For Norwegian biathlon skier Tiril Eckhoff, the winter of 2020–2021 was magical. She won 12 world cup races, best Norwegian woman ever and equal to the male national hero, Ole Einar Bjørndalen. In the 2021 world championship in Pokljuka, Russia, she won four gold medals, one silver, and one bronze out of seven possible races. That winter, a spectator noticed a small stylistic detail coinciding with Eckhoff’s every win: a free-flying ponytail. Confronted with this detail, Eckhoff admitted to being a bit superstitious, thanked the viewer, and said she would sport a ponytail the rest of the season (NRK, March 21, 2021; VG, March 12, 2021).

In the world of sports, “winning” connotes charm and captivation, but magic, ritual, and superstition also are characteristic of this realm of chance (Broch & Kristiansen, 2014; Gmelch, 2004/1971). Spectators may not easily detect some competitors’ rituals—like always eating pasta on race day, wearing the same pair of boxers, or repeating the same words at the pre-race meeting (VG, March 12, 2021)—a free-flying ponytail is conspicuously magic.

Bearing in mind the many social constrains, power relations, and injustices existent in sports (not to mention the undeserved stereotype of “the dumb jock”), to begin a look at sports with the notion of magic might seem unfair; however, I proceed with utmost respect for the athlete and serious cultural sociological intents. In the previous chapters, we have seen how the ponytail answers to gendered expectations, health issues, and the practicalities of the modern Norwegian woman, a process in which the deeply emotive, semiotic, and sacral elements of society can be imbued in the ponytail object. Not only is social life rooted in the materiality of hair, but hair’s otherwise dead materiality has a half-life that directs our bodily existence and experience (Alexander, 1988a, 1988b, 2020). Therefore, as I have proposed, the ponytail icon is a total phenomenon that allows us to sensuously maneuver the experiential totality of social facts (e.g. Durkheim, 1901/2014; Mauss, 1950/1966).

The ponytail object can be a cosmological compass. A magician can only use her art on things that belong to her symbolic ecology, and totems can only be charged if they are positioned at the core of a symbol system (Durkheim, 1912/1995, pp. 150–151); therefore, magic reveals the social constraints we encounter and the codes, narratives, and myths we use to maneuver them.1 In this sense, a magic ponytail—its aesthetic surface and moral depth—tells how individual and public cultures intersect. It makes perfect sense that a ponytail can hold magic, which is why mapping the symbolic layers of the ponytail is important. Now I can show how the codes of youthfulness, custom, fashion, and progress are used to maneuver material and non-material social facts. Rooted in the ponytail, these meanings generate a prospective half-life. With a free-flying ponytail, Tiril Eckhoff is herself free-flying as a healthy, normative, and moving woman. The ponytail shows us this.

Culture is dynamic and swift-moving. It changes historically, varies across cultures, and moves in and out of material and non-material facts. We do not always notice, but culture like a cosmology is always in motion, as we view the same world through shared codes, narratives, and myths, but from different social, bodily, and biographic viewpoints, to create a multitude of expressions (Durkheim, 1912/1995, p. 273). In fairytales, Jung (1972/2003, pp. 102–105) said, we sense a spirit consisting of a phenomenology that is antithetical to, but still resides in nature and the material. Spirit is a vehicle of psychological phenomena, or of life itself. To a Durkheimian (1912/1995) scholar, spirits are folkloric, moral, and ideational renditions of will, memory, creative power, and hope. Cultural spirits are evocative of “the wind” or a primordial vivifying essence that moves through objects, individuals, and historical time:

In keeping with its original wind-nature, spirit is always an active, winged, swift-moving being as well as that which vivifies, stimulates, incites, fires, and inspires. To put it in modern language, spirit is the dynamic principle, forming for that very reason the classical antithesis of matter—the antithesis, that is, of its stasis and inertia. Basically it is the contrast between life and death. (Jung, 1972/2003, p. 105)

We have seen culture move like spirits in the many examples of ponytails among gendered customs and fashions, in its oscillations amid young and adult heteronormative womanhood, in democratic tales and hopes motivated by social (in)justice. None of these swift-moving codes are entirely new, but are part of a trajectory of imitations that reinvent the ponytail’s mythical half-life. In sports, an aesthetics of body movements and poetic anticipations of what comes next (Gumbrecht, 2006), spirit appears as social meanings (Alexander, 2004) join with sport aesthetics and symbolism (Broch, 2020). Thus, sporting ponytails can materialize a winning version of the practical, healthy, progressive, longhaired expectation. This iconic power is not typically achieved through explicit deliberation, but built up over time by “invisible accretions” that make the icon a performer with a half-life (Alexander, 2012, p. 34). In sports, the moving body is at the center of attention, and therefore, paramount to its construction of icons.

