“A flamboyant head of hair is neither feminine nor masculine; it is human and it sets us apart from our primate relatives as we evolved into a distinct species” (Morris, 1987, p. 21). As soon as we were sufficiently advanced, Morris continued, we set about snipping, curling, and shaving. The shaft, the visible part of the hair, grows about a third of a millimeter a day which allows a continuous grooming and surveillance of this highly malleable part of the human body. Growth slows down in old age, illness, pregnancy, and cold weather, and is most speedy between the ages of 16 and 24, in health, and in recovery from illness to compensate for impeded growth. A hair lives about six years on a healthy young adult head, and if uncut, will grow to reach roughly a meter in length, flowing from head to knees (Morris, 1987, p. 25). Thus, hair growing and cutting dialogues with and expresses biological life. No wonder then hair fashioning is vital to our understanding of life, birth, youth, aging, and death.

Moral ideas about hair growth and cutting may reflect existential threats of finitude and express a believer’s devotion to symbol systems.1 Women who sell their hair online tend to highlight their healthy diet and lifestyle, stressing their hair’s “natural qualities” and the loving treatment they give it (Tarlo, 2017, p. 36). This meaning-making about biological hair naturalizes its symbolism. Hair becomes a material mediator of social facts and makes health a “paramount norm” of human life (Durkheim, [1901] 2014, pp. 4, 57). In youth-worshipping Western cultures, any sign of (biological or cultural) aging is something of a disaster. The drive is to relentlessly keep the body “naturally young” through a blend of emotive, semiotic, and sacred actions that perpetually root health in hair. As we ceaselessly fuse youth and health, we construct a social fact that directs social life and is eminently visible in hair that grays, thins, or disappears with age. Displaying and sensing healthy hair is, in other words, part of how we enact and feel human history, common capacities and frailties, and moral youthfulness (Bordo, 1999; Prince, 2009; Shilling, 2004; Weitz, 2004).

Throughout history and across cultures, beliefs and desires regarding youthfulness vary yet persist. There might not be much truth to the fountain of youth, but its meaning has enchanted humanity from 3500 bce, inspiring myths about historic figures like Alexander the Great and Ponce de León searched for its wellspring and alchemists attempting to recreate its brew (Olshansky, Hayflick, & Carnes, 2002). Today, medical professionals (Crawford, 2006; Zola, 1972), self-branded gurus, and social-media influencers fuse health and fit femininities within a landscape saturated with youthful images (Baker & Rojek, 2020; O’Connor, 2011). Meaning-making about bodies seems placed squarely with commercial actors or the hegemonic ideologists of big pharma. Our bodies have become props, only worthy as exchange value measured in money or followers, or as a means of medicalized surveillance. Yet humans are undeniably destined for an ephemeral existence, and aging is an impossible dynamic to reverse. Many also would agree that worship of youthful bodies is problematic and downright ageist.2 Nonetheless, myths about youthfulness continue to resound. “Magic” anti-aging creams have made a modern alchemist revival. Even the rational world of science blows life into stories of old mice and men turned young again and of claims of research firms that (for a neat sum) slow aging.3

Apart from indicating a period before adult maturity when one is young, youthfulness also signifies growth, vitality, freshness, and little erosion.4 According to Jung (1967, pp. 235–236), the youthfulness of childhood, as an archetype, is suggestive of unconscious, instinctive happenings, a state of unconscious identity with parents, and therefore, an unconscious and animal state of life. This sort of freedom from responsibility and social control is lost with age, but the longing for this world endures and generates its symbolic landscape.5 Thus, the transitional years of youth, adolescence, represent both this imagined loss and long for childhood and the crises that ensue when we reach for and push away adult commitments, moral worlds, and ideologies (Hopkins, 1983; Kaplan, 1984).

Youthfulness is a cultural grammar of complex threats and promises. The public figure of youth often materializes in the moral standard-bearers of civil society. In Norway and Norden, youths have spearheaded youth political movements and national efforts for independence, unity, and progress.6 As a code, youth signifies hope, courage, vitality, and willpower, as well as a dangerous, primitive force in need of discipline. As youths are tempted by the “evils” of alcohol, crime, and “deviant sexualities,” the purity and democratic prospects they possess remain prominent, but fragile.

In this chapter, I explore how the ponytail through its aesthetic surface may make tangible the complex symbol systems of youthfulness. Employing icon theory (Alexander, 2010b, 2012), I show how the ponytail can hold and transmit youthfulness throughout a woman’s lifespan, from childhood and well into old age.

Childhood

An icon is about experience, not communication. To have an iconic consciousness is to understand without knowing, or at least without knowing that one knows. It is to understand by feeling, contact, and sensory evidence rather than the mind (Alexander, 2010b, p. 11). Some of the cheerful youthfulness of a sleek, straight ponytail echoes from its being the fashion of the young, White, heteronormative female.7 An October 22, 1956 report in the newspaper Raumnes concerning the vibrant Girl Scouts of small town Haga exemplifies this claim. A fine row of bikes welcomes the reporter, signifying that she is in the right place:

And well inside, there it is, the horde we are looking for. Dark [tanned] necks, light [blonde] excited ponytails, and short wagging backs [bustesvanser] bent over in a thrilled preoccupation” with their many tasks. These eight young women radiate “the most youthful of adolescence’s fiery glow and interest” for the cause. They play and study, embroider, and tie all kinds of knots. They sing. Then they put knowledge into action in the great outdoors. Blue-eyed perhaps, the girls fill the room with their “pure voices and focused wrinkles on the otherwise smooth foreheads”.

