"Actually he's bulimic"
The mitzvah of self-control, class stratification, and horses that die horribly
The Royal Ascot will come to a close this Saturday, putting an end to the year’s most important parade of marvellous hats.
When conservatives yearn for the days of old – family values, tradition and all that – what they really mean is that they wish we lived in a world where people still wore hats. Baruch HaShem, some of us actually do.
Like most horse events, Royal Ascot is not actually about horses. To be sure, one could watch the races, bet on a horse, and cavort with jockeys, but the real point of the five-day meeting is to get sloshed and look fabulous. One Ascot insider told me that people who can’t get into the event would dress up anyway and hang around outside to take photos.
The star of the occasion was once the fascinator: an ornamental ladies’ hat, fixed to the head with a headband or pins. Fascinators don’t cover much of the head, and they’re commonly adorned with feathers, tulle, and pizzazz making them rather indiscreet. Like many beautiful things, they’re uncommon in the United States but occasionally pop up at formal occasions across the commonwealth. I would be remiss, however, not to mention the Kentucky Derby, the acid-trip American answer to Ascot, where bleached hair, enormous hats, and yes, fascinators are second only to mint juleps in importance before horses and gambling.
Royal Ascot has strict dress requirements. Ladies must wear hats, but fascinators don’t meet the requirements of a hat. Express reported in 2012 that “all headgear must have a base of at least four inches or 10cm in diameter, which definitely rules out hairbands or those little saucer-y discs on which fascinators are usually built.” The juries out on whether lace-top sheitels count as a valid head covering under the auspices of the Royal Ascot, but it’s probably safer to go with a wider hat, to be sure.
I have never attended Ascot or the Kentucky Derby. I’ve always wanted to. I love dressing up. I love summer. I love drinking. I love the idea of WASPy sports. You can always tell when summer officially starts in Montreal because the lawn bowlers emerge in their whites on the Westmount bowling green. They inaugurate the season with a slow bagpipe procession on a sunny Saturday morning. They do this next to the Shaar, and you can catch it if you’re late for services. On the way out, bowling is in full swing, and as you leave the shul you can peek at them from over the hedge like a cluster of garden gnomes and contemplate your chosen-ness.
Sometimes I think the air feels different on Shabbat. You measure the day in sunsets. Time passes slower, and your phone is in a drawer somewhere. You hope people will show up to your meals when they said they would. People zip past you in cars on the way to the mall. If Ruth Bader Ginsburg happens to die, you won’t find out until dark. I wonder if the lawn bowlers feel the same, smocked in white and paying a stupid amount of money for club membership. The invite-only attendees in the Ascot’s Royal Enclosure whose choices keep the millinery industry alive year after year.
In Calgary, the sexy oil city where I was born, there’s a yearly rodeo-cum-carnival where people dress up, but without any of the elitism of Ascot or the derby. There are chuckwagon races and men who genuinely wear cowboy hats, and then tens of thousands of attendees dress in their finest western wear for 11 days in July. People get really into it, even the octogenarians at Beth Tzedec on shabbos morning, who lein Torah in cowboy hats, boots, and tallisim like The Frisco Kid.
One of the more esoteric aspects of the Stampede is the crowning of the Stampede Queen. The Stampede Royalty consists of a Queen, a Princess, and a First Nations Princess in its current iteration. The first Stampede Queen was crowned in 1946, and the first Indian Princess was crowned in 1995, with that title lasting until they changed it in 2018. I cannot recall a single Stampede Queen. It’s kind of a beauty pageant, kind of horse riding thing, and maybe more meaningful to people who grew up on farms. The winner makes public appearances (allegedly) for a year before handing off the crown (a cowboy hat) to the next winner. I’m glad the word Cheugy was invented this year because the whole thing is a cheugfest.