The magic of Eckhoff’s ponytail is situated in a Norwegian cosmology in which skiing and other winter sports are fused with narratives of health, courage, and the winter landscape. Winter sport is to Norwegians what soccer is to the English and hockey to Canadians, an affirmation of natural and mythical landscapes (Barthes, 2007). We see this in Nordic children’s literature, in the feminist stories of Astrid Lindgren and Maria Parr, who created female characters who jump rivers and run the mountainsides,2 but also in the primordial and ethnic-majority history of a Norway in which overcoming nature and being outdoors has a long tradition.3

To master nature’s trials and pleasures, a mountain girl must have a solid backbone, it is said, As Ildrid in Mustrøen’s (1915/1992) story of the Mountain Girl who peers through her window glass, awaiting her boyfriend in the cold winter night. Suddenly, she sees something that brings her to her knees, to a whispering in the name of Christ and then, up she jumps. Her father hears only barely a pair of skis caressing the snow outside. It is Ildrid, who with staff in hand, speeds toward the roaring river and the roaring wolves that surround her boyfriend. She thinks it will be worse if he rather than she fall prey. With the mountains blue of night, burning like doomsday, with stars scorching, falling behind the peaks, Ildrid climbs the hillside to jump the valley and death at the same time. The snow so hard and the skis so fast, she is flying. Her blood is frozen, and the abyss over which she jumps rumbles. A wolf skin and her staff are still found on the farm as reminders.

Tiril Eckhoff’s skiing and courage, as well as her swinging ponytail, are not unique. Mid-winter, on January 31, during the 1956 Cortina Winter Olympics, VG’s reporters attended the action. Their presence was not neutral. Norwegian journalist Arne Skouen drew upon a full supply of cultural background representations to fuse Norwegian ethnicity with skiing. In one report, he recapped the day as “focusing on those other nations that have learnt to use skis and skates as well as us. In this Olympic spirit and in the joy of showing modesty at the medal ceremony, we [Norwegians] urge an era when Norway no longer played ‘first violin’ [in the Winter-Olympic orchestra]. It was health and kindness in every word we uttered.” Skouen wrote with a conspicuous modesty, as Norway dominated.4 In the women’s slalom slopes, Norway seized all top four positions. In this case, the journalist recounts the prior Olympic champion American Andrea Mead Lawrence, who competed alongside and even beat Norway. This year she skied “con amore with her waving ponytail, but finished fifth.” Even so, Norwegians should not pound their chests in joy of domination. What is key, Skouen “modestly” said, is not the medals:

It is that girls like Astrid Sandvik and Inger Bjørnebakken have embodied the right type of slalom. They do not control the skis, but allow all movements to develop in a play of equilibria. The skies have become a compliant function of the body’s dance through the gates, the very watermark of the intriguing rhythmic and almost musical talent needed to master this sport. They are, in all honesty, worthy of a song. For they competed amongst the best with such an effortless playfulness. (VG, January 31, 1956)

Like the sirens’ song of Greek myth—a song never recounted as the sailor who heard it never returned from its lure—the musicality of the women’s slalom is a mythic idea that never fully materializes in its aesthetic rhythms. It leaves traces in the snow, yet escapes like a gust of wind to move us, to put us in motion, and to escape materiality yet again. But we can feel its rhythm and poetically recapture it.5 The aesthetics of sports become myth-like when we push the athletic performance at a distance, yet holds it at our disposal to evoke the cultural elements that shape its full musicality.6 As an example, Andrea Mead Lawrence’s waving ponytail is iconic because it holds a condensed image of the ponytail’s many symbolic layers imbued in her body movements.7 Her waving ponytail recasts her swaying motions down the slalom hill: The women body in slalom motion; the long and quick entering of the gates; bursts of energy when leaving gates that can shoot a skier off track if she is not in balance. The ponytail’s aesthetic movement fascinates as it draws our attention to an effortless play and rhythmic force evocative of practicalities, health, gendered expectations: a pride of mastering sporting and social movements. As the myth tells, a good skier does not run her skis, but lets the skis run for her. She glides, flies, con amore, with love, devotion, and zest. The ponytail accentuates a culture whose spirits hold beliefs and desires recast in the poetics of slalom. Thus, sports can indeed shape gender and meaningful body techniques birth new imitations of the fashionable customs of the spirited, moving woman (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
A photograph of three different positions in pole jumping is portrayed by a woman.

The materialization of movements. (Picture credit: technotr via Getty Images)

Full size image

Spirit, then, consists of the existential narratives and codes that vivify the material world. Spirit is manifest in the girl and woman skier who jumps the death of the valley, who dares the blistering cold and the mountainside burning with the winter’s azure darkness. Its aesthetic sensations resound, almost like magic, the historical times and cultural creation of bodies, communities, and natural life.