These young, ponytailed girls are poised and healthy, just like the 25 lively [livsfriske] kids in the summer of 1958 at the summer colony at Vennevold, an El Dorado for three-to-nine year olds who have come to the countryside from Oslo (Raumnes. July 23, 1958). The newspaper account paints a picture of ideal, healthy childhood, aswirl with energy and budding like nature itself, as the children excitedly surround the reporters’ car, “with wild locks and ponytails in perfect harmony, light Nordic bangs, and many with the essential scar on their knees. Brown [tanned], well and healthy, fizzing with the joy of life.”

Nature draws children away from the worldly world, to escape and challenge it while remaining in the mythical landscapes of childhood (Natov, 2011), a process apparent in these stories about Girl Scouts and summer campers, as well as in the cherished children’s literature of the Nordic countries. Far from all girls in Norden grow up like ardent feminist and children’s prose writer Astrid Lindgren’s Ronja, Røverdatter [Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter] who, with wild screams of joy (and sometimes fear) and an advanced moral sense, runs into the woodlands her wild, dark hair flowing.8 Similarly, Maria Parr’s Tonje Glimmerdal [Astrid, the Unstoppable] with a big, red hair flowing in the wind, fears no challenges in conquering mountains, ski jumps, backflips, sled rides.9 Nor in amending broken relationships with compassion and empathy. That is, with a little bit of “speed and self-confidence,” which is Tonje’s catchphrase, these young girl femininities represent a central childhood narrative in this region of the world. In their struggle for independence and belonging, Ronja and Astrid never lose their love for a nature with its seasonal shifts, dangers, and joys. The ponytailed child with a tanned neck and scarred knees, as such, is a mythical character herself, in the flesh. Well brought up, she will roam free with immense potential.

On February 28, 1959, VG’s Arne Skouen, a journalist well-known for his fight for the developmentally disabled and for institutionalizing the regular VG entry, the “Declaration,” poetically narrated his visit with a special little girl at a childcare institution. Under the headline “Your little destiny,” Skouen’s article describes how the ten-year-old girl, fictitiously named Frida, was shoved out from her parents’ “nest” that was home to 11 other little ones and onto the “dump.” The only parting gift Frida received was the North Norwegian dialect from a folk song, which she practices repeatedly, letting her voice linger on the last intonation of its argot, “Your mommy-y-y” [Mor di-i-i].

Although Frida should have been in third grade, she is not able to collect her thoughts. “She shrieks in joy at the bird that flies above her, when she should be focusing on her drawing.” At day, she absorbed all around her. Like “a talented artist with a startling maturity, but oh, so impatient,” she looks at the sailboats on the water calling them “tents.” At night, in the dusk, “her voice is clear like a bell as she sings her dream of mommy-y-y.”

To cast Frida’s story, Skouen fuses social issues of family, state economies, and politics with the lack of caring for children like her. He describes “how she sings her Northlandish” and how “she toils, in the heat of the moment, with her rubber boots.” He lets us see with him “how her hair is bound in a ponytail that precociously spurts from underneath her red hat … As she is out playing with the other kids, … Frida is free like the foal.” Like the foal, we understand that Frida can move with a spirited ponytail only if she is cared for. The journalist pleads for politicians to see and care as well. To help the readers identify with the politics of Frida’s situation, he links childhood to an instinctive, creative play materialized in the healthy and youthful swing of the ponytail. A lack of love arrested Frida’s development at an instinctual childhood state in which she still calls out for her mother’s vow and is incapable of gathering her thoughts. As an archetype, ponytailed Frida is a negative instance. She disrupts the dull clockwork of our world. Who can be so cruel to deny committed love to such an innocent child?

Many times, the ponytail pops up when journalists poetically condense the image of a girl. In a play by Anne-Cath Vestly, girls with ponytails go to the theater and learn about the new, stressful consumer society (VG, September 3, 1965a, p. 7). A caring mom fashions a girl’s ponytail in front of the mirror with deliberation (VG, October 20, 1965b, p. 4). A ponytail with four rubber bands, one after another, and a horsetail brush at the tip is the chosen fashion of early primary-school girls (VG, August 25, 1966, p. 14). Josef Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, was once a scrawny, cheerful 13-year-old with a ponytail and knee-high stockings (VG, September 6, 1967, p. 10). Nine-year-old prime ballerina, Anne-Mette Torp, wears two ponytails (usually called pigtails) as she sings the famous Norwegian children’s song “Du og jeg og vi to [You and I and Us Two]” (VG, April 21, 1973, p. 38). And then there is Nina Sand, the only child of her little town, who has no other kids to play with. However, with a long dark ponytail down her back, she enjoys the company of the boisterousness and confidence of Astrid Lindgren’s ([1948] 2015) character Pippi Longstocking, although Nina is a little shy herself (VG, November 11, 1978, p. 28).

