Tangling with a bad hair day

Tangling with a bad hair day
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Saturday January 12, 2013
Section: Opinion

A hair cut is not a trifling matter. This, men do not understand. To a man, a haircut is a way to kill fifteen minutes of a lunch hour. It involves no more mental taxation than reclining in a swivel chair arguing with a barber about Shane Warne’s discipline problem.

For women, a haircut is the fastest route to an identity crisis. Period. It can coincide with that too. I should know – I just had one – a haircut, and a freak-out. Some people will no longer recognize me because I’ve gone short – I had a whole 3 centimetres cut off. For me, a change is nowhere near as good as a holiday.

Men should also know that women have a fraught relationship with their hair because hair the only thing that can be changed at whim. And let’s face it, most women grow up wanting to change everything about themselves. Well at least I did.

I was seven when I began noticing Serena down the road had a shiny blonde ponytail like Barbie, while I had limping stick-brown plaits like a Holly Hobby doll.

My downward comparisons got worse as I became a teenager. I measured myself against other girls according to blondeness or cascading wavy-ness – and was always left lacking and dissatisfied. It was the start of an uncomfortable relationship with being female, of wasting a significant portion of my young life sizing myself up against some narrow measure of the perfect woman’s exterior.

I was in my 20’s by the time I realized my insecurities were simply character weaknesses, and I could fix those. I decided that my negative body image was unhealthy and perverse, and I would no longer indulge it (except during ‘that time of the month,’ when nothing is curable and there is no bright side.)

Women have a peculiar knack for self-loathing, something I’ve rarely seen in a man. Really, it’s a nauseatingly first world problem – I’m sure if we had to rifle through a rubbish tip to find dinner or wash our clothes on a rock by the river, we wouldn’t be giving two hoots about our hair. (We’d probably have sold it off to some merchant making fake hair extensions for the elaborately coiffed in Perth.)

Self-loathing is the flipside of self-obsession, two symptoms of that disease called vanity. Vanity must also be a side-effect of not having enough to do. I’m sure it’s nice to always look flawless – but those who aspire to perfection must find themselves slave to an entirely joyless process. After all, a bad hair day can ambush even the most military of beauty regimes.

I like to miss a few gym sessions and lose control at the smorgasbord because, well  – because I can. My friends won’t desert me and I like to imagine my husband will still think I’m a fox – he’s seen me thin(ish) and also 9-months pregnant, and hasn’t passed judgment on either. (Smart men never do.)

The cult of female beauty is ingrained at an early age. In high school, I must have frittered away days of my life wishing for longer legs and less curves, obsessing over my Roman nose and muscly calves. I couldn’t see anything but my faults. I was the sum total of a collection of ugly body parts.

Insecure as a teenager, I often mistook sexual harassment for compliments. Once, when the father of a girlfriend pinned me up against the wall of his shed after school, I felt flattered instead of repulsed. I look back on that day and still feel incredulous that my self esteem was then propped on such flimsy scaffolding.

I had the best of role models – a mum who was confident, positive, and motivated to keep fit and eat well – no closet psychoses there. I had female teachers I admired and respected, aunties and friends’ mothers I loved to bits who told me I was kind and intelligent, not pretty and thin. (I wished they’d said ‘funny’, because funny can compensate for all other shortfalls.)

I look back now and see I was much like every other girl, and every other girl was much like me: consumed with the glorified images of the impossibly glamorous models in our Dolly magazines. And yet as wives and mothers, when we’re trying to trying to stay sane juggling parenthood and working and caring for extended families, I find some women are still as competitive as ever. I don’t get it – are they forever desperate to outshine the sisterhood?  Is this relentless pursuit of perfection some misguided attempt at one-upmanship? What the blazes for? I can only surmise that there are women who need to feel envied to feel good about themselves.  In my imperfect world, that looks to me like low self-esteem. Can’t we all just admire each other?

I’ve decided the best test of a woman’s vanity is a hideous haircut – the kind of haircut that you can see is a disaster even before they’ve finished drying it.  I can recall the taste of rising panic as it dawned on me that the he-she with the scissors did his apprenticeship as a butcher, not as a hair ‘artiste.’ There I sat – (under that black plastic shroud that’s always too tight around your neck) – struck mute by the dawning realization that for the next three months, my new do would be the new don’t. And when he’d finished his masterpiece, and I was looking as inviting as a soup sandwich, I got up and grinned stupidly: “Thank you so much – no, no – really, I love it,” handed over $150 and sobbed all the way home in the car.’ People who are vain are also smart enough to cause a scene belittling the hair-man so that at least they get a free disaster, and scare off all the other clients.

I have an impeccably stylish friend who claims hair, skin, weight and clothes, in that order, betray a woman’s age. Oh dear, so boring hair now makes you look decrepit too? I’ve had it up to pussy’s bow with stylers, straighteners and hot tongs. Those blasted appliances take up fifteen minutes of my sixteen minute daily beauty regime. After all, it’s just hair, it’s not even alive, but it’s the most demanding thing I own. And I expect it will be until I’m the owner of a perm and a blue rinse. At least then I’ll take comfort in knowing the one upside to death will be never having to think about my hair.

Mutton dressed as man

Mutton dressed as man
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday January 5, 2013
Section: Opinion

My husband is so fashion forward he thinks he’s the new black. Apparently, the new black is a portly but cute middle-aged father of three with Henry Kissinger glasses decked out in an electric yellow Polo shirt and cargo shorts with a hammer holder.

He’s not alone – I know other charismatic men of a certain age who dress smartly at the office, but who throw caution to the wind at weekends and go out in public looking like a one man sailing regatta – all stripes and baggywrinkled Bermudas –  convinced they’re the ship’s biscuit.