Bodily Movements and Naturalized Progression

The power of nature to form social life and bodies, of skis to impart tracks in the snow and strengths in the legs, are familiar to the writers of prose and composers of national identities.8 The “nature of sport,” too, meaningfully sculpts bodies through rhythmic movements and brings these bodies into the public sphere through a dramatic staging of mastery, strength, and agility. When sporting bodies enter the public realm on TV screens, in prose, and as work colleagues, they do so sculpted through the materialization of meaningful movements. Women’s sports often provide especially good examples of this process.9

In 1991, the newspaper Aftenposten (April 27, 1991a, p. 25) introduced Kari Fasting, the Norwegian track and field gold and silver medalist, a 800-meter runner, and the country’s first women sports professor and first women rector at a sports college in Norden. At a high tide of the gendered sport revolution, the journalist depicted life around Fasting’s college located by beautiful lake Sognsvann, bordering the forest of Oslo:

Spring is budding and the whole of Norway is running. Tears are running, noses are running, and sweat pearls are pouring. Is it the allergies? Then, there are the joggers. They sprint, jump, rove the streets, parks, woods, and fields. In flock or all alone with their pulse. Sognsvann is theirs and the college’s play area. Here they run past you with their wildling hair and ponytails, in psychedelically colored tights. As the birds tweet and the duck turn their rears, they run with one finger on their pulse and one thought on their mind: lactic acid. After five laps around the lake [5 times 3K], they still have not seen the flowers by the budding birch. You must be quite courageous to say no to jogging in this milieu. Rector Fasting is daring.

Jogging is healthy, but boring, Fasting admits. She is skilled, in sport biology, law, pedagogy, and management. She can do a split-jump over a log and a triple jump in the mud without causing a splash, according to the report. “She is the professor, rector, and ruler of the temple” known as the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences. This 1990s woman is asked what it takes. “Well, work life has been consuming. And multifaceted,” she says. Fasting practices jazz ballet, slalom, cross-country skiing, tennis, and golf. “She even grinds her teeth for the occasional jog. But no more than once a week!” Also her intellectual capacities are vast. She is a “very popular speaker at national and international counsels, and in committees on children and women sport.”

Looking back on it all, at her life, Fasting admits that at the age of 48 she feels old:

From the time that I was standing there at the starting line, in the ‘50s, a revolution has taken place. At that time, marathon for women? Unthinkable. Until Grete Waitz. Women’s soccer? Nonsense. Not even possible to dream about. Today, there are hardly any barriers left to brake. Almost all disciplines are open for women. This year, the triple jump was added to the [Olympic] program. Next time it will be pole vault and hammer throw. Today a women’s gold medal is, on most occasions, considered as valuable as one won by a man.

When asked if being rector will crown her career, Fasting emphatically answers no:

[Fasting is so] damn energetic that she might just reach the peak behind the peak, blowing with the wind. She has a mouth that is big, red, smiling, and full of dexterous words. She is a woman and has no concerns about being one or showing it. Women athletes have become more feminine, Fasting tells us.

“The Norwegian cross-country girls are so fashionable that they have been used as mannequins and models in Paris. That has to be a new trend. They no longer have to remove their lipstick before a run, as we had to back in the days. That is the face of something new, of a more accepting perspective on women. Today, the healthy woman is an ideal. Women can have muscles on the conditions of the women body. That is an extremely valuable progress. When young women understand that it is possible to combine elite sports with femininity, it will be easier for them to start doing sports, and to continue,” Fasting says. (Aftenposten, April 27, 1991a, p. 25)

In this moment of enthusiasm, with a spirit that can carry her to the peak behind the peak, Fasting looks back at her own career and a time when women athletes had to remove markers of femininity. She cheers the new possibility that muscularity and femininity can fuse. Later, in moments of second-wave theorizing, Fasting’s script seemingly flipped. Feminine agency became a false consciousness persuaded by patriarchy.10

Let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that sports—not alone, of course—has changed social life to make new and sometimes quite constrained ideals of how muscularity and femininity can fuse. Sports-active women in Norway almost doubled from the 1950s into the late twentieth century. Forty percent of sports club participants are women, and the gender gap in time spent on physical exercise and sports has almost vanished. Gender politics and economic freedom have transformed the Norwegian leisure landscape.11 Sports participation is now normative for ethnic-majority girls.12 The ponytail of the 1950s and ‘60s female athlete reappears in a wholly new social terrain, where it has been all along—among young schoolgirls, among women of leisure, and among fashionistas on busy city streets. The ponytail that was fashionably sexy for “women who attend the sport activities of their sons” (VG, August 29, 1995), also waves for women who are not just watching but doing sports themselves. They are informed watchers. Some of them are coaches. Some of them are rectors.

Others are admired role models to be imitated—Grete Waitz for example. Unlike Ildrid in Mustrøen’s (1915/1992) the Mountain Girl, Waitz was no poetic image of a female ideal flying across hard snow and jumping a river—she was a real, living woman. Pounding the asphalt, her calves strong, her step light, Waitz jumped the abyss of women’s inabilities and passivity.

