We love watching Saturday Night Live to see how they slip the satirical knife into targets like Trump, Bennifer, Tucker Carlson, Putin, various hypocrites and egotists, and Trump. We don’t really expect to see them go after women like us though. Because what about us can you make fun of?
Gray pigtails, apparently.
“I look how incense smells.”
We didn’t even know gray pigtails were a thing, but it seems they are worn by a certain kind of pot-smoking, folk-music-loving woman who wants to express how far from your typical old lady she is. Or so that’s what a skit from the show this weekend insists.
“I want to express myself because I’m young at heart and I want to show it,” a prim older woman wearing a cardigan says at the start of the bit.
“And I want to look as young as I feel,” says her similarly cardigan-ed friend.
The solution, proposed by characers played by Adie Bryant and Kate McKinnon, are gray adult pigtails. “The number one hairstyle for whimsical women of a certain age.”
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The Meat of the Joke
NextTribe founder Jeannie Ralston has been known to wear her (non-gray) hair in pigtails, but really she’s more fond of braids as an alternative style.
The skit goes on to suggest that you pair your new hair with a Cranberries T-shirt or denim overalls where you’re naked underneath. One character sporting the do says, “I look how incense smells.”
The overall suggestion is that certain kinds of older women are still highly sexualized and a bit pathetic or silly. But we did love the joke from a guy with his own gray pigtails (you must see the clip to see how that works). “You can’t ride a bike,” he says naughtily, “with no handlebars!”
It rankles some that women who dare to part from the conventional path are to be laughed at. But then we check our thin skin and look at the whole thing from another angle. Many people consider it a compliment to be lampooned on SNL. And for the show to turn its hefty media spotlight on us means we’re figuring in the social conversation of the day. And that’s waaaay better than being invisible, don’t you think?
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