Another excellent article by Victoria Smith which my Gen X self really enjoyed reading.
https://thecritic.co.uk/women-can-have-short-hair-too/
'If you are a Gen Xer like me — that is, someone who grew up when genuinely androgynous women such as Grace Jones and Annie Lennox were at the height of their fame — this seems especially odd. It is as though something very obvious about what it means to reject femininity has been lost in translation. The degree of misunderstanding might be summed up by a bizarre meme featuring Jones and Lennox, which features the caption “I don’t really understand how people who were young in the 80s act so confused about different gender identities and expressions when the celebrities of their time looked like this”. The trouble is, we weren’t confused at all.
We knew that Grace Jones’ style didn’t make her less female; it showed there were other ways in which to be female. More space was being created for female self-expression. If someone said of Jones “you can’t tell if that’s a man or a woman”, you knew they were lying. You also knew that the comment was intended to reinforce rather than shatter norms. Now, pretending not to be able to tell is treated as laudable.
There is a part of me that finds the seriousness with which some young activists now take trivial gender markers quite funny. It reminds me of the Onion article “Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People”. I almost want to tell the girl in the TikTok video “hang on — you look like that and yet … you’re not a boy? Consider my tiny, Karen-y mind blown!” Yet overall, it’s not that amusing. I can’t help feeling something has gone very badly wrong when the space for free expression for young women in particular has become so narrow that looking totally unremarkable counts as earth-shattering. It is as though the moment one does not conform to the strictest of feminine standards some kind of declaration must be made. Even if one does not go so far as renouncing womanhood entirely, one must at least make it known that one knows this is a little bit on the edge. '