This widespread presence of the ponytail among girls is most interesting, however, because of the ways in which it is interpreted and felt. For example, a 1985 story in VG contrasts Norwegian and East European gymnastics:

Of another world: competing in the same European Championship, but Norwegian Hanne Veiby and Gry Hansen do not come close to Maxi Gnauck other than when asking for an autograph. But the Norwegian girls are having fun doing sports.

[The Norwegian girls, 14 and 16 years old, admire the “majestic” moves of world star gymnasts, Maxi Gnauck and Natalia Jurtchenko.] Mouth and eyes wide open, with their autograph collection in hand, they [the Norwegians] watch their competitors perform series that they do not even dare to dream to carry out.

[At the final workout before the main event,] “strict East European coaches, wearing the mask of a heartless stoic, instructing their little ones in worn-out gym socks, ponytails, and magnesium-white hands. The girls themselves seem unaffected. They listen carefully and will not let their competitors, the press or the functionaries, steel their attention. When they finish their drills, they march straight to their coach. There awaits a pat on the shoulder for approval, or a scolding that makes their little heads bow in shame. They will become great gymnasts, whether they like it or not. During the practice, their focus is so intense that any teacher at Blindern [University of Oslo] would turn pale in envy. The opposite is true among some of the Western European nations, where the smile is steadily present on the girls. But then again, they get to collect autographs too.

Many might say that this shows why Norway is so far behind in international gymnastics. Obviously, Gry and Hanne could walk the hall like gymnast-robots. The smile could be washed away, and seriousness could take over, completely. No, it is better that we, the TV-audience, are satisfied with being impressed by the East Europeans. But do not forget as you watch them: Goodness how much these little ones have toiled for their success. (VG, May 11, 1985, p. 41)

Once more, as with Frida’s story, the ponytail marks the culturally contingent promise of a girl that might otherwise be hard to see. While the smile is missing amid adult authority and disciplinary regime, the girl is still there, as her ponytail provides iconic proof of her existence. At the same time, the ponytail—as a centerpiece of sacred and polluted dimensions of upbringing—can generate a stark contrast and reveal how youthful, instinctual prospects of play can be lost. Similar to Foucault (1977), the journalist frames the robotic East European girl as emerging from a militaristic surveillance culture. Indeed, she has a child’s ponytail, but she is stripped of childhood’s freedom. It is not that Norwegian sports have no adult authority and no robotic athletes; rather they are coded differently, and therefore, are seen differently. Youngsters are protected in ways that allow them to be another type of children. This contrasting story of the East European other is one of a Norwegian identity that is anti-hierarchical and antiauthoritarian.10 Thus, the iconic image of the girl gymnast and robot-athlete with a ponytail seems to be a useful one for the Norwegian journalist: She reappears two years later inside the confines of a military hall in Seska Moscow (Aftenposten, May 23, 1987, p. 6) as a perfect illustration of the opposite of a healthy Norwegian childhood.

Childhoods are cultural constructs. In Norway, sports are the country’s largest voluntary organizations and social movement. They provide an arena for youths’ moral and physical development, which represent the country’s health. At arms’ length distance, the Norwegian welfare state endorses this civil contribution made by sports. The key symbol of ‘the joy of sports’ [idrettsglede] that is responsible for the stark contrast in between Norwegian and East European gymnastics can be found in the Norwegian public sphere and are associated with health, voluntarism, equality, communion, and democracy. Adult volunteers commit to help the local sports club, and thus, also commit to the local community’s youth, at least in principle (T. B. Broch, 2022).

Of course, Norwegian sports are not without problematics. Recurrently, sports are called out as overly competitive, sexist, and racist, and civil actors steadily attempt to repair the notions of Norwegian sports as a safe haven for the nation’s children and youth.11 With great success, sports continue to be a leading provider of afterschool activities. Therefore, youth sports in Norway are a prime site for the interpretation of healthy youths and where the vitality and health of youths can be performed. The contrast of the very skilled, but sadly subdued East European gymnast makes a good case of this debate.

According to the Norwegian press, the sporting health of Norwegian girls is quite different from that of the East Europeans. A good example is the Norway Cup, one of the world’s largest soccer tournaments for children ages 6 to 19. From its 1972 inauguration, this competition welcomed female players, although the Norwegian Soccer Federation did not do so until 1976. As an international tournament, it has won the 1995 UNICEF-Norway prize for building bridges between children and youth across cultures.

No other team has a more pressing time schedule than the pack of young girls from the club that hosts the tournament. They get up early in the morning to remove litter, candy bar wrappings, paper cups, and left-behind programs. And, these troopers are not among the most serious of footballers either, a journalist reported, after asking them about their positions on the pitch. Most of them are fully unaware and careless of their position. Three games into the 1986 Norway Cup, Jeanette’s team had scored zero and let in 20. “They scored again. Silje, how many goals have they scored? Little Jeanette (8 years old) looks at her teammate, puts her fingers to her mouth, wondering, and throws her light blonde ponytail to her back” (VG, July 31, 1986, p. 30). But, as with many other stories of archetypal positive youth, no one (at least not the journalist) can neglect their enthusiastic play and voluntarism, on and off the pitch, in making the prized Norway Cup (Fig. 1

Fig. 1
A photograph of two female children playing football.

