Don’t Forget The Nails

Most people think of the tits. That’s understandable, given they would enter a room some not-insignificant amount of time before the rest of her. But there was also the hair, often high enough to occupy a distinct micro-climate, or the rhinestones, which reflected enough light to obscure everything save the tits and the hair. Saying Dolly Parton had a signature look is a bit like saying water has a signature wetness. What she had was a constitutive way of being. What she had was a relationship to femininity that I found, in turns, inspiring and confounding. Inspiring because she was always in on the joke—“it costs a lot of money to look this cheap;” “I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb… and I also know that I’m not blonde”—and confounding because I would find myself thinking doesn’t she ever get tired of having to be in on the joke? I’ve never had a particularly vexed relationship with my gender, but I do sometimes find the outward trappings tiring. Possibly this is because there are certain parts of it I’m just not very good at. Style has always been a thing that other people are able to have while I—no matter how much effort or money I expend—kind of just wear clothes. Every once in a while I’ll watch make-up tutorials on Instagram and get annoyed ping-ponging between the women showing me how to do a “no-makeup make-up look” who don’t actually need to wear any make-up and the ones who approach it with the kind of rigor one might more readily associate with big engineering projects. I realized years ago that having very long hair is an easy way to avoid ever having to learn what to do with it, and so when I tip my head back my hair touches my ass.

Read it at Defector ↗

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