here doesn’t have anything to do with nurture, kindness, or warm milk, but crafting the perfect denim pedestal for your butt. My mother never gave me this lesson explicitly, but I like to think that a woman who wore tiny miniskirts in 1960s Korea and fearlessly yelled back profanities to boys who made lewd insults would have gone in for some hard jeans that required hot water baths to grow accustomed to her body. The fabric of my mother’s jeans in that defiant photo doesn’t look particularly hard but I like to imagine that they once were.

Even if “Mother” is an identity that is granted by the use of one’s uterus, why should it automatically have a “soft” cultural identity? I never thought of the womb as a squishy place anyways. It seems less like a warm wet cavern and more like an industrial workshop in which fetuses are stamped out. Like the reverse of a callous: a hard skin that becomes soft with use. Mother jeans are hard jeans designed to give a hard outline to a soft shape. My mother may not have worn hard jeans, but she’d weathered enough shit in her life to give meaning to their designation. Mother jeans should produce hard femininity. After all, my mother expelled her children not through soft natural childbirth but a caesarian. Every time I put on my hard jeans, I’m stepping into the depths opened up by a gaping sliced mouth on my mother’s belly, and her legs are my legs.