The healthy ponytailed child. (Picture credit: Lorado via Getty Images)

Full size image

).

Embodied youthful identities, should not reflect merely toil, discipline, and achievement. And when it does, the toil should be a form that is prized, such as in voluntarism and democratic participation. However, youth should indulge in unserious play, not drills and authoritarian sport regimes. When asked “Why do you dance ballet?” May Linn Viker said, “Because it is fun! She puts both her hands in her mouth, looks at mommy and giggles so much that her dark ponytail jumps. She has been on stage with almost 300 ballet students and thinks it is just fun” (Aftenposten, December 12, 1990, p. 40). That is how children sports should be!

With its many positive and negative aspects, and charged with archetypal myths, the ponytail is an iconic signifier of “the girl,” who participates in “instinctual play” but also needs democratic guidance. Her healthy environment and upbringing should not lack authority figures, but those authorities should be democratically concerned with the child’s healthy development. When not properly cared for, or socialized into guilt and constrained by social power, the ponytailed girl still contains the form of the girl child, but we feel the painful loss of her content: her normal, healthy childhood, and the child herself. The aesthetic surface of the ponytail presents this dualistic presence of the archetypal girl. When she roams free, with scars on her knees and a healthy tan, her ponytail swings happily like the horsetail of a frisky foal. When it is “simply there” as a discharged signifier of a girl, we sense and fear its death.

When a residential block collapsed in Turkey, Muztaffer Yarla was thrown from his balcony onto the sidewalk. Lying on a stretcher as rescue personnel frenetically searched for survivors, he feared for the lives of his family members. Only God knows. “A picture of a girl with a ponytail falls undamaged from the jaws of a bulldozer” removing rubble from the scene and suddenly the machines stop as a naked pair of lifeless feet are revealed (NTB, August 17, 1999). Like the snippets of hair kept to retain the life spirit of our youth or of someone we love now passed away, the ponytail holds the half-life a healthy childhood that never was (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
A list of healthy childhood hair. 1. Freedom to roam. Socially constrained. 2. Instinctual play. Socialized guilt. 3. Democratic guidance and care. Non-committal parenting and scorn.

The symbolic layers used to interpret and enact healthy and unhealthy childhoods

Full size image

Youth

The ponytailed girl, roaming about with healthy scars or putting in the long voluntary hours in her sports club, will eventually become a teenager with an altered physical-cum-social body.12 Thus, the iconic ponytail is amended to the scripts of young adulthood.13 While the ponytailed girl jumps into play, youth never seem to make up their minds. As shopkeepers in 1956 brace themselves for the last fervent Norwegian Christmas shoppers, the clerk with best-selling items like the ponytail clip, kindly asks a reporter, “Please tell the young women that come to get that 40 cent lipstick not to arrive five minutes before closing” (VG, December 24, 1956).

Youth is a time to sample caricatures of our societies, and every so often, we retain those that we only meant to try on (Kaplan, 1984). In the 1950s, a new generation of youth tie up their ponytails “with a prosaic stocking-band around the ‘tail’ as clips and bands grow ever more popular” in Norway and the United States (VG, January 22, 1957a). At a rock music competition, girls “with ponytails, pigtails, and long hair [dåre-hår]” abound. One of them “took her shoes off and was using them as ammunition, throwing them at the referees” who had declared the champion (VG, August 22, 1958). Similar styles reappear a generation later. “Leather jackets, tight dungarees and slick hair on the boys. Ponytails, small dark sunglasses, and boots on the girls. These were the important ingredients for many” of those who still rocked around the clock, even though they were not even born “when legendary Bill Haley in 1954 rocked his way into the world” (VG, June 18, 1979, p. 36). Generation after generation continued to rock hard at concerts, so hard “that ponytails were shaking and dungarees got drenched” (VG, June 6, 1980, p. 45). The rise of “the teenager” coincided with the rise of rock and roll, and never really seems to have settled. Rock girls in all ages even survived the transition to Y2K with the “‘60s still clinging on their rhythms and outfits, dotted skirts and dipping ponytails that we suspect have been hanging on since, well, the Sixties” (Aftenposten, July 14, 2001, p. 21).

Many of the stories collected for this book reflect White, Norwegian heteronormativity a social status, arguably, achieved through trials observed by journalists out for a stroll. The journalist sees all those cool boys on their phones, and all those “small girls in white, tight pants that totter on their high platform shoes. They look like newborn foals, struggling to stay on their legs as they walk the cobblestones. Ponytails wave above eyelashes that are black like the spider’s feet. Fingers with glued on nails gripping bottles with unidentifiable drinks. Girls with cell phones glued to their ears. Girls meet boys. They chew gum. Giggle. And flirt” (NTB, April 6, 2000). The roaming, high-spirited foal, representing the healthy girl child, is replaced with a foal barely able to stay on her feet, recalling Disney’s young Bambi barely getting a foothold on the ice. These teenagers’ ponytails sway as they try to manage fashionable high heels and skirts that constrain their stride and attention (Rich, 1983).

