Experience

Abstract

For the ponytail to evoke meaningful experience, its materiality must be enmeshed in culture. Its material texture—touch and sight—must hold public culture in ways that allow us to feel hair as an iconic source that lives and moves through health, practicalities, and gendered expectations. Having established a sociological idea of movement embodied in the aesthetics of sports, I now show how body movements evoke the moral depth of health, practicalities, and gendered expectations, as the ponytail swings in athletic endeavors. In this final analytic chapter, I draw on the previous chapters to reveal how sports are shaped by and shape social life as the woman athlete’s movements are imbued with broadly available folklore, codes of democratization, and myth, which make the ponytail an icon of progress. We see how the coded experience of sports snaps into alignment to yield a ponytailed experience of sports.

For the ponytail to evoke meaningful experience, its materiality must be enmeshed in culture. Its material texture—touch and sight—must hold public culture in ways that reflect hair as an iconic source of gendered expectations, health, practicalities, and movement. In today’s fragmented, complex societies this iconic power is hard to sustain. Contestations of ideals and ideologies are many, frequent, and sometimes surprising (Jijon, 2019; Raud, 2016; Smith & Alexander, 2005); therefore, the ponytail’s iconic power depends on how it is perpetually enlivened and presented in the public sphere, as well as how we experience, explore, and feel (come into contact with) this object’s surface and moral depth (Alexander, 2012, 2020).

Icons’ symbolic force is polyvocal. Their meanings are dynamic and contingent on our ability both to attach their objects to narratives, codes, and myths and to imbue their forms with these culture structures. Therefore, the ponytail as an icon is reused and altered, but still bears sensory and affective traces of its earlier forms and the cultural codes it holds. Some ponytailed women embody second-wave feminism and speak up against systemic injustice; others represent third-wave feminism and speak of feminine empowerment. Some do both, and some neither.

Some like Kari Traa are at “one and the same time a reincarnation of Synnøve Solbakken, a true badass, and a highly successful sport fashion clothing entrepreneur” (Bergens Tidene, March 1, 2003, p. 35). Traa started out as an Olympian and mogul skier with a ponytail, well known for giving it all on the slopes:

You see, it is not only her two-colored ponytail in black and white (that she very much liked until she saw a goat in Zermatt with the exact same color combination) that gives color to this girl from Voss. Her accomplishments are decorated, too. She either wins, or she does not make it to the finish line.

“That is just how I am, I have to give it my all. I believe that is how I will improve the most. And it is fun. Most fun of all is to take a chance, give it my all, and succeed. It is a great feeling. To play it safe is no fun. I won’t win unless I give it my all.”

[Well into her career, Traa struggles with a bad back, and the journalist wonders if that might possibly affect her approach to the slopes.]

“Perhaps,” Kari laughs so that her black and white ponytail shakes. (Aftenposten, November 22, 2000b, p. 40)

Kari Traa is one of those women who by the end of the 1990s had reclaimed the color pink as she launched her top-selling winter, training, and fashionable garments for “nuns and knock-outs.” With the national broadcaster NrK, she made a television series about “Cool Girls” to train teenage girls in mogul skiing and toughness. In Norwegian, the English word cool is “kul” and can also mean “a bump;” thus, mogul skiing is “kule-kjøring,” which translates as “racing bumps.” These girls not only look cool, they are being cool as they actively race the bumpy mogul slopes. A true hard-hitter, Traa exemplifies and is an exemplar of the women’s empowerment of third-wave feminism (Dahlén, 2008).

“Although the feminist movement improved women’s lives in many ways, it freed few women from fashion norms” (Weitz, 2004, p. 27) At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the confident Florence Griffith Joyner wore a ponytail and the official uniform of the United States, rather than one of her signature, custom-made tight suits. “‘I do not want to get kicked out of the team because of some piece of clothing,’ she said … the make-up, a ponytail and sunglasses relaxing on her head, and those long nails. Red as of today” (Aftenposten, September 19, 1988, p. 3). These individual women control their lives, bodies, and health in shiny Lycra, which allows “women to wear their own bodies. Lycra^® became the second skin for a new life in which self-confidence would be rooted in women and their bodies, not in rules … and especially not the girdle” (O’Connor, 2011, p. 125).

In 1990, 22-year-old high jumper Hanne Haugland won a Norwegian championship medal “in the most daring uniform of the Norwegian track-and-field team. A special order from England. Hanne has let her light [blonde] hair grow and put it up in a teasing ponytail. À la FloJo, she gets track-and-field Norway to pay attention. ‘I know people are watching from the stance and are evaluating me. They make comments on appearance. The audience is as concerned with how I look as with how high I jump,’ says Hanne, and thinks it is all OK” (VG, August 6, 1990b, p. 25) as she exudes confidence.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, ponytails abounded in Norwegian sports media. Monica Seles, 17 years old, ruled the tennis court. She made big bucks, too, about half a million dollars when she cut her trademark ponytail and signed a sponsorship deal with the cosmetics firm, Matrix Essentials (Aftenposten, June 2, 1991, p. 1). But her ponytail grew back by the following summer when Seles’ on-court moans became the next big thing (VG, July 1, 1992, p. 30, 31).