However, she could not command weather. On a day with heavy rains, the participation rate of the Oslo run dropped 30 percent, but nevertheless, a fair share of enthusiasts showed up for this materialization of the women’s and the fitness movements. In the newly launched 5K event, women outnumbered men by 670 to 404. “Who knows how many of these participants will try to double the distance next year?” pondered Aftensposten’s gender observant journalist, Mette Bugge (June 10, 1985a, p. 10).

A new material social fact was being forged in “the form of crowd behaviors, in the movement of bodies in the street” (Smith, 2020, p. 23). A symbolic system of freedom, movement, and progress generated this shared psychological current, and in the very middle of it all stood an icon, Grete Waitz, both feet firmly planted on the ground. She “got a pretty wet ponytail as she guided the littlest participants on an easy 5K path. The children, of course, 7 years-old at the youngest, were very excited to have such a prominent guide” (Aftensposten, June 10, 1985a, p. 10). The role models of sports and sports communities shape our relationships and imitations of embodied empowerment through active democratic learning and imitation. This is not a simple viewing of body ideals, but a doing of ideals in ways that contrast with a mere consumerist’s gaze.13 A meaningful ponytailed health involves democratic participation through imitation.

A few months later, in the heyday of the world-renowned long-distance runner, Waitz caused “a fish school of followers and quite a racket just by showing her face in the streets of New York” for the city’s marathon. Waitz had become a superstar. “She has met with Royals and Presidents, received gold medals and great silver cups. Been on TV shows, too.” On September 14, 1985, she met long-distance runner Bjørn Nordheggen, who “has been wandering the forests where silence whispers and breathes to body and mind. Will this talented young man take the torch when Waitz retires?” the journalist asked. As the first sex of this interaction, Waitz loudly protested at the mention of retirement: “Stop running? Never!” Grete Waitz looks up, dismayed. She is not sitting, but flat out laying on her chair, feet up. “Totally relaxed, but with a fully armed pair of eyes.” She would turn 32 on October 1st, but this would not be her last New York Marathon.

Twenty-four-year-old Nordheggen said, “Grete ranges on the top of his list of idols.” Although he has never trained in the very organized manner that Waitz has, Bjørn said, “I have walked the forest, a lot. With dad, mom, and four siblings—or alone—from the time I was little.” Both he and Waitz shared a love for the forest, but “it is not that I run around admiring nature,” Waitz said. “It is quiet, no humans, and no cars. Pure, fresh air.” The forest does you good, Nordheggen and Waitz agreed.

She had just published the book World Class and had been featured on the cover of Woman magazine, with “a soft red mouth and mysterious blue eyes.” Not a fan of makeup and hair styling, “She tells about attending a TV show, wearing a ponytail,” that is better. Waitz “bubbled with irony” as she painted a picture of herself besides “Jackie Collins, from Dynasty [TV series], and the ex-wife of Vidal Sassoon, that guy with world-class hair salons. And Emmanuelle, she with the scantily dressed movies. And then me, Grete …” (Aftenposten, September 14, 1985b, p. 23).

From time to time, sports have it all in terms of female role models—from the often passive “tennis” star, Anna Kournikova, to the in-your-face style of a sexually empowered Serena Williams and mixed-martial artist Ronda Rousey, who loudly opposed the idea of sculpting a body to attract wealthy men’s attention.14 Waitz is a role model of a different kind. Urban Grete Waitz enjoys abstract nature and the rational training regimes that made her the perfect pioneer and spokesperson for the women’s (fitness) movement.

The ponytail has an aesthetic surface charged by narratives of movement in sports and society. As the 13th Grete Waitz run was held in Oslo in 1996, Aftenposten reported:

Miss Marathon runs on home court and Norway’s most famous ponytail will fly in the wind. Behind her runs 48,500 companions. Girls with punch and grit. With courage in their chest, sweat on their foreheads, and sneakers on their feet. When this caterpillar train [of women bodies] thunders through the streets, the Richter scale will pick up on its impact!” (Aftenposten, May 14, 1996, p. 38)

Not only had a new material social fact been formed, the very symbol system that was forming it, which kept it moving, could be sensed by its visual presence in the streets, detected on the Richter scale. The 1990s had been the time of Grete Waitz, “the women with a ponytail and an athletic suit. That obligatory everlasting Adidas” (Aftenposten, May 12, 1991b, p. 32). Even before, in 1984, a shared psychological current had materialized on the city streets: Waitz immortalized in a statue, two tails of hair flying behind her resolute and democratizing stride outside Bislett Stadium in Oslo.

The power of sports to shape social life and bodies are indeed familiar to many. Sports sculpts bodies through movements and presents them in the public sphere through dramatic stagings of mastery, strength, and agility. This presentation includes not only elite professional athletes, but also those whose leisurely involvement in sports carries the iconic ponytail into new contexts.