Hair allows us to play with potential racial, sexual, and class identities and to assert who we are and whom we want to become (Weitz, 2004). These cobblestone wobblers present many identifiable stereotypes that indicate how youths seek to shape their own futures, and, as archetypes, the future of the collective (Berggren, 1997). As they try on these cultural archetypes (some of which their parents would prefer they did not), many will deem their stumbling a natural part of youth.

As a hallmark of the land of individuality, McDonalds conquered Norway and is in 2000 the country’s largest employer of youth between 16 and 25. In press reports about the non-unionized youth working at McDonalds, such as “May Elise Skauvik (19) is sweating behind the cash register, her ponytail sticking out from underneath her dark blue cap with that big M in yellow” (Adresseavisen, July, 17, 2000, p. 10). The reporter is critical of the company, but finds little disapproval among the young employees, who would rather spend their money on things than a union.

Adolescence is a time of cultural promises and dangers. While some work the grills of McDonalds, some face other prospects. Thirteen-year-old Jannicke Boug delivered the May 17th speech in 1988 at the wreathed tombstone of poet, social debater, and proponent of the Independence Day celebration, Henrik Wergeland. While McDonalds’ young women chose not to unionize, Borg–like the many young men and women that perform this annual speech–urged her generation to join in solidarity with those who fought for their country’s independence and for those who are less fortunate today. True to the genre of Independence Day speeches, many in 2022 honored Ukraine’s fight for independence as well as their Norwegian ancestors. In 1988, Boug will ask all to “Join in!” As she practices her speech “she encourages all her fellow students in Oslo and swings her ponytail to accentuate her message” (Aftenposten, May 16, 1988, p. 4).

Adulthood

As described in Chap. 3, adult fashionistas demonstrate that the ponytail is not limited to any specific age group, and as we trace it across the social categories of age, there is much to learn about its iconicity (Pugh, 2014). The ponytail seems to carry with it a transcendent symbol system that makes it iconic. For example, when 22-year-old actor Kari Sundby received a stipend in 1957 at the National theatre [the National Theater], a reporter wrote, “With her long ponytail, no makeup on her face, and wide vividly playful eyes—no one could possibly envy her the 5000 kroner prize. After six years of toil, she had earnt the praise” (VG, December, 11, 1957b), although she does not know how she will spend the award. “Like a breath of wind she vanishes” from the journalist’s eyes and notepad, “out the door. Small, slender and smiling. Ponytail waving goodbye.” As Sunby is awarded for her extraordinary effort, her ponytail indicates she is in a work mode and needs to get her hair off her face, just like pop culture critic Whitaker (2018) argued. At once, her long ponytail, no makeup, and vivid eyes depict the “natural truth” of her energetic effort—a union of matter and spirit.

In 1983 as Oslo New Theatre’s puppet theater celebrated its 30th anniversary, 40-year-old professional puppeteer Kjertsi Gemeten sought to dramatize Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Seal,” in which the young seal, Kotic, experiences an adventure, “life itself, where animals are at peace.” Gemeten explained to an Aftenposten reporter, “I do not want to make it into a play about war or politics. What I want to show is that a richer life is possible if we break our patterns, not only in combat or opposition. Like that little seal, we can all experience that adventure.” Having the adventure within, feeling it, is vital for both adults and children, the puppeteer advised. “With a long, light colored ponytail she [Gemeten] looks like a child marveling in a land of puppets herself” (Aftenposten, December 3, 1983, p. 25).

Although these adult women inarguably are enacting the expectation of longhair, the journalists’ iconic consciousness for the narrative of healthy youthfulness charges the ponytail with sensuous energy. The sacral elements of this code do not infantilize the women in ways that constrain their energy and movements (like the ponytailed teenagers’ high heels as they navigate cobblestones). The symbolic layer of ponytailed youthfulness generates narratives of excitement, high spirits, and kinetic, creative energy. The issue is not whether the ponytail exposes these women’s energetic youthfulness to the journalists or their vitality highlights the ponytail, but rather how some meanings remain and others change as the ponytail moves along a continuum of age. As the hairstyle travels from an idealized childhood into the rational, disenchanted adult world, the ponytail’s full symbolic capacity for vitality, growth, and promise remains.

Leach (1969) argued that such movements, from a sacred to a profane landscape, allow the vitality of the sacred to enter the real world. One of the adult’s greatest life challenges is to see and understand the child’s world reality from the child’s perspective. To do so, we have to reconfigure our worlds into symbolic landscapes (Erikson, 1937; Winnicott, [1971] 2005). In turn, this very re-creation of childhood and youth travels into adulthood where adults re-experience and interpret life through this symbolic imaginary (T. B. Broch, 2020). Therefore, the ponytail serves as both the compass and the pole as we traverse Norway’s social terrains.