In Italy, athlete Stefania Belmondo stands 157 centimeters tall (a bit more than five feet) and weighs just 44 kilograms (97 pounds), but she is big in the cross-country skiing world:

To the great pleasure of thousands of the Italian supporters that had travelled to Mont Blanc, she took the lead on the 30k already with the first thrust of her staves. With the dancing, bleached ponytail as her trademark, little Stefania had a big group of fans as she held off against the Russians and was crowned world champion. (Aftenposten, February 22, 1992, p. 29)

Other reports spotlight 13-year-old Morgan Presser, who hits her first hole-in-one at the U.S. Open and is likened to Tiger Woods, and “turns her ponytail around a finger” as she meets the press (VG, May 31, 2001, p. 30); and on the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics tennis court,

Henrieta Nagyová is normally dressed in a white tennis shirt with Slovakia’s Olympic emblem and a red band around her ponytail. (Aftenposten, September 20, 2000a, p. 42)

Fig. 1

Copycats at the gym. (Picture credit: yoh4nn via Getty Images)

Hair is, of course, not everything in the spirited competition of sports. During the 2000 Olympics women’s basketball showdown, Australian player Lauren Jackson suddenly found herself holding U.S. player Lisa Leslie’s long hair, apparently a hairpiece, in her hand. “Keep the hair,” Leslie said, “I want the gold!” (NTB, October 1, 2000). While few are free from fashion norms (Weitz, 2004), such norms are not uniform. After ponytailed figure skater Michelle Kwan scored poorly because she lacked makeup, her coach, Frank Carroll, defended her, noting that not all bodies have to be “smeared with the products of big capitalism,” and that not all bodies have to look like they are from the United States (VG, February 18, 1998, p. 44).

Of course, sportswomen are not the only inspiration for ponytailed fashions, although the aura of the athlete and the active lifestyle she radiates surely make her an important contributor to the trend. While ponytailed sportswomen can be neoliberal sex symbols, in the Hollywood sense, in Lycra^®, they can also be fully dressed in baggy wool clothing as outdoorsy femininities, with their ponytails as the only obvious gender identifier. A ponytailed identity is contingent on the operational context. At the fitness center, a demonstration of big capitalism’s huge success in profiting on physical activity, women and girls can feel their individuality, together (Fig. 1).¹ Observing the copycats at her local gym, Trude Ringheim writes with a twist of irony:

The girls look exactly alike. Regardless of whether they are 17 or 27. They are slim and fit. Nine out of ten wear black tights. Seven out of ten have white singlets. Seven out of ten have earplugs with music. Eight out of ten have long hair in a ponytail. Half of these women have bleached their hair. The most poignant characteristic of our time is individualism and indefinite options of choice. (Aftenposten Magasinet, October 1, 2011, p. 77)

The ponytail comes to signify a moving and active body. Even Norwegian supermodel Eva Sannum, who dated Spain’s crown prince, is “dressing sporty with a simple ponytail and blue pants” (VG, December 12, 2000, p. 33, my emphasis). In fact, her favorite hairdo is the ponytail (Dagbladet, May 16, 2001, p. 18), which is unmistakably sporty, thanks to the custom of ponytailed athletes.

Democratic Hopes and Setbacks

In Norway, soccer is the most popular sport for females, although they have long remained in the shadows of their male colleagues (Persson et al., 2020). A journalist documenting the spirited play of girls’ soccer notices Carina Nordby from Enebakk, who “played so her braid was singing,” on the soccer pitch of the Kanari Cup for seven- to ten-year-old girls and boys. Nordby is easy to spot with her 42-centimeter-long horsetail-braid:

“I am saving for one meter,” the girl with number 13 on her back smiles. Carina plays defense, midfield, a little bit of theatre, but mostly striker. If she can choose herself, she prefers playing with the boys.

“The boys are better passers,” Carina says.

Do not the girls pass?

“Just Hege.”

… Carina is about to run along, but says, “Write down that I was a goalie too, when I was younger. AND, that Eric Cantona is a football genius,” Carina yells before she disappears in a crowd of braids, ponytails, and short girl’s hair. (Aftenposten, January 30, 1995, p. 16)

Nordby does it all: plays all positions and with the boys, too. The journalist sees her confidence, but questions a lapse in this story of opportunistic play. Do not the girls pass well? Nordby’s experience of being a long-haired girl soccer player is shaped by ideas of male “football geniuses.” Her imitations are a form of social memory that settles in her body. She can do it all, no doubt, but she prefers to do soccer like the boys. Her body is a site of remembrance that does not change overnight, but the ponytail icon allows her and the journalist an iconic consciousness and to feel a ponytailed self that enters soccer.² Ponytailed progress is not only dynamic and contested, it also holds a contradictory capacity to expand and constrict, include and exclude.³ Nordby and her many soccer compatriots in Norway and internationally spur conversations about conflicting, changing, and contested bodies. Spirit is not all that travels like a wind; shared morals move through our social landscapes to shape the way we see, feel, and deliberate social movements.

Many gender battles are left to fight. Despite the fact that the national women’s soccer team has been more accomplished than the men’s team, males still outnumber females by two-thirds in Norway’s biggest sport. As the 1999 World Cup for women approaches, an Aftenposten journalist tracks down some 14-year-old girls and asks them about their favorite players and teams (June 9, 1999a, p. 36):

“Is there a championship?” one girl replies.

“No, I don’t think I know the name of any women soccer players at all,” another answers.

“Well, yes, I have heard of Marianne Pettersen and Linda Medalen,” one finally admits and “yes, I know about the championship, but David Beckham is my role model!”

“And John Carew is mine” another cheers.

One of the coaches is not surprised at these responses. “Our [top] women’s team is not allowed to exercise on the pitch where our men’s team practices, and therefore, it is the men they see and identify with. But when they get a little older and are called to play on the county’s recruit-team they will get better acquainted with women soccer and women elite sports,” he says.

“Very few of the girls at this age read the newspapers,” another coach replies, as if this is a good source for knowledge about women sport stars.

The reporter notes that the 14-year-old MVP on the field that day bears a remarkable resemblance to Norway’s best striker, Marianne Pettersen: “Both being attackers, both with number 11 on their jerseys, and both with ponytails. But today’s MVP has never heard of the latter.”

