One of my favorite websites is Offbeat Bride. It's got so many great stories about people, and their wacky weddings are endearing to read about (candy for the mind on a bad day!) and the photos are so much fun. I ran across an article there while checking it today on diversity within the offbeat bride community. You can read it here. It got me thinking about a few conversations I've had with people lately about subculture, self-marginalization and what everyone's "normal" is.
The other day I'm talking to my friend and coworker over some Mexican food and she asked if I was going to leave my hair like is for a conference I'm attending in San Antonio later this month. I recently dyed my all of my hair bright purple, and she knows I haven't decided if I should dye it back to look more professional for the four days I'll be in Texas. I was telling her about how last year when I went to this conference, I was irritated with some of the delegates there who had put themselves outside the realm of professional appearances with unnatural hair colors, lip rings, etc. and hadn't done anything to offset that. What I mean is not that they (or I) should necessarily take that lip ring out or dye the hair back, but that to appear professional when one is clearly not buying into that, one will have to go an extra mile. Slicker makeup, a more formal hairdo, extra starch in the suit. Things I wouldn't worry about if I were currently a brunette or that someone else might not find necessary if they didn't have a visible tattoo branding them "sloppy" to proponents of professional dress.
The point isn't necessarily my bias, because I'm the first to admit that whole opinion isn't entirely fair and tad hypocritical. My friend and I went on to discuss how that same concept of having to "make up for" what you have voluntarily done with put yourself outside the norm of accepted personal aesthetics certainly must apply as well to those who can't help being outside the Barbie and Ken genre of looks. Do minorities have to "make up for" looking "different"? We wondered if it is more acceptable for a white blond woman to go about in a sweat suit than a young black man, because her lack of formal dress is less problematic considering she has the "advantage" of being a white blond woman, and thus already up on the widely-accepted aesthetics.
So that brings us to this Offbeat Bride article that touches on that same idea of privilege of appearance. Someone wrote, "It's more difficult to exist (survive economically, be accepted, etc.) in a normative homogenizing society like ours as a member of a sub-culture; therefore for someone who is already marginalized based on something they have no choice about (their visible racial identity) it is less likely they will choose to compound that marginalization. To some extent it is a luxury to choose to marginalize yourself when you have the choice of 'blending'."
It's refreshing to consider that as much as prejudice against the pierced, tattooed, and dyed is discussed, it is still a privilege to pierce, tattoo, and dye. I've often heard comparisons and debates over voluntary alterations of appearance vs. involuntary differences like race show up on tattoo message boards and yuppie articles, but this twist on the old argument is good food for thought.
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