A linguistic observation

Yesterday, as I caught myself ogling the back of someone’s head, I realized something–there is no dignified way to describe the woman’s hairstyle closely shorn on the sides and back, with the bangs and top left to grow slightly beyond those normally worn by Western males. All its descriptors employ childish imagery.

Consider the term “pixie cut,” and its invocation of storybook fae saddled  with the unserious “ie/y” suffix.

To call the haircut “boyish” implicitly, subliminally, unwittingly (harmlessly?) imposes a fashion development of the last two centuries onto the whole of pre-adolescent maledom. If one really thinks about it, saddling a mature woman’s hair with the modifier “boyish” carries a likewise subliminal echo of pederasty.

As named in The Joy Luck Club, the “Peter Pan” not only implies boyishness, but perennial childhood,and one marked by recklessness, solipsism, and incontinence.

Should I be genuinely worried about the lack of adult language to describe cropped hair in women, I should think I would be more politically correct than I intend (although I’ve never received an adequate definition of what “PC” actually is other than a bad or at least silly thing). I might be over-thinking it as it is, like the proverbial Talmundic scholar who philosophizes on the legality of eating an egg laid on the sabbath. In of itself, the use of existing terms are probably harmless, though they are indicative of potentially troublesome means by which sexualities are expressed.