About a month later, U.S. player Mia Hamm, the world’s best woman soccer player, creates pandemonium at the World Cup:

“Magical Mia!” … is named among the top 50 most beautiful women in the world, and teenage girls in the USA make a complete ruckus when they see Hamm (27). On this day of the tournament, all the USA hopes that Mia will hoist the cup. As she, in the 17th minute of the game against Denmark received a crossover pass, pulls the ball past goalie Katrine Pedersen and shoots it with her left leg, the World Cup party was on. That was Mia’s 110th career goal. She next danced over the field to assist the 2-0 goal, 15 minutes before the end signal, and the fans got just what they wanted: A playful, dancing, explosive, intense, warrior athlete with a ponytail as victory banner waving from the top of her determined face. In the stands danced hordes of girls with the same ponytail and the same number 9 on their T-shirts. The idol had done it again. Mia Hamm offers teenage girls far more exciting challenges than Pamela Anderson’s silicone implants. More than 7 million girls are already in full sprints across the pitches of the USA. “I know I am a role model, and I take it very seriously,” Hamm says. “I only had men athletes as role models. It is important that girls get women role models, and that they know they can do what I have done,” she continues. (NTB, July 2, 1999)

Hamm was born in 1972, the same year that the United States passed Title IX of the Education Amendments, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in any educational institution receiving federal funds. Hamm says soccer gave her confidence, discipline, and motivation. She claims an amazing list of on-field merits, sponsors covet her image, and even the Barbie doll has—with Mia’s blessing—a number 9 U.S.A. jersey, and of course, a ponytail. The screams from the World Cup audience resemble nothing ever heard before as “teenage girls dominated the stands, with parents tagging along. The World Cup president jokingly named them the ‘ponytail hooligans’ and [a U.S. reporter was] said to be reporting from ‘a stadium packed with Spice Girls on steroids,’ in awe of the loud crowd” (NTB, July 2, 1999).

Despite national Norwegian women team’s fourth place win, back on the Norwegian pitch, 15-year-old Marianne is mostly concerned with men’s soccer. She thinks “Ronaldo is overrated,” as she “rolls her eyes and throws her ponytail.”

Again, the Norwegian journalist is curious: Why is this so? Why are there so few spectators in the stands for women’s games in Norway, when stadium after stadium sells out in the United States during the World Cup?

“The men’s game has more tempo, more strength, harder tackles. You cannot really compare,” another 15-year-old-girl responds.

National anti-hero and sports commentator nerd Arne Scheie weighs in, “We should stop comparing. We never compare Anita Moen and Bjørn Dæhli [cross-country stars], or men’s and women’s handball [unfortunately it does happen, but women have historically won the comparison]. I am really proud of what the Norwegian team accomplished in the U.S.A.,” he says even though he favors men’s soccer.

Presenting a democratic hope, the journalist notes that some things have changed at least:

In 1978 the national women team played their first game to harsh comments like “I am against women playing football. I have talked with a doctor that recommends [women] to stay away [from football], indefinitely.”

“All women players are gay,” someone proclaimed.

“Things have changed a lot,” sport sociologist Gerd von der Lippe testifies. (Dagbladet, July 4, 1999, p. 7)

Overnight, it seemed, the U.S. women’s team became superstars. “Sepp Blatter had declared that soccer’s future is feminine,’ and he was right,” Aftenposten’s journalists agreed:

In a country used to seeing sport stars that only care for themselves and their money, these selfless, down-to-earth and well-playing women are a breath of fresh air. “We are enjoying every moment,” superstar Mia Hamm says. All those girls that we saw screaming at the Backstreet Boys concert are now at the game to cheer their new superstars. Mia! Mia! The competition-crazed America would probably not have embraced this team with such heartwarming devotion if they had not been the best. Nonetheless, girls need role models that resemble themselves. A ponytailed Mia Hamm is a perfect role model for girls aged 7 and up. She is a role model they can identify with. (Aftenposten July 8, 1999b, p. 29)

A ponytailed youthfulness starts in childhood and can carry into adult life. The performance of ponytailed Mia Hamm does not mask the gender barriers she has broken, which make her a good role model and archetypal example of a democratic woman.

Despite numerous challenges for sustained everyday interest in women’s soccer, the World Cup competition continues to grow in size and interest.⁴ So does the repertoire of women’s bodies that embody memories and spur conversations. Notably, the idea of imitation is as resonant as a lay theory as it is an academic one. As role models, women athletes are not flawless, but hold a different “health” and spirit than Pamela Anderson’s engineered body or Barbie’s plastic shape. In fact, imitations of Hamm changed Barbie and gave room for a more human diversity (unfortunately, still highly uniform). Barbie had long had a ponytail, but with Mia Hamm, it was not simply a pragmatic choice or a stylistic expression; rather, it was infused with the star-power of a soccer-playing hero. Indeed, “Barbie Hamm” was not just playing professional soccer, but working in entertainment. Women sports had professionalized and its images multiplied.

Normalizing the ponytailed athlete is not without a cost to diversity. As we have seen, the ponytail is about being normative and fashionable, (white) heteronormative, that is. In 1986, as the Norwegian national women’s handball team made their decisive breakthrough, one or two players sported ponytails. A decade later, when soon-to-be Norwegian handball star Mia Hundvin entered the public limelight, she was (and would continue to be) described as “a tad bit crazy”:

She thinks Thor Heyerdahl is awesome, she goes to Garage [the legendary nightspot in Bergen city center], and cannot survive without licorice. She has tattoos, piercing, and neon red hair. Her new hair color caused a lot of talk some weeks back. In fact, more talk than when she, at eight years old, came to her Steiner-School with a new hairdo.

“It was my idea, but my whole family agreed that I looked adorable with a huge mouth, giant eyes, and short, purple-pink hair,” says Mia.

The description works just as well today. But Mia is fed up with hair talk. She does not get it. “What is so special about getting rid of a boring hair color?” Tertnes’ [Bergen team] color-pallet does not really think all that much about how her team colleagues slob around with ponytails, sweat pants and the television remote in their pocket.