In the corridors of Domus Medica at Oslo University, a journalist spotted Thea Bjerkestrand Bøe, a former handball player and now a medical student. Her “ponytail dances just like it did when she sprinted across the hardwood floor,” noted the journalist, either remembering well or simply imagining an iconic memory evoked by the ponytail. “Her handshake is just as forceful as you would expect of a former handball girl.” Her smile is broad and there is no question that she enjoys her new life as a medical student. Bøe said she “went to a couple of handball practices last fall, but after a couple of sessions I just had it up to here.” (Tønsberg Blad, March 1, 2014).

While Bøe has had enough of handball, her sporting spirit has a half-life that radiates through the ponytail in this new context where movement, progress, and self-confidence are equally important. Her feel for the game, of sports, and of being physically active have continued beyond the gym and the sports arena into social life—at least if we are to believe the natural sciences about muscle memory and cultural theories of experienced bodily functionalism. When sporting bodies re-enter the public, they do so having been sculpted through the materialization of a set of meaningful movements.

Kinesthetic Freedom and Woman Nature

The 1990s was a time when the Norwegian roster was full of women’s sport talent. Like “the 18-year-old [soccer star] Gro Espeseth, from Sandvika, young, light blonde, and nimble. Underneath her long ponytail there was hiding a talent of an unusual caliber” (VG, May 24, 1991, p. 29). Not simply athletic, this hidden talent also held an imagery deeply rooted in a Norwegian cultural history, although not always articulated. The character of an 1857 Bjørnsjerne Bjørnson novel is Synnøve Solbakken, who represents goodness and light and hails from the sunny side of the valley, the “Sol-bakken,” or Sunnyhill. Some Norwegians still associate these meanings with light blond and the morally good. Of course, in the twenty-first century, Synnøve Solbakken is as much a humorous relic as a sacral ideal of majority ethnic, rural womanhood. But if and when she materializes, she has long light blond hair, sometimes a swinging ponytail, and perhaps wears a bunad, or a work uniform, or is on cross-country skis.

Many examples of this myth-making tradition of perfect, ephemeral women archetypes appear in Norway.15 Sometimes they are explicated. When the Norwegian women’s cross-country skiing relay team won gold in the Salt Lake City Olympics, the gold medalists were named four Synnøve Solbakkens (NTB, February 26, 2010). One of them, Therese Johaug, became one of the biggest names in Norwegian sports history and a favorite to corporate sponsors as the very personification of the amiable and blond-haired Synnøve Solbakken from the countryside, with “bigger potentials than her superstar colleagues of both genders, Petter Northug and Marit Bjørgen” (VG, March 6, 2011).

In 2010, the year of her decisive breakthrough, Johaug won the 30K distance at the world championship race in Oslo. By custom, the champion was to shake hands with the Norwegian king, but instead she jumped into his arms, moving the royal family and a nation from awe to charm (Aftenposten July 9, 2011b; December 24, 2019; Dagbladet, July 15, 2012; VG, February 23, 2013). This 21-year-old, from a farm in the little village of Dahlsbygda, we presume on the sunny side of the valley, had “risen from nature. Beautiful, predictable, like a birch tree in May” (Aftenposten, March 6, 2011a). When she won the world championship, Norwegians heard “the same old tune” about a “Synnøve Solbakken of the race tracks” who “throughout her childhood loved to ski” and had the “heartfelt support of her parents [thought they] doubted that the scrawny little girl would ever make a sports star.” On skis, rising from a rhythm of energy, full of life spirit, flying rather than gliding on the ski tracks, Johaug was

a manifestation of one of the founding myths of the cross-country sport. The one about an ancient power that is built by heavy labor such as lifting hay and by walking the cattle to the mountain pastures in the summer. Of the morality that arises due to the fact that work, work, and more work is the pulse that allows life on a farm. (Aftenposten, December 24, 2019)

Johaug, the elegant mountain goat and lightweight climber of the steep slopes of any contest (VG, August 8, 2015), was a national treasure, the embodiment of a distinct ethnic majority and Norwegian identity. So powerful an icon of a naïve, morally good femininity was Johaug, that when she tested positive for doping, Norwegian’s own naiveté was strained. Later she enjoyed record sales of her line of a fashionable, highly lucrative clothing line for elite athletes and exercisers on skies, hikes, and runs (Bergens Tidene, February 15, 2017; NrK, October 27, 2017; November 7, 2018).