Objects can retain history and shape potential futures (Hilmar, 2016; Lønning & Kohli, 2021), and a ponytail can put these symbolic worlds in motion. Ponytailed adult men and women can be full of creativity and artistry. Gerdi Jacobs, a women artist in her eighties, is “still going strong, light bodied, like a young girl, she retrieves the pictures she wants to show us, while her ponytail swings happily” (Aftenposten, May 9, 1992, p. 43). Jacobs’ biography is imbued in her body as was ballet dancer Anne Borg’s. A dancer since age 11, she was the very personification of Norwegian Ballet, head of the Norwegian Opera, and rector of the Statens Ballethøgskole. She had performed at most venues in Norway, in London, Leningrad, and New York:

On a casual weekday she wears her hair in a ponytail and dresses in clothes most 50-years-olds rarely build up the courage to wear, but that look great on her. Tight blue jeans and red shoes today. Her silhouette is a straight line [rank]. As if an invisible ballet maestro was in the room with us. (Aftenposten, September 27, 1986)

Through this symbolic imagery of a healthy and vital youthfulness, Borg’s choice of fashion and the way she bodily enters and sustains the world is shaped as her identity as a dancer meets the public codes of ponytailed health. Her aesthetic surface evokes an iconic consciousness in the journalist who poetically recaptures her meaningful materiality.

Borg is not alone in shaping social life in this way. Eighty-four-year-old activist Ingeborg Brekke, who occasionally wears a youthful ponytail, “believes in the feminist potential in religion” and gets “furiously pissed when men preach in ways that take all dignity from women.” She owns Bekkestranda Fjordhotell, designed by architect Bjørn Simonnæs and known for its rustic appearance, sod roof, and not one straight angel. The hotel’s shape—the way it shapes its inhabitants and visitors—is “a monument of her willpower,” as Brekke also goes against the grain and any straight line. Her feet are strong, and despite her age, they carry her body through the furious tempo of her life, the twists and turns on the roads she takes, her ponytails “standing straight out as the woman storms passed us” (Bergens Tidene, March 3, 1992, p. 42).

We are painting broad brush strokes here, moving swiftly over historical time, jumping from context to context, touching briefly on condensed images of a symbolism of health in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. That is how myth is established. It is what myth does.14 Like myth, the story of the ponytail is organized around a central character—an archetypal woman protagonist—who endures challenges and changes, experiences mistakes and successes.

Consider, for example, a journalist’s depiction of internationally recognized Norwegian actor and director Liv Ullmann, the 1971 Golden Globe Award winner for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama, a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and co-founder and honorary chair of the International Rescue Committee’s Women’s Refugee Commission. The journalist describes the 57-year-old Ullmann as “slimmer. Confident. Modern. More satisfied. With two major movies and a TV series in the rear view. Moreover, leaving her home and husband Donald. Meet ‘the new’ Liv Ullmann, full of dreams and visions for the future. She arrives for her interview on the tram from Skarpsno. Wild bangs, rain in the hair, wind in her ponytail. Soft as sap [sevje] and slender like a teenager. Now she will direct and produce her own movies. Now she will take control herself” (VG, November 24, 1996, pp. 26–27).

The enduring presence of the ponytail does not allow us to reduce all its appearances to a mere echo of childhood or a longing for that time. As a collective representation of existential abstractions storied into our lived realities, myth allows us to bring ideas of the past into the present and future. Childhood, as a personal experience and collective idea, never lives on in its original form. Rebirth, vitality in sap, winds of change, and regenerative rain stand in for the ability to create life (Jung, [1972] 2003). Thus, Ullmann might have youthful qualities and vitality materialized in a ponytail, but she is not infantilized. She has matured. She is confident, independent, and in control.

As we consider the ponytail wearer from girl child to woman, the code of youthful health is challenged and refined. A healthy childhood is symbolically created by the interplay of cultural ideas of the child’s raw biological and psychologic potential and the adult’s caring and loving democratic guidance. It is the adult’s task (and adult society, if we ask journalist Arne Skouen, cited above) to ensure the child is ready and equipped for democratic participation. Therefore, in this landscape of archetypes and symbolic role models like Liv Ullmann, Anne Borg, and Ingeborg Brekke, we also find concrete and real down-to-earth helpers in children’s lives. For example, Julie Alfstad, who for 40 consecutive years has taught kids to swim. In the Norwegian village of Toten, Alfstad watches as the wind leaves the lake rippled and the children pulling “their shoulders to right up under their ears, as they adjust their helpful Styrofoam, and dive in. It is about 18 degrees Celsius and a good day for swimming.” Alfstad stands in the shallow waters “with platina hair in a ponytail, pink lipstick, a pink windbreaker jacket over her swim suit, pink ear rings, and indeed a pair of pink bathing shoes as she directs about a dozen rascals, white as a snowstorm [no tan yet], from Toten” (NTB, July 28, 1986).

Despite the cold, this is a much better place to practice swimming, Alfstad argues. After all, accidents that require swimming and survival skills usually occur in the outdoors. What better place to practice than in nature’s sometimes chilly, goosebumps-inciting milieu! Here Alfstad—high-spirited and pink from her lips to her toes, with her ponytail swaying—trains the youth of tomorrow.