“I watch TV, too. I have to watch NYPD Blue, but I never wear sweatpants when I am home. Workout clothes are for working out,” says Mia. (Bergens Tidene, February 1, 1998b, p. 18)

Hundvin, the short-haired color-pallet rebel, describes the ponytail as conventional and boring, not just visually, but also as an emotional uniform. She says, “The handball girls are encouraged to present themselves as mom’s best child: We should be kind and good people. We should have ponytails and don’t get angry if we lose. I tell you, I am goddam pissed if we lose and if we played a shitty game. But that just does not look good on television” (VG, June 15, 2002, p. 29).

Indeed, Hundvin is right in many respects. The ponytail is so normative that some players have trouble getting credit for all the goals they score. In the record-crazed sports world, this is a problem.⁵ For instance, before the final game of the 2010 handball season, star player Heidi Løke was trailing 15 goals behind Linn-Kristin Riegelhuth’s scoring record, although everyone believed she had already broken it. The explanation, according to Løke’s coach, was:

There are many mistakes done by the game secretariat. Moreover, we have many blond girls with ponytails out on the field. Just since New Year’s, the second half of the season, we know that Løke has not been credited for all her goals. (Telemarksavisa, April 2, 2011, p. 41)

The idea that the secretariat could not distinguish between blond players with ponytails makes little sense when the problem doesn’t seem to exist for short-haired male handball players. Perhaps the ponytails were stealing all the attention?

The professionalization of women’s sports did not end discrimination by far, and it should be perfectly clear that Norwegian journalists and their interviewees appear at some level to see long hair as a signifier of conventional heterosexuality. Perhaps this is why three women athletes from Halden in southeastern Norway were saluted for their courage to say “NO.” Under the headline, “Girls Who Will Not Be Tempted” (Halden Arbeiderblad, December 30, 2015) the women unanimously proclaimed, “We want to be remembered as athletes with good merits rather than for some scantily dressed photos on the Internet.” They are feminine role models, or as a sociologist might define them, role models that challenge ideas about conventional femininity as passivity and subordination.⁶

“When we visit our sport club’s children athletes,” these young women say, “the kids are really looking forward to seeing us. It would just be totally inappropriate if the last picture they saw of us was one in which we had no clothes on,” an elite handball player laughs.

The three women exemplars want to be feminine and show that “athletes with waving hair are can-doers!” as sport sociologist Kari Fasting once advocated, and echoing the sentiment of UFC champion Ronda Rousey, who refused the very idea of sculpting a body to attract wealthy men’s attention (McClearen, 2018).

One of the three who does road racing and rides a motor bike says she “loves to let the ponytail sail from underneath the helmet as I swoosh by the boys.” She is hoping for another road-racing adventure in the United States, where “there is a whole different culture. The very few girls that do ride let themselves be taken advantage of. When I also have the guts to say no, our cultures collide,” she laughs (Halden Arbeiderblad, December 30, 2015). Like the male bike rider with a ponytail roaring “unapologetically down the street” (VG, 27.04.1990a, p. 40), so does this young woman, even riding past him in competition. We can wonder, what is more pleasurable than to feel oneself move past symbolic and very real gender barriers, waving to the competition with a forceful signifier of heteronormative femininity, the ponytail.

Foucauldian docility to patriarchy can grant economic gains, but these women are not preaching neoliberalism. Bourdieusian false consciousness causes perceived power to reproduce subordination, but these women are not persuaded to be heteronormative objects. The iconic feel of the ponytail indicates that meanings and codes of heteronormativity do not have to reduce a woman’s willpower, performative power, or corporal force. The icon is filled with ideals of democratization and an egalitarian consciousness about being in motion. Of course, the ponytail does not eradicate injustice, but it becomes a medium with which we can experience social progress, barriers, and setbacks. In Norway, this idea of democratic hair has folkloric roots and is part of a long prose tradition. Here, feminist ideas are institutionalized in the state and in the civil sphere in which the women’s movement, social commentators, and others have long criticized unhealthy ideals.⁷ In the act of performing gender equality, the ponytail bears an iconic consciousness of democratization.

Like any community, sports and being sporty are not equally available to all. The solidarity of a community in motion is far from perfect. In fact, it might move in a direction that makes some girls and women uncomfortable or at a speed beyond their pace. Nonetheless, the idea of a ponytailed community is so pervasive that the ponytail comes to represent it.⁸ In an interview about isolation and bullying, a woman shares a poetic recollection of her schoolgirl loneliness and how breaking free from alienation can involve joining a moving body, a fish-school of children, with “laughs and ponytails swaying from side to side” (Sarpsborg Arbeiderblad, 2012). Being able to move with a ponytailed community, therefore, depends on the cultural codes and myths that this hairdo possesses and how these codes include or exclude various bodies and movements.

Underneath the ponytail’s aesthetic surface lies a cultural depth with powerful codes of both democratic incorporation and exclusion. Making ready for the Paralympics, a training session of Norwegian table tennis player Aida Husic Dahlen, “the Balkan powder keg” as her coach named her, is profiled. Dahlen was born in war-stricken Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1990 with no left forearm and has an amputated left leg below the knee. She lived her first three years at a medical center in Sarajevo before she was adopted and moved to Norway. Now “Aida is sweating. The long dark ponytail is dancing on her back, in the rapid rhythm of her body. The 21-year-old is moving swiftly on her toes behind the table” (Fædrelandsvennen, January 28, 2012, pp. 8–14). Perhaps the ponytail’s swing can expand ideas of (able)bodiless? Arne Skouen (see p. 86) used the ponytail icon to show that differently abled Frida was as normally instinctive and playful as any other child and that her limitations were mostly due to a society that cared too little. Aida Husic Dahlen “never ever believed” that she would make it to the Paralympics. Her story is a fairytale in a grim world where “dreams do not always, but sometimes come true. It has happened before” (Fædrelandsvennen, January 28, 2012, pp. 8–14). In Norway, this myth remains: Physical impairments cannot (at least should not) hold back a woman’s movements.

