spacefaring kiss boy

ergonomicon

For us, Lenin and Stalin’s hairstyles fell within the normal range of men’s haircuts, but we didn’t know what to make of Marx and Engels, whose hair was long even by women’s standards, for women in our town–like Chinese women everywhere then–cropped their hair short below the ear. Hair length was the established yardstick for distinguishing the sexes, and so Marx and Engels left us baffled, especially Marx–his curly hair practically covered his ears, much like the women of our town, whose ears revealed themselves only occasionally beneath their thick heads of hair. Marx’s bushy beard, of course, tended to deter us from further speculation about his gender. One of my classmates, however, brushed aside this evidence and went so far as to publicly declare, “Marx was a woman.”