The Topknot ties: Gendering of identities

While the depiction of symbols/icons of the male figure  in comic strips, ads and most glaringly in public washrooms enjoy a certain anonymity by being a plane stick/blob of black or white, women have been ‘marked’ by certain adornments since times immemorial. The frock, the heels, the handbag and the ponytail caricatured in the symbols of female representation always remind women that they have to take on certain frivolities as significant extensions of their beings. Women can’t be that plain stick or blob of black, their gender identities being adorned by signifiers of deep seated sexuality. Since the time of the classics, for instance, in Rapunzel we see how long hair becomes a potent source of the woman’s existence and is used against her to punish her for establishing a relationship with a man. Locked up in a tower by the wicked Dame Gothel Rapunzel would let down her beautiful long golden hair to let in her mistress but she is furious when she gets to know that other than her she has been meeting a prince alike.  As a punishment her hair is chopped off; for expressing her sexuality she has to give away the tradition marker of female sexuality. Transcending to more recent times we witness how an entire hair-care industry revolves around the different hair straightening treatments African American women. These women painstakingly and patiently go by these cosmetic surgical procedures to conform to the stereotypically attractive manner in which women wear their hair in USA, as illustrated in Chris Rock’s Good Hair (2009).  All because they can’t have a smooth and silky ponytail like the white skinned American women, cursing their cropped, curly hair? Well…have we really transcended? While it may sound like an unnecessary exaggeration, in the sexist symbol of the ponytail is grounded the contemporary discourse on rape culture being instigated by the way a women adorns herself. What women do with their hair or their bodies is the topic of much deliberation, unlike in case of men because we have never been exempted from the external adornments in caricatured representations.

While men are braving the topknot look with great panache, what about the iconography of the male figure in literature, in comic strips, in the doors of washrooms? Has the male stick even come to wear a beard or a tie? Hardly.