Word: hairs
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...practically on a whim, I decided - after nearly a quarter-century of every-three-weeks hair-salon coloring - to buck convention and stop dyeing my hair. And I found to my surprise that by visually challenging my peers (if I was really gray, so must they be!), I unwittingly landed myself on the front lines of a public struggle - literally superficial but at the same time almost existentially meaningful to American women - with the vicissitudes...
...Friends and strangers responded to my newly revealed natural hair color in one of two ways: a sort of proud, sometimes sanctimonious right-on-sister enthusiasm from fellow gray-haired women or an equally proud, sometimes resentful don't-judge-my-choices-I-do-this-to-feel-good-about-me defensiveness in the comments of the committed-to-dyeing cohort. Hardly anyone was lukewarm in their reactions, which suggests to me we may have a contentious new baby-boomer argument over gray hair that is as mutually judgmental as the mommy wars between working and stay-at-home mothers...
...course. For starters, the stakes in the debate between stay-at-home mothers vs. working mothers are plainly, unequivocally serious, since that's a zero-sum game between maximum professional fulfillment and maximum parental availability. But there are serious and similar social crosscurrents underlying the apparently trivial issue of hair color as well, and the divide is of roughly the same scale. Three-quarters of women from 25 to 54 are in the labor force these days, twice as many as worked a half-century ago - which is why the decision to be a stay-at-home mother became...
...political, as the women on the barricades made us believe, then even choices about how to face old age are going to be loaded. Barbara Kass, a New York City psychotherapist and definitely a citizen of Woodstock Nation in the '60s, feels twinges of guilt about dyeing her long hair at 53. She says, "At 22, getting older absolutely did not cross my mind. The young me would find it shocking that I dye my hair...
...part. And in doing so, they have presided over a narrowing of the range of acceptable looks for women. Women may be CEOs, Cabinet officers and TV-news anchors and may openly indulge their sexual appetites - but only if they appear eternally youthful. And a main requirement is a hair color other than gray or white...