Changing Rules and Boundaries

The democratic women’s movement in sports was iconic, not only its powerful progress, but its many setbacks, too. Actors felt it and audiences saw it. Some tried to hide it and look the other way, but the Richter scale picked up its impact, and a new wave of bodily moralities steadily forced new questions. Sportswomen and other strong, emphatic, and courageous women (with solid backbones) were there all along. New undercurrents and spirits revealed them in a new, sometimes brighter, public light. Many had ponytails and many had bodies fashioned and molded to move against the grain. They moved to move us. A view on and from these bodies could look and feel democratic. Whether swayed by neoliberalism or socialism, they saw, entered, and recreated the world with new fusions of customs and symbols.

It is reasonable to argue that feminist undercurrents indeed power the ponytail’s iconicity, but not in a consensual and causal manner. Culture provides an ontology, a fellowship of souls, to use Durkheim’s ([1912] 1995) ideas about spiritual unity and corporal diversity. Notably, a community does not constitute consensus, but holds codes that allow its members to make understandable claims from very different, even binary, positions (Spillman, 2020). Today we are better off understanding culture as fragmented codes re-fused by actors and audiences aiming to shape social life in particular ways (Alexander, 2017). Therefore, the qualitatively different ways of seeing the world of substances, inequalities, and equalities, contain not only corporal diversity, but spiritual diversity as well, and comprise the determining factors for one’s bodily and spiritual perspective on the world (Stang, 2009, p. 60). The multitude of symbolic layers revealed in this book show how feminist undercurrents and surface debates are felt and performed in many qualitatively different ways.

In modernity, the use of symbolic layers is often accredited to the character and soul of a person. Two years before the 1998 Nagano Olympics, an Aftenposten reporter wrote:

Few have started a longer and more difficult road towards the Olympics than the women’s hockey team. They started out a couple of years back with just a few players, no traditions, and having to fight tons of prejudice. Now they are preparing by competing in the hockey league for men. Women and hockey might sound as natural as boys and knitting, but if someone snorts at the idea of women’s hockey, they are mistaking these girls’ will, determination, and commitment … The core of this team works out seven to nine times a week. All year around. Their training sessions are cruel and ambitious. And no one should think that the boys they are playing are saving their energies just because there are ponytails and braids underneath their opposition’s helmets.

“Oh no, no one feels sorry for us,” Guro Brandshaug tells us. She is captain on the boys’ team of Flatås IL in Trondheim. (Aftenposten, March 3, 1996, p. 16)

These ponytailed girls face off against boys, even lead them in battle, the journalist lets us see. They do strength training as often as possible, we are told; they are brought onto the rink by their fathers, and they change with the boys in the locker room.

The boys “treat me as they would treat anyone else. I do not think they think about me being a girl,” Brandshaug says, adding that when it is time to take a shower, she finds a vacant locker room for herself (Aftenposten, March 3, 1996, p. 16).

This joint social (Alexander, 2004) and sports performance (Broch, 2020) meets long-haired expectations in the pragmatic ponytail, its feelings and visual significance oscillating between a deep social and a deep sports play. The very personal ponytail is an unconscious reminder of a soul whose identity meaningfully maneuvers conflict and solidarity within the limits of symbolic layers. The journalist poetically recaptures the play of this two-sided icon as it waves across the ice. The journalist sees it along with the girls who she watches play. She dares the boys to come see the ponytailed performance from her side of the binary. As the journalist imbues the ponytail with determination and commitment in social and sport movements, the athlete becomes an object in democratic participation and a person with a deep consciousness of its many barriers. In the highly transformational worlds of modernity, the half-life of the ponytail allows our spirits and souls a material casing and surface that fluctuates and alters, not only to reproduce a recognizable gender identity, but to use this identity to change social life.

The world of sports is full of social facts like laws and rules that determine “the nature” of play and of those who are included (e.g., Durkheim, [1901] 2014). However, as rules change, sports journalists reveal that these are not simply game alterations, but transformations of the naturalization of gendered meanings. “You really have to excuse us,” says the impressed journalist interviewing Sigrid Lise Nonås, a ponytailed woman referee of men’s international hockey. “How can a cute, smiling lady of about 170 centimeters control a bunch of testosterone-bombes [aka men hockey players] armed with sticks?”

“When I had short hair, not many noticed that I was a girl until we were standing face to face at the puck drop” Nonås responds, “and, even now that I have a ponytail that gives me off, it is still not a problem being a girl referee.” The biggest challenge she insists is maintaining concentration “when the rink and the stands are boiling” (Bergens Tidene, January 30, 1998a, p. 17).

These journalists seem to be on a mission to show women’s progress, guts, and perhaps their lack of recognition, sometimes in places unfamiliar to most of us. Rollerblade hockey, for instance, is also a macho sport. With a humorous twist, journalist Bente Kalsnes writes about the roller hockey rink:

where the boys’ arms are as thin as their hockey sticks and most of them are about ten years. They even have a girl on their team. The light [blond] ponytail showing from underneath her helmet and necklace makes it possible to tell her apart from the team. Ida Zeline Lien (12) is the only girl in Bergen’s 1999 Inline Cup. She tackles as forcefully as her teammates. (Bergens Tidene, June 3, 1999, p. 23)

Fair enough, tackles are not allowed, but rules are made to be broken, at least if you are a dedicated player (and woman activist), the journalist declares:

[Ida] glimmers with pearls of sweat, big kneepads, and thick gloves.

“I tried figure skating too, but I think ice hockey is more fun,” Ida says.