Or there’s the dad I know who favours an oversized mustard-coloured Rugby shirt he calls ‘Golden Boy’ because it protects against every combination of chocolate, coffee and clumsiness. If you’re a stylish woman blessed with a fashion plate husband of your own, you’ll understand where I’m coming from. Mine is more a fashion platter, an XL hunk of man who only sets foot in a clothing shop twice a year during the David Jones sales. It must have been there last summer, in the men’s department, that some pretty shop assistant managed to offload some unsaleable stock by telling him: “No, no sir, you’re one of the lucky ones – your ginger hair goes with everything .” (And canary yellow was everywhere in Kazakhstan this season.)

At weekends my Beau Brummel gets around in a kaleidoscope of loud boardies and even louder shirts. The new ones are so bright they hurt my eyes. The hot pink Polo is his pet right now, closely followed by the purple one with the chlorine stains down the front. His favourite shorts are printed with a rainbow of small elephants. Friends and family never tire of taking the mick: “Hey mate, when does the circus leave town?” but he refuses to take the bait. I fear he has become what the rag trade calls ‘the technicolor middle-aged.’

Don’t get me wrong, there’s not an ounce of vanity living in this man. He is no ageing peacock, he couldn’t care less what he looks like (obviously) nor does he give a hoot what people think. Clothes do not maketh my man, they are simply for hiding his nakedness.

I have given up trying to change him, or his clothes. I’ve got enough to worry about keeping my own fashion sense in check. But I bet on Saturday nights as babysitters arrive at their destinations all over town, there are wives saying to husbands: “You’re not wearing that are you?” All those tiffs that start with: “I’m not going out with you dressed like that!” Exasperated men trying to defend why they’re wearing their own ‘Golden Boy’ as the perfect camouflage for beer drips and gravy spills: “Hey, I chose this to save you some washing – I’ll get three wears out of this before anyone notices it’s dirty.” Uncle Tony says he’s learnt to save time (and marital grief) by saying: “Okay Marg – you choose what I should wear.”

I pity all those blokes being asked: “Does this dress make me look thinner or fatter?” Every woman knows this is a minefield across which no man has traversed successfully. I can see the look on my husband’s face as his brain registers a no-win situation. He’s only been waiting for me for twenty minutes while I agonise over what to wear. And yet my last act of wardrobe desperation is to ask a man who’s wearing a shirt with umbrellas all over it whether my outfit is flattering?

Those of you who think I’m being cruel should remember that I met this man when he was sporting a pair of Dunlop Volleys. I fell in love with him anyway. Since then I have had to attend all manner of social occasions on the arm of a man who thinks dressing up is wearing a cardigan.

Last Father’s Day I spotted an old man’s cardie in a shop selling Fair Isle jumpers  and other grandfatherly  attire and knew right away he would be beside himself: shawl collar, cable knit, covered buttons, deep pockets, I can’t remember if it had elbow pads but I bought it anyway. As a joke. I’ve had to put up with him going out in it every chance he gets with all the buttons done up. When the weather’s changeable he teams it with the elephant shorts.

On occasion, my fashion smorgasbord has been clairvoyant. He came home from a business trip to Spain some years ago sporting a pair of vibrant orange sneakers: “Mark my words, I’m way ahead of my time.” He wore them until they were in tatters, and basked in the smirks from strangers. Now neon runners are everywhere, and he likes to remind me:  “Orange is the new Matt.”

Having just moved house, I valiantly tried to cull his wardrobe. I had hopes of ushering some of the faded, torn or hopelessly stained specimens towards the Good Samaritan bin, but was intercepted with a furious: “Move away from the cupboard.” I made a futile attempt to argue the merits of spring cleaning but then gave up, defeated. In the end, it would be less trouble if the offending articles came with us. (Even the homeless have fashion standards.)

I have come to the conclusion that men, as they get older, realise that how they look has less and less to do with the quality of woman they attract. Partnered and 40, they stop trying to impress women by looking slick and cool because they’ve landed the one they want. So Monsieur begins dressing for comfort, sometimes in ways other blokes find amusing. He knows it isn’t pretty but hey – he’s still gets lots of sex from a woman who inexplicably still likes him.

No man ever calls himself a metro-sexual but they’re out there, being lampooned by my husband and his mates. Apparently, those young blokes who’ve converted to man-scaping their bodies with tattoos and shaved chests and skin tight jeans are letting the team down. In the name of research, I asked my James Bond some apparel questions as he was spread-eagled on the sofa watching Goldfinger. He was in smart casual: a favourite stained shirt with a pair of footy shorts last worn during the legendary  University Football Club A-colts 1985 grand final. “Would you wear skinny trousers?” “Only if I was man-orexic. “  ”How about a man-purse?”  “Yes, if you were Pussy Galore and I was armed with a Walther PPK.”

Perhaps men’s fashion should be left to those who understand it. According to Oscar Schoffler, the  longtime fashion editor of Esquire: “Never underestimate the power of what you wear. After all, there’s just a small bit of yourself sticking out at the collar and cuff.”What about the not so small bit of my man sticking out between the shirt and the shorts? His response from the sofa: “That’s the fuel tank for a sex machine.” (The bad jokes are never-ending in our house.)

I console myself that his self-esteem is rock solid. While I dress to conceal the naked truth I see in the mirror each morning, he likes to put it about in low-slung Levis and shrunken t-shirts. He still thinks I am living with a God.

So for any husbands out there wondering what piece of apparel they should make space for in the domestic wardrobe next season, my husband says the gent’s waistcoat is going to make a comeback. In grey woollen flannel a la Sean Connery in Thunderball. I can’t wait to see if he’s right. Or how it’s going to look with a cardigan.