Horses have a dark relationship to sport. Horses die every year at the Stampede, usually from injuries incurred during chuckwagon racing or when their transport trailers crash. They’re euthanized after breaking bones. Sometimes their riders die from head injuries. The jockeys who ride horses at fancier events have their fair share of issues, too. To be a jockey, you have to be tiny and light, like a child or a feather. Adult men who ride tend to follow “restrictive diets.” My friend’s dad genuinely suggested giving the all-you-can-eat sushi at dinner we couldn’t finish to the jockey dining with us because he would throw it all up later. “Actually, he’s bulimic. I’m surprised you didn’t notice.” It’s very hush-hush because men never talk about their eating disorders.
When people talk about their eating disorders, especially when they’re not in recovery, it can come across as competitive or camaraderie. In the way that Maya Hornbacher’s Wasted can be considered an instructional account of her anorexia, personal anecdotes of disordered eating can easily come across as didactic. This makes it easy for insidious behaviour to spread. One of the terms commonly used to describe the disordered eating behaviour of jockeys is “weight-control.” As soon as you start talking about disordered eating as a matter of self-control, it starts to sound like a virtue.
An Instagram BT rebbetzin I follow recently started making content about the importance of kisuy rosh, the practice of married women covering their hair. She was not raised religious and took on the mitzvah recently. In one archived Story, she writes, “Let’s do it! #coveryourhair #coveryourcollarbones.” In another, “To truly embrace the Mitpachat, you must truly believe you are beautiful from the inside first.” I can imagine that’s encouraging, in a way, but the head covering discourse is often urgent and condescending, especially when advocating for the most stringent interpretation of the mitzvah. I wonder if her audience, or if she herself, would feel more comfortable if she were aware of the differing standards of head covering across the Orthodox world. Lace-top discourse aside, there’s a subset of people who find immodest head covering to be putting our neshamas, our families, and our yearning for Moshiach in peril.
From Ohel Sara:
Ladies, we have to admit that one of the ailments of this generation that has affected Am Yisrael, is the lack of sensitivity for kedushah and Yahadut. I think it’s time for all of us to ban together just like the nashim tzadkaniyot did all those years ago in Mitzrayim and it’s time for us to take a stand.
Framing mitzvot as a matter of self-discipline probably works for a specific subset of people, but the guilt it inspires is unsustainable. Leaning too far and failing isn’t a great recipe for retention as much as it is for resentment. The same influencer writes, “sometimes we’re out of the swing of things when it comes to prayer, tzniut, or mitzvot. When we want to return to the proper derech, it can be super frustrating, especially when you want to get everything right and perfect.”
Royal Ascot isn’t the only space concerned with women’s modesty. So, where do fascinators stand? The Forward reported that some synagogues in the UK don’t consider the fascinator to be a valid head covering for women, with one shul saying, “All Jewish married ladies must wear a hat or other head covering (not just a ‘fascinator’) while in the Synagogue.” Meanwhile, in the US:
But Rabbi Benjamin Skydell of Congregation Orach Chaim, a modern Orthodox synagogue in Manhattan, explains that a fascinator — even one on the smaller side — may be entirely kosher. The passages in the Talmud that deal with the standards of hair covering mention little about how much hair must be covered, he says. There’s even discussion as to whether wearing just a basket on one’s head is enough (remember, women way back when carried baskets).
“A fascinator may very well fit the minimum requirement,” Skydell says.
At home, some of the women at my shul wear fascinators. I once spotted controversial conservative Canadian journalist Barbara Kay wearing a fascinator at the kiddush, shortly after she penned an op-ed about the beauty of mechitza titled The view from the women’s balcony. When she smiled at me, she revealed many rows of sharp, serrated teeth. Just kidding. Her journey from a liberal shul to something more trad mirrored my own (except for the very public falling out with her old community); she writes:
Liberalized, egalitarian Judaism served me and my family well in our salad days. I cherish warm memories of that community and the friendships that grew from it.
But, now a matriarch, I am attuned to the task of becoming a Jewish ancestor. I need to focus on the bigger picture. To my surprise, I find that picture coming into sharper focus from the women’s section.
Funnily enough, the mechitza at our shul is more of a squat railing where people gather to kibitz, and young children hoist themselves over. It’s basically the same view. I know it’s a metaphor, but it’s funny.
If you’re thinking of covering your hair this shabbos, consider the humble fascinator in the spirit of lost horses and champagne glasses.