In all this clutter of children, teenagers, young and mature adults, the ponytail might seem to be a quite random symbolic form that at best is conventionally fashionable. We could perfectly well end and settle our argument right here having made this commonsensical finding: the ponytail is the product of ideologies and power relations that have repositioned the hegemony of beauty culture at the apex of a neoliberal femininity.15 Western cultures are brimming with myths of the healthy, youthful body, and the attempt to reverse aging has become an individualized and medicalized responsibility and self-branding opportunity. Beauty, fitness, and health have fused with images of youthfulness to make countering the aging process a display of personal control and self-investment.16 Is the material feel for the ponytail’s youthfulness only a false consciousness? Is it controlled and surveilled by a neoliberal ideology equaling empowerment to a consumption of youth, or are there other truths hiding in the clutter and symbolism of the texts assembled here? What are the ponytails’ emergent meanings, and how does it instantiate broader cultural patterns across contexts and ideologies?

The ponytailed landscape is made up of a multitude of female wearers that are all bound by the same existential dimension, aging. Myth allows experiences and observations of aging to leave our everyday reality and enter a landscape of abstract answers. In a feedback loop, myth’s answers can be placed back into and resolve our irreconcilable realities (Lévi-Strauss, 1967). Aging, childhood, and adulthood are cultural and biological realities at the heart of our existence. Traditionally, adolescence is a liminal life stage resolved by rites of passage, but in modernity, prospects of a predictable adult life are more difficult. This does not mean that meanings about childhood and adulthood, and all in between, have vanished; rather, adjustments, adaptability, and youthfulness have become sacred themselves and rites of passages are differentiated and diversified over longer periods of time.17 In every myth, as well as those of modernity, follows a mediator, an instrument, a middle ground, or an abnormal category with special powers.18 Hair has a liminal existence itself, as a growing yet dead materiality, and therefore, is well qualified as the mediator that allows youthfulness to oscillate between the poles of childhood and adulthood. The ponytail materializes the instinctual play and freedom of an ideal childhood and can seem to reverse or slow the aging of adults who long to return to the ideal of youthfulness. This is myth: a dream-like landscape where our collective unconsciousness answers questions about our shared existence. The plot and the biological reality of aging are unchanged, but the myth provides a story that aging with youthfulness can be achieved in an experience of freedom and instinctual play guided by democratic actors.

This chapter started with examples of ponytails on girl children. Some stories where cheerful tales of healthy girls; others were melancholic accounts of a lost childhood. The ponytail lets us see and sense the girl in both instances, but with contradictory meanings surrounding her aura. In an ideal childhood, Norwegian girls participate in the play of democracy, in tournaments like the Norway Cup that pioneered gender equality and multiculturalism and allow children to volunteer in this democratic movement. This ideal image contrasts with Frida who was left by her parents at an institution and with the East European gymnasts who had become robots in an authoritarian regime. In these cases, their societies stole their “childhood.”

Adolescence makes for a transitory stage in which the dangers and joys of childhood and adult life are tried out. Norwegian youths struggle to find out what to believe, desire, and imitate. They can unionize or keep the change for themselves; they can spend the night out wobbling the cobblestones or stand straight as speakers and bearers of civil virtues on Independence Day. Some do both, and much so more.

In adult life, the ponytail remains charged with a youthfulness that is first lost, yet continues to reverberate with myth as the wearer enters and sustains her communities. Adult women with ponytails retain their youthfulness and move as soft as sap. Many of them are activists for women’s rights who speak for humanity and social justice—feminists revered for their efforts. The youthfulness imbued in their ponytails—vitality, hope, courage, and willpower—is their democratic weapon.

The ponytail icon allows opportunities for absorption, imitation, and a chance to revitalize meanings that fascinate us (Alexander, 2010a, p. 327). The ponytail is a mediator that negotiates youthfulness until its inherent contradictions are settled perpetually. It dominates and resolves our longing for an imaginary youth, creativity, and vitality. The ponytail simultaneously materializes this loss and keeps it alive through a youthfulness that eventually is lost again—twice lost.19 This melancholic oscillation between youth and adulthood is a potent feedback loop energized by folklore, existential dilemmas, and processes of democratization. Absorption in its melancholy generates uplifting and draining energies coded as youthfulness. Ponytailed health is about this iconic consciousness of youthfulness: experiencing without necessarily knowing that one knows. To forget about death and finitude, paradoxically, we must embody health and youth, and hide this cultural process of naturalization deep beneath the surface of a swishing ponytail.20

With this iconic charge of the ponytail in mind, it is easy to argue that commercial and state interests can capitalize on the symbolism of health and make the ponytailed women an instrument of their ideologies. Yet, they can do so only up to a certain point and only if their ideology is truly taken for granted, hegemonic, and unquestioned. Analytically, this can only be so if we choose to bracket out ponytailed youth’s sacral dimensions and see the ponytail as solely signifying social constraints instead of freedom, merely socialized guilt instead of play, and docile conformity instead of democratic participation and caring. If that is the case, the ponytail will likely lose its many potentials and become perverted by an ideological system of our time. This has happened before; bobs and flappers are still out there, ready for an iconic recharge. We are active drama-producing agents with bodies that sense and enact our collective hopes and anxieties through myth (Alexander, 2017; Belting, 2012). For the ponytail to remain iconic, it must offer us leeway to maneuver and oscillate between existential hopes and fears (Figs. 3 and 4).

