If you go up to the second-floor bathroom of my student house, and for some reason take a good look at the bottom of the garbage bin, you’ll find dark brown hair clippings: the ghost of impulsive haircuts past.
They’re stuck in there. Partially because in the chaos of any given day, nobody can be bothered to clean them up. But, as I am determined to cloak the world in shades of epic drama, I think we have to make them more than that. Those hair clippings are going to stay there, or rather, they have to stay there, because of the tremendous capacity for hope embedded in their narrative.
One person I know, Matilda, is a third year Psychology major here at Queen’s who recently got a pixie cut reminiscent of an alternative Audrey Hepburn. Admiring the bold step, I asked her why:
“I had short hair when I was younger and loved it, but I got a lot of comments about how guys wouldn’t like it and [they told me how] I’d be prettier with long hair. I spent a long time growing it out and trying to just make it exactly what guys would like (and I was in a bad relationship where I was sort of told what I could and couldn’t do with my appearance), so a huge part of getting out of high school and that relationship symbolically was doing all the things guys didn’t like to my hair. And then every time I was sad or bored or felt ugly I would f*** with my hair to feel like I could get control back and eventually it was not empowering anymore. So, I just said f*** it and cut it all off to start fresh. Cause f*** doing anything for men but also f*** doing things cause you’re sad, men and sadness are both terrible motivations to do anything.”
Surely, we can all see here that Matilda certainly should never have been crafting her appearance to suit the preferences of some guy, who, high on the victory of his high school basketball team, walked around with a Don Quixote-esque inflated sense of self-importance. But we’re all doing it. We go to great lengths to look pretty, girly, clear skinned, approachable, natural but not too natural, thin but not too thin, curvy but not too curvy. It can leave you in the impossible task of trying to keep up, with a kind of emotional whiplash. In this world, the very concept of a haircut is anything but a haircut. We aren’t ever really cutting our hair. We are cutting a part of a cultural context.
But what happens when it runs so deep that even that haircut, the rebellious one, is a kind of post-breakup, anti-high school, anti-boys-who-try-to-control-you, power play? When you, like Matilda described, chop off your hair because you’re caught up in some miserable attempt to take control, you’re cutting your hair to protest something. The discouraging paradox is that that protest is a kind of affirmation of some guy’s very power over you. What’s a girl to do?
What is our hair, really? It’s so much more than the physical. What I’m going to characterize as the ‘Hair Salon Industrial Complex’ has women spending upwards of sixty or so dollars every time we would like to get just a little bit of it trimmed off. There’s also the shampoo, the scalp massage, the deep condition, the anti-frizz cream, that come along with the haircut. You can’t forgo these measures and pay less. The idea of hair as a process, an event, is implicit in the institutions we are all bound to in order to take care of it. This is not to say hairdressers do not deserve to be paid well for their work. I think these individuals are magicians, and I’m sure they should make more. But what does it say that there’s this much fanfare around a haircut?
It says that it is important. Hair becomes something of a profound aesthetic statement. It is worth putting time and effort into, to make it just what you want. The top of your head is prime real estate for impact and attention. So much is lost when we rent that property out to some guy.
Imagine if he was nowhere to be found. If we let our hair be ours, it would be like a crown. It could be like a personality quiz or an astrological reading. It could tell the world who you are or who you wanted to be that day or how much you have changed since last month or how little you want to be who you were last year. It could be just for fun. It could be profoundly serious. It could make you feel bouncy or free or ethereal or brooding or artistic. It could be something you have for you. A sacred ritual where you can invent yourself once and for all, or three times in the same week.
“Men and sadness are both terrible motivations to do anything”
Try to know why you’re doing it. Cut it all off and start fresh. But start fresh for you. Bleach it for you. Get short, punk rock looking bangs for you. And if you can’t tell the difference between you and some guy, listen to Gravity by Sara Bareilles, and leave your hair alone, until you can.
And then, when you really know what you want, those clippings in the second floor bathroom will sit in the garbage can and stare back at you; simply an artifact of that one time you told the world exactly what you wanted to be. That month, at least.