In sympathy? Norwegians still wanted to sport like Johaug. In sports, bodily movements and gendered expectations fuse. Not only Johaug combines the elegant moves of the mountain goat with archetypal femininity. Norwegian Jorunn Horgen, too, “surfs the crest of weaves and past the world’s best,” according to a report in Aftenposten:

She is a modern mermaid, Formula 1 class. She dances over the regatta court as a prima ballerina driven by the power of the winds—a recipe for gold. And gold indeed, she has served us: five world cups, today the fourth European cup, one Asian championship and various Norwegian titles. The Olympic gold is missing. Steady as she goes, with a ponytail [waving] in the wind and both her legs [sjøben] firmly planted on the Lechner board. She is Nedre Eiker’s [district] Synnøve Solbakken. The nimble, light [blond] haired and blue-eyed girl that has both smarts and legs. (Aftenposten, June 13, 1992, p. 27)

What do all these women have in common? Synnøve Solbakken of Bjørnson’s novel signifies all that which is good and light as opposed to darkness. As a child, Synnøve and her friend Ingrid ran around so fast and so much that everyone called them “the grouses.” As she came of age, “Synnøve grew tall and slim, had yellow hair, a nice and shiny face with quiet blue eyes. When she spoke, she smiled, and people said it brought a blessing” (Bjørnson, 1857/1998, p. 21). Through the 1990s, the gendered spirit was not the same as that of Bjørnson’s 1857 novel, but the belief in the morally sacred, light of color, of good and bad spirits, had not vanished and still poetically shaped social life. Like in myth and fairytales in which a tiny detail or the littlest among us changes the course of life, the ponytail holds the powerful spirits of a fashionably folkloric, youthful, forceful, longhaired feminine archetype.

Something changed in sports during the 1980s. A national repertoire of ideal female types and heroes recast the sacral active woman in a new healthy, active way, perhaps extending Kari Fasting’s analysis of the possible. Theoretically, we know the use and feel for the spirits of our ecologies, these swift-moving winds that vivify, stimulate, incite, inspire. We should be able to find them as they travel through social landscapes and institutions with folkloric and shared renditions of will, memory, imagination, creative power, and moral aspirations.

In 1986, the Norwegian women’s handball team broke through to became national heroes and started a long Norwegian sports success story. Among the players on the team that won the 1986 World Cup bronze medal, almost all had short to medium-length hair (Aftenposten, November 26, 2016), but entering the twenty-first century, almost everyone had long hair, enough for a ponytail or a bun. For example, Susann Goksøyr (24) is the new big thing in Norwegian mid-90s handball. She is funny and energetic and loves to play tricks and joke around, as she has done her entire life:

She has kept her smile and laugh. The only place Susann looks a little grim is out on the handball court. When she shoots the ball, her lips curl inwards as she presses her mouth shut. Her eyes shoot lightening. A fervent “rrr!” releases from the grip of her lips as the ball shoots towards the goal. At least 418 times, she has lit up the arena with a big smile only seconds after. That is how many goals she scored in her 165 games for the national team. During games, the whole of Susan dances. Legs and arms changes direction in a lightning fast tempo. Her face communicates the message better than any word could, “Throw me the ball. I am right here. Attack. Yeees!” Even as she now sits still behind the desk [talking to us], her ponytail and hands dance in the rhythms of the handball games that Susann is talking about. (Nordlys, September 17, 1994, p. 40)

Goksøyr’s spirit is naturalized, individualized—a vivifying force she carries with her from childhood through life’s various stages and institutions. Susan Goksøyr along with Kari Fasting, Grete Waitz, and Jorunn Horgen embody the aesthetics of their sporting rhythms. Indeed, critical theory reveals that the drills, hard labor, and practice of sports that strengthens bodies can strip a person of creative spirit.16 Norwegian journalists writing about the young girl robots of the Russian gymnastics team warned about this danger. But sports also can shape creative and spirited bodies, like the play of the two light-colored, flying “grouses,” Synnøve Solbakken and her friend, Ingrid, roaming the countryside. The musicality of sports is composed of smarts and legs, laughs and grit, and rrrs. The ponytail becomes a composite of these primordial and spirited powers in women’s cultural-cum-kinetic movements. If Tarde (1903, p. 34) and Mauss (1934/1973, p. 77) are right, these beliefs and desires are not simply poetic, but pulse through habitualized imitations. They give the ponytail a half-life, an object with its own capacities of performative power.

If we bear in mind the symbolic layers of ponytailed health, it seems reasonable to argue that kinetic freedom and emancipation are linked to the existential depths of youthfulness. Children and youth sports communities are believed to provide—or at least add to—a healthy, democratic participation in Norwegian society. Here ponytailed girls do a little bit of sports, a little bit of volunteering, and have a whole lot of fun. For example, eight-year-old Stine Vatne Hansen, a third grader at Gullfjordungen Elementary School, has played soccer for a year and a half and attends a soccer summer camp to hone her skills:Verse