Fig. 3
A list of ponytailed health. 1. Freedom. Constrain. 2. Instinctual play. Socialized guilt. 3. Democratic participation. Noncommittal conformity.

The codes and symbolic layers used to interpret and enact healthy and unhealthy womanhood

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Fig. 4
Three spiky circles are labeled as follows. 1. Freedom. Constrain. 2. Democratic participation. Noncommittal conformity. 3. Play. Guilt.

The codes and symbolic layers of the healthy hair

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Moral meaning and actions, whether aligning, countering, or providing an alternative, are two sides of the same coin and tightly interrelated (Weber, [1904–05] 2009, [1922] 1993).

  2. 2.

    Awakening the sense of myth as falsity, Shilling (2004, 2008) argued that the healthy body norm is a mythical creation of the appealing, functional youthful body and an appalling, dysfunctional old body.

  3. 3.

    Forskning.no, December, 27, 2016; Independent, September, 6, 2019; NRK.no. December 17, 2019.

  4. 4.

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/youthful; https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/youth.

  5. 5.

    Predominantly in the Western world, perhaps.

  6. 6.

    For more about how youths have figured as moral standard-bearers of civil society in the United States and globally, see (Alexander, 2006, pp. 347–358; Smith & Howe, 2015, pp. 157–161), and in Norway and Norden, see (Berggren, 1997; Nielsen, 2005).

  7. 7.

    The ponytail is often imbued with notions of a White, heteronormative female fashion (Blackburn, 2007; Prince, 2009; Simon, 2000).

  8. 8.

    See Astrid Lindgren’s (1981) book on Ronja. Perhaps best known outside of Scandinavia for her iconic Pippi Longstocking series, Lindgren is revered in Scandinavia in much the same way Roald Dahl is in the United Kingdom. She wrote 11 separate series and 25 stand-alone books that have topped 165 million sales and been adapted for film 53 times. Her works in translation rank fourth in worldwide children’s book sales and can be read in 100 languages (King, 2020).

  9. 9.

    Parr ([2009] 2017).

  10. 10.

    Identities are created in contrasts of who we are and who we are not (Lawler, 2008; Polkinghorne, 2000; Woodward, 2002).

  11. 11.

    The meanings of childhood are contingent on culture (H. B. Broch, 2002; Dyck, 2012), and in Norway, sports have had an intimate relationship to the ideational practicing of childhood and youth. Norwegian sports have always been committed to the moral and physical discipline of youth and became an anti-Nazi movement during WWII (Goksøyr & Olstad, 2017). Today sports are held by the state apparatus to contribute to the population’s social and physical health (Helsedirektoratet, 2010, 2018) and to maintain the image of the committed adult who cares for the local community’s youth by volunteering to spending time in practices and events (Archetti, 2003; Lesjø, 2008). Sport represents the largest voluntary organization in Norway, and about 90 percent of the population’s youth has participated (Bakken, 2018). Of course, this dominant position has spurred many debates about and challenges to this very positive depiction, and the “inclusive and solidary nature” of organized Norwegian sport competitions is steadily questioned (Helle-Valle, 2008; Skille & Broch, 2019).

  12. 12.

    See introduction: the physical (Merleau-Ponty, [1945] 2012; Turner, 1995), the performed (Butler, 1990; Goffman, 1959, 1976; West & Zimmerman, 1987), the social (Bourdieu, 1984; Foucault, 1977, 1980), and the meaningful body (Champagne, forthcoming).

  13. 13.

    See Alexander (2004) about how background culture is amended to scripts.

  14. 14.

    (Franz, 1964; Leach, 1969; Lévi-Strauss, 1967).

  15. 15.

    (Gill, 2016; McRobbie, 2009; Tincknell, 2013).

  16. 16.

    (Baker & Rojek, 2020; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Maguire, 2008; Pickren, 2018; Rutherford, 2018).

  17. 17.

    (Alexander, 2017; Eisenstadt, 1962; Silva, 2012).

  18. 18.

    (Douglas, 1966; Leach, 1969; Lévi-Strauss, 1967).

  19. 19.

    Butler (1990, p. 66) wrote beautifully about melancholy by drawing on Lacan and Freud’s work. She argued that refusals of love are resolved through “the incorporative strategy of melancholy, the taking on of attributes of the object/Other that is lost, when loss is the consequence of a refusal of love.” Refusals are themselves refused through “a double negation that redoubles the structure of identity through the melancholic absorption of the one who is, in effect, twice lost.”

  20. 20.

    Beauvoir ([1949] 2011, p. 181) argued that woman must embody health and youth to make man forget about death and finitude, and paradoxically, hide this cultural process of signifying naturalness. This is not a process that merely happens, but an active meaning-making carried out at the interstice of agency and structure (Jacobs & Spillman, 2005; Spillman, 2020).