She still uses some moves from figure skating to keep her balance. She is not sure why so few girls play roller skate hockey.

“I do not know, perhaps they do not know about roller hockey. But hockey is kind of a boy sport, it is a little bit tough,” Ida concludes.

Shania Twain’s hit song of the moment, “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” covers the arena. Ida too, is not impressed by the hockey boys. Yet, there are quite a few boys that are impressed by themselves and know very well why girls do not play hockey: “They don’t have muscles. They have some, but not a lot.”

Unfortunately, these boys do not know to whom they are talking to. This women reporter plays hockey.

Christian’s eyes open wide when I tell him that I play hockey.

“But you can’t possibly have any muscles!” he exclaims.

Christian himself, this journalist announces, has tons of muscles well hidden behind skinny arms and a big T-shirt. (Bergens Tidene, June 3, 1999, p. 23)

There is no biological reason why girls and women cannot compete socially with boys, but their hair gives their presence away to denaturalize the assumption that hockey is for boys. “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” girls and women are part of the game. They call the shots, make tackles and keep those testosterone bombs in place.

Are there any sports left that are exclusively male? Not if it is up to these fighting women players and journalist supporters who normalize women’s material presence in sports through the ponytail. They also are quick to pick up on other reformists and their gendered intent. For example, on March 27, 2017, Frøydis Sund, senior counsel at the Norwegian Center for Equality, called out the ruling that allowed only boys 12 and older to tackle in hockey—not girls. She sided with the girl teams of the Hockey Club Storhammar, who were disappointed in not being allowed to play “real hockey” (NrK, March 23, 2017a). “The Norwegian Hockey Federation should listen to the girls and stop passively referring to international regulations and outdated biomedical discourses about the frail female body,” Sund said (NrK, March 27, 2017b). On February 6, 2020, the 11-year-old girls of the Bergen Hockey Club announced they would walk in the March 8 parade to protest gender inequalities in their sport. “It is just not a 100 percent hockey if we are not allowed to tackle,” they said (NrK, February 6, 2020a). On March 8, they were pictured with hockey jerseys, banners, and a megaphone in the streets of Bergen and talking to SV (socialist left) politician, Audun Lysbakken, about sports discrimination (NrK, March 8, 2020c).

Not only on the digital platform of Norway’s most influential media outlet, but also on the primetime evening news, hockey girls with ponytails from underneath their helmets recharged the democratic woman’s body as they questioned the male legislative and cultural sports hierarchy. To change the social facts of law, perhaps a youthful spirit is needed, not in the literal meaning of the word, but in signifying a ponytailed creativity, play, and freedom. Our shared imagining of psychological and biological freedom is pre-social, Butler (1990, pp. 18–38) argued. Perhaps the feminist undercurrent of social emancipation can draw power from a ponytailed health. Perhaps freedom, instinctual play, and the democratic participation of a long-haired femininity can change the social facts of law.

If there is a place to look for such long-haired answers to health in the Nordic countries, children’s prose and sports is a good place to start. Add some winter landscape and quite a lot of snow, and we are getting somewhere. On cold February afternoons in Glimmerdal, for example, the town of author Maria Parr’s character, Astrid, the Unstoppable, it is quiet and white with snow. Steep mountains run right down to the fjord:

But in the midst of this winter quiet, there is a black dot about to make some noise … At the end of a long and quite rough ski track. The dot was none other than Astrid Glimmerdal … “I let her out every morning and hope she’ll be back in the evening,” her dad, Sigurd, would say … The Little Thunderbolt of Glimmerdal, that was what everyone called her. Below Cairn Peak, Astrid shifted her weight a little, pointing the tips of her skis down towards the crag known as the Little Hammer … The run down to the Little Hammer was steep. So steep that Astrid really had to steel herself. But this was what Auntie Eira and Auntie Idun did when they were home for Easter. They’d start from the same place, and would set off at a furious speed, kicking up a flurry of snow behind them like a bride’s veil. They’d leap off the edge of the Little Hammer, flying sky-high. Auntie Eira did somersaults. “You need two things in life,” Aunt Eira would say. “Speed and confidence.” … Now Astrid waved her arms to signal that she was ready. (Parr, [2009] 2017, pp. 15–18)

Gunnvald is Astrid’s neighbor and best friend—an adult man living alone, and with some darn good binoculars to watch Astrid from his kitchen window. The silence of Glimmerdal’s winter landscape is broken as Astrid sings her way down the mountainside. She hits the Little Hammer and flies:

If she’d known how to do somersaults, like Auntie Eira, then she would’ve had time to do three in a row. But I do not know how to do somersaults yet, Astrid thought to herself while in mid-air. Or maybe I do, she thought next, when she noticed that her head was where her legs were supposed to be, and her legs were where her head was supposed to be. Then, after flying quite an impressive trajectory, Astrid crash-landed like an upside-down jelly baby in a cream cake with far too much cream. It was white and cold, and she didn’t know whether she was alive or dead as she lay there. Gunnvald was probably wondering the same thing, down at his kitchen window. Astrid lay still until she could feel her heart beating. Then she shook her head a little, as if to put everything inside it back in place. “Does that count as a somersault?” she wondered. (Parr, [2009] 2017, pp. 18–20)

This narrative represents neither the psychological notion of the pre-social or a lexical notion of youth, but the cultural significance of this youthful stage of life and how its symbolism is seen and felt throughout life. “Speed and confidence,” as Astrid would say, are not simply a surface moving through air, but a depth of currents and felt forces of social movements. On an afternoon in October 2001 in Lillehammer, winter-sports athletes still await the snow, but, artificial turf allows the ski jumpers to fly early:

There she goes; her balance is good, loooong she goes! If the girls keep up the pace, they will likely get some attention and the breakthrough they deserve. When they are welcomed at the Olympics, they will definitely turn some heads.