Verse “I am a better player now,” she says. “Look, I can hit my water bottle!” She misses but gets another try. That is how it is at camp. You try repeatedly, until you get it. Stine knows she can kick both high and low. “Darn it! Missed again. I will try a high kick instead,” she says and drops the ball to her foot for yet another second try. Practice makes champions. The ball rockets into the air with full thrust. Stine has not practiced a lot of headers before, but she is not the type of girl that backs down from a challenge. [Kind of like Pippi Longstocking saying, “I have never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do it.”] She practices and after a couple of minutes, she makes headers forward, backwards, and upwards. The best player Stine knows is her sister, [who] has played soccer for 10 years now. “My hair is really soaked in sweat now,” Stine suddenly exclaims. She runs to the closest tree and shakes it so that its raindrops fall on her light ponytail. (Hordaland, July 8, 2002, p. 11)

While Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking had some magic tricks up her sleeve, so does Stine Vatne Hansen. She knows that drills make for a good sweat and that sweat poetically dramatizes drills. She might not be able to verbalize this cultural fact, but she can definitely feel it. Good thing there are raindrops on the trees surrounding the field. The reporter too feels this landscape of ponytailed magic, as natural as the dew on the birch.

Hansen’s hair, well hair in general, is also about belonging,17 a means to feel one’s individual participation and to show community.18 Hansen’s hair magic only works in a culture that knows how families inspire sports participation and “agrees” that sports can provide a pristine, healthy engagement with nature and society. These societies, uniform as they may look, still provide us with the bafflement of social life in poetic form. When comedian Sigurd Sollien stepped in as voluntary handball coach for the 13- to 15-year-old girls team in Harstad, he encountered expectations that experienced players would take for granted to be surprising as a newcomer to the sport: “Putting up hair in a ponytail or braiding hair. Putting on sports tape to stabilize fingers and knees. A handball practice is about so much more than throwing a ball, bouncing and shooting it” (Harstad Tidende, March 8, 2018). What do you do in the half time break of a handball game? “Get your friend to style your hair perhaps” says the teenage handball girls attending the handball cup in Aurskoghallen (Indre Akershus Blad, January 16, 2017) (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
A photograph depicts a group of handball girls with ponytails discussing together.

Ponytailed belonging. (Picture credit: South_agency via Getty Images)

Full size image

Sports girls’ hair is about longhaired practicalities, but also about familial and friendship communities that put bodies in movement. Like horses that cheerfully swishing flies from each other’s faces, humans also demonstrate friendship as they stand in a line, fingers to hair, making ponytails and braids for each other, and passing on styling techniques—a ritual of caring and sometimes some painful tugs, too (Prince, 2009; Weitz, 2004). The ponytail can signify solidarity in a community’s many voluntary identities put in motion.

These girl and women bodies in movement and their women’s movement is fast paced and full of vitality, like the self-proclaimed “Turbo-girls” from the small town, Nordby, south of Oslo. This group of pre-teen soccer players received a two-page coverage of their game against a team of boys of their same age from Bjørndalen. Under a huge picture, the caption reads: “Ann-Kristin Nystøl Nicolaisen dribbles so her ponytail jumps to the sky and the Bjørndalen boys fall on their butts” (Østlandets Blad, May 3, 2011). With the high spirits of a frisky foal off to games and races, Nicolaisen holds her ponytail high and really turns on the turbo. Moving past the boys with sturdy legs and good balance, Nicolaisen is so fast that her ponytail barely catches up with her moves. The boys certainly do not. Her cultural kinetics, too, echo a fashionable young girl hairdo, a youthful spirit unleashed, and the social opportunity to embody movement. Nicolaisen is a child that perhaps in the eyes of the journalist and some of the adult audience is gender normative, but all the same should not be constrained by this social fact. The ponytail resolves this puzzle with an aura of movements.

Mother and father coaches applaud the girls, and the journalist, too, salutes them: “The girls are so eager. ‘We love playing soccer. It is fun and good exercise. We make so many friends,’ the girls say. The Nordby girls boldly attacked with zero respect for the boys” (Østlandets Blad, May 3, 2011).

These sporting freedoms and the folkloric ideal of girls’ bodies in motion are many, with many small variations. Norwegian girl handball players are portrayed with ponytails “dancing when they jump and shoot,” (Agderposten, April 17, 2010); and youth badminton player Helle Sofie Sagøy plays with a “high tempo” and her “ponytail dancing” behind her act (Allers, September 5, 2016). U.S. sports culture comes to Norway in the form of a cheerleader with “waving ponytail and hot pants,” (Aftenposten Aften, May 31, 2012) and “soft sneakers, shorts, and waving ponytails with ribbons” (Fanaposten, April 13, 2012). These girls are full of grit, spirit, and courage, Norwegian journalists report. After the cheer, after the game, ponytailed girls and their audience know what their effort should look like: “With red cheeks and roughed-up ponytails,” visibly and verbally happy about their effort, the girls report: “It was fun” (Smaalenes Avis, November 24, 2010).