“We are working on it. And we are working for an official World Cup for women,” says Mette Jahr (43), part of the Girls Committee in the Norwegian Skiing Federation’s Ski Jump board …”

[Many nations—Switzerland, Germany, and Japan—are investing in their women ski jumpers, we are told.]

Who would have thought? Henriette Smeby has jumped 133 meters in Lillehammer and all the girls [on the Norwegian national team] have crushed their equal-aged boy peers.

“We know these girls are for real and that they will go the extra mile for their sport,” [says] Hroar Stjernen, their coach, who wants to build the world’s best team. He is surrounded by teenage boys from Elverum and one girl. It is just the light [blond] ponytail sticking out from underneath the helmet, which tells us that she is not exactly like the rest of the group.

“Ski jump is different,” Kristine says in her silver-colored suit. “The great speed is fun, and to fly. But it is difficult.”

Today the ski jumping team is made up of girls who are happy to now be able to compete in a sport that is to them new, but truth is that ski jump for women is an old discipline. Through the 1930s, Johanne Kolstad and Hilda Braskerud from the small rural community of Dokka competed in women’s ski jumping. Indeed, in 1896, at an event hosted by Asker Skiing Club, a local writer recommended that women jumpers should wear a tight-fitting suit with tight pants as it was not considered appropriate when a “lady” was sliding on her belly down the slope with her skirt hugging her ears. Ski jumper Johanne Kollstad broke the world record in USA [72 meter in March 6, 1938] and became the first women world champion in ski jump. (Aftenposten, October 7, 2001, p. 43)

Given the many women exemplars and the long strategic work of the gender-equity-minded state of Norway, the new generation of women ski jumpers are fighting a battle that has been repeatedly fought and won, but almost forgotten. Part of this puzzlement, it should be noted, is not a result of an uninformed public. Time and time again, the Norwegian public has heard or read about gendered injustice, and thus, their bewilderment is simply an argument for change. Asking “how can this be?” again and again reveals the blind side of a culture with gender equality at its heart as well as a master narrative actively used to revitalize that charge. Not all attempts are equally admirable and impressive, but that is not our concern here. What sustains our interest is how the social performance of equality is infused in those sporting ponytails and the possible implications.

In her 1992 New Year’s address, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Norway’s first woman prime minister (forever after dubbed “Landsmoderen,” loosely translated “the mother of the nation”), implicitly countered the idea that Norwegians should not think too highly of themselves. Representing the Norwegian Labor Party, she stressed that social-democratic success is possible only through a well-functioning welfare state founded on solidarity in sameness and equality. Using examples from the hierarchized world of sports, Brundtland argued for cultivating the values Norwegians are very good at:

The football girls, the handball girls, the cross-country boys, and the Oslo philharmonic compete among the world’s elite. In the same way, we will show everyone that Norwegian industry can do well globally. Do we need a new slogan? It is typically Norwegian to be good. (Brundtland, 1992)

With her use of components of competition, sports, and industry, perhaps Brundtland managed to sneak neoliberalism into Norway’s social democracy without its citizens even noticing (Stalsberg, 2019). This hindsight cannot detract from the many women who inspired Bruntland’s spirited declaration. Anything less would be unduly un-Norwegian and, therefore, undemocratic.⁹

Beliefs and solidarity also move industry, interests, and economies (Spillman, 2012). The Norwegian idea of gender equality keeps ringing. On March 2, 2020b, the Norwegian public broadcast news program NrK’s Dagsrevyen (19:23) reported on the Norwegian royal family’s visit to Jordan where the king and queen put “gender equality on the agenda.” The journalists reported that only 14 percent of Jordanian women were paid workers, and with a hint of racial superiority, they also noted that the Jordanian reception of the Norwegian king resembled a story out of 1001 Nights. They even perfumed the negotiation rooms.

Film footage showed the Norwegian king surrounded by Norwegian women ministers, and commented, “With him, King Harald has only women in the most powerful positions of parliament, and a message of looking to Norway for [lessons] in equality.” The Norwegian queen, in her ceremonial speech to the hosts, said “Women’s participation in working life has had a greater impact on Norway’s economy than our oil and gas revenues together. We are quite proud of that.” The broadcast proclaimed, “One strong woman made a hard-hitting contribution to equality also in Jordan. Queen Sonja asked King Abdullah to step up his reforms to get more women into work by stating that ‘Gender equality is not only a human right, it is also smart economics.’”

Time and time again Norwegians crown themselves as champions of gender equality, and some statistics and global rankings prove the point. Yet others are more problematic, such as the very fact that Norwegian sports is falling behind in the battle for gender justice. During the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, where Norwegian women medalists outnumbered their men compatriots, journalist Leif Welhaven commented on “the paramount women’s revolution” in sport, arguing that of all that “Norwegian society has reason to feel proud about, equality between men and women is what is [our] finest [achievement]. Not much can [therefore] beat the taste of women no longer being the weaker sex as we count our medals” (VG, February 21, 2018). A year later, in front thousands of spectators in Seefeld, Maren Lundby won the 2019 World Championship gold medal in ski jump, and Aftenposten noted, “It is hard not to think of gender equality and the women’s movement as Maren Lundby is screaming in joy” (Aftenposten, February 27, 2019).

As Norwegian women ski jumpers made small jumps in sports, they made giant leaps for women, at least, so the story goes. It is difficult to frame Maren Lundby’s feat any other way because a substantial part of the Norwegian press had been reporting and cheering this progress for many years. Perhaps because men sports had taken up a lot of viewing hours and many print pages, a woman’s accomplishments seemed more heroic, more daring. Maren Lundby joined a long line of pioneering women athletes in Norway, the newspapers reported (Aftenposten, February 27, 2019). Johanne Kolstad and Hilda Braskerud, Mette Jahr and Henriette Smeby, and perhaps best known to contemporary Norwegians, Anette Sagen, began championing for women’s right to ski jump in Norway long ago. These women, in various ways and in various rhythms, materialized several movements. Alongside them, images of Synnøve Sobakken, Ildrid the Mountain Girl, Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi and Ronja, and Astrid the Unstoppable were skiing, too. Like Andy Mead Lawrence and the Norwegian women slalom team, their movements developed “in a play of equilibria. The skies becoming 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” (VG, January 31, 1956) Ski jumpers Sagen and Lundby were “blond, with braided ponytails under their helmets and a perseverance of steel. Perhaps there is Pippi power in those braids” (FriFagbevegelse, February 12, 2018), the reporter wrote. This was a story of gender equality, “of how women ski jumpers fought for all girls who wanted to fly on skis” (ibid.).

In 2021, under the banner of “equal possibilities,” Maren Lundby joined other top ranked Norwegian women athletes to fight for equal conditions in girls’ and boys’ sports. Minister of Culture and Equality Abid Raja saluted Lundby’s “merciless equality criticism” of Norwegian sports. This is “a fight she should not have to fight in the second most equal country in the world’s. Sports still lag behind,” he said (Dagbladet, January, 12, 2021). Raja had the statistics and global rankings to make this statement, yet, there Lundby was again, fighting. Perhaps they had forgotten about the other gender injustices of Norway? On a very few occasions, meaningful materiality can move mountains and even make objects not meant to fly to soar above the slopes. More often, perhaps, spirits, beliefs, and desires can be performed in ways that echo between the mountains, vibrate throughout the concert hall, shake our ideas of corporal possibilities, triggering avalanches that clear new terrain. This is no ritual causality, but a work of continuous and relentless efforts evoked by an iconic consciousness of injustice. No wonder then, with all those meanings and all that effort, that a ponytail experience can have a democratic charge.

Myths, not as a falsity, but as a cultural modality, are “living texts with which living people continue to write or narrate or perform their unique answers to basic human questions” (Leonard & McClure, 2005, p. 57). These answers are powerful because individuals intuitively match experienced, perceived, and available worlds with a deeper level of reality.¹⁰ It is not that an iconic ponytail lends humans the swinging tail of a proud horse or the high tail of a frisky foal, although Vogue called out Kim Kardashian West’s “memorable mane” and a Norwegian journalist noted the stark similarity of the two tails bouncing as the young girl equestrian rides her horse. Neither is the ponytail the chic statement of Norwegian state-feminism’s gender norms, which would make the hairstyle arguably less likable among Liberal and Conservative milieus than it is. However, we cannot ignore the poetic deliberation that ties the women’s movement to the fashionable braids of the athlete. Iconic instances are multilayered and situational. Feedback loops that oscillate between the codes of custom and fashion, between freedom and constraints, fuse in a belief and desire for materiality of balance, a ponytail. Its charge builds up over time.¹¹ Like Ørjan, his face tickled by a horsetail as he anticipates yet another ride, or the journalist noticing again and again the ski jumper’s ponytail braided with “Pippi power” and the women’s movement—tangible sensing, writing, speaking, and performing condense the many layers of a cosmology of democratic wishes that lend ponytailed imitations their mythological depth.

Butler (1990) argued, and many with her, that desire reflects or expresses gender and that gender reflects or expresses desires of difference. There is no questioning this heteronormative, identity-creating fact of many Western societies. All the same, we must explore if and possibly how desires of sameness, equality, and freedom run parallel to constructions of difference. Imitations not only copy, but also alter. They do not always replicate uncritically, but call forth deliberation.

The ponytailed women athlete, never loves nor worships movement—she is movement. She and her audience can seek recourse to the empirical facts that will not only prove it, but also naturalize its identities and desires. She was like this all through childhood, through adolescence, and she still is. The ponytail’s empirical-cum-iconic “reality” is stored in bodies and elaborated by the hair’s aesthetic swing. If it is true that the ponytail of modernity rings a feminist tune and that it signifies a working, powerful, and busy femininity—at times too busy to consider the male gaze—then the ponytail has moved beyond the heads of girls playing and learning to women working and changing the world. This movement is historic and cultural. Its embodiment, the iconic consciousness it projects of the heterosexual matrix, safeguards and demonstrates this achievement to remake new and old barriers. Sporting ponytails are not easily pacified or compromised. They purify a healthy freedom and social movement in long-haired expectations in the practical settings of the modern woman (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

To be movement. (Picture credit: Nastasic via Getty Images)

In the diverse world of athletic contest, ponytailed women reveal how sports shape gendered spirits in primordial ways. Fashion, youthfulness, and democratic spirits are not equally available to all. Historically, men have dominated the materializing of sporting spirits in the public sphere, but more and more in the twenty-first century, women are changing that. Plausibly, both social movements and neoliberal ideas of emancipation have catalyzed and capitalized on this process.¹² Yet sport remains an existential realm in which we perform and interpret how and why spirits, social power, ideologies, and democratic movements shape gendered life. As actors and audiences thread the deep meanings of the ponytail through social and sport life, as they root their social existence in this materiality (e.g., Alexander, 1988a, 1988b), this total social fact allows us to see and feel the experiential totality of our maneuvering of material and non-material facts (e.g., Durkheim, [1901] 2014; Mauss, [1950] 1966). Here, the ponytail object becomes an inner compass of a cosmological terrain of democratic hopes and social inequalities. Depending on the codes and symbolic layers used for calibration, the needle will point in different directions. Sometimes its direction is logical and feels rational; sometimes its course will turn your stomach round and leave you cheering the path taken. Quite often, the ponytail icon is a powerful mediator that lets you enter and recreate a set of irreconcilable oppositions, wishes, and constraints, to navigate its pulls and pushes, to shape and challenge again and again the path taken.