Beneath this plethora of examples drums a myth of natural and sacral movement. The sporting girl and woman materialize motions, both physical and cultural, in the form of a cultural kinetics that capture the spirits of their time and are starkly visible in their ponytails, moving with them and imbued with this movement.

Notes

  1. 1.

    All the beings classified in a single clan—men [sic], animals, plants, inanimate objects—are only modalities of the totemic being … Moreover, the adjectives applied to them are the same as those applied to the totem (Durkheim, 1912/1995, p. 151).

  2. 2.

    Astrid Lindgren’s (1981) Ronja Røverdatter and Maria Parr’s (2009/2017) Astrid, the Unstoppable.

  3. 3.

    The myth of a Norwegian majority-ethnicity is of course gendered. In the making of Norway’s proud men on polar expeditions, on the home front during WWII, at the Olympics, and at the expense of Sami claims to the invention of the ski (Broch, 2012; Goksøyr, 2013; Klausen et al., 1995; Skille & Broch, 2019). However, in the late twentieth century, both the public and commercial interests partly reinvented this gendering of skiing. With the adventures of national women sport heroes, and with modern-day explorer-heroes like Cecilie Skog and Tonje Blomseth. Skog, mountain climber and adventurer, summited Mount Everest in 2004 and unassisted crossed Antarctica in 2010—to be dubbed the Fairytale Queen. Not as a fairytale queen that is the prized reward of some man, but as the powerful protagonist queen of daring fairytales. Blomseth a master of social media, North Calotte traveler, and controversial explorer of Canadas wilderness too. Both women commodified. Both having their face printed on skis. Skog engraved with her long, wild, and curly hair reminiscent of Ronja and Tonje Glimmerdal. Blomseth wearing Roald Amundsen-like apparel and an unprecedented ponytail.

  4. 4.

    From politics to sports, the code of modesty is highly valued in Norway (Broch & Skille, 2018; Daloz, 2007; Larsen, 2016; Skarpenes, 2007).

  5. 5.

    Sport is an aesthetic performance for audiences to sensuously interpret (Gumbrecht, 2006) and for athletes to maneuver in ritual chains charged with emotional energy (Collins, 2004).

  6. 6.

    (Barthes, 1957/2009b, p. 141).

  7. 7.

    This rhythm can neither be credibly understood simply with reference to the body techniques that put it in motion nor the meaningful imitations that recapture this movement as an idea (Mauss, 1934/1973).

  8. 8.

    For studies on children’s prose, see (Natov, 2011) and on national identities, see (Slagstad, 2018; Spillman, 1997).

  9. 9.

    Women sports is perfect example of how boundaries of women muscularity has changed (Butler, 1998). The woman athlete’s body, at least some, has become a body that matters (Butler, 1993).

  10. 10.

    Studies from the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences show that, after all, women athletes could not be too muscular (Sisjord & Kristiansen, 2009) and that constraints of traditional femininity, in fact, seemed to outweigh progress long into the 1990s (Fasting et al., 2004; Scraton et al., 1999).

  11. 11.

    For sports club membership data, see (Fasting & Sand, 2009). Regarding the gender gap in time spent on exercise and sports, see (Green, 2018; Green et al., 2015). For gender politics in sports and economic freedom and expenditures on sports, see (Breivik, 2013; Goksøyr, 2008; Skirstad, 2009).

  12. 12.

    (Strandbu & Bakken, 2007; Strandbu et al., 2017).

  13. 13.

    Gendered role models for embodied empowerment shape how we see and act on our opportunities, McClearen (2018) showed in a study Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC) and the mixed-martial arts champion Ronda Rousey. Not only as a primary agent of socialization, but also the sometimes wispy and ephemeral communities of sports model felicitous relationships and shape social life from the sporting ground on up (Fine, 2012; Fine & Corte, 2017). Sports provide active scenes for learning about democracy through participation (Anderson, 2008) and contrast with the mostly passive consumerist gaze of the spectator and sport-body consumer (see Azzarito, 2018).

  14. 14.

    Anna Kournikova (Messner et al., 2003); Serena Williams (Cooky, 2018); Ronda Rousey (McClearen, 2018).

  15. 15.

    Women ski-heroes are to be found in the somewhat dusty piles of historical evidence (at least in comparing it to the shiny mantle on which the nation has put its men heroes), but women heroes have nevertheless always been and now, to an even greater extent, are very much part of the spotlight ignited by the sport/media complex (Goksøyr, 2008, 2011). Sport women have become a significant part of the reinvention of tradition (Hobsbawn, 2010) through imitations of an archetype, perfect and ephemeral (Barthes, 1957/2009a) for a new Norwegian landscape of meaning (Reed, 2011).

  16. 16.

    (Bourdieu, 1990; Foucault, 1977).

  17. 17.

    (Prince, 2009; Synnott, 1987; Tarlo, 2017).

  18. 18.

    (Leach, 1958; Obeyesekere, 1981).