Short hair, don't care!

When it comes to women’s hair, it’s about more than just hair, isn’t it?

Last summer, I had my hair cut short. I don’t mean the kind of “short” cut that long-haired women often seem to mean, when the person in question wails about it being too short while no one else even notices it’s been cut. We’re talking proper short - from a bit below my shoulders to a couple of inches on top and shorter at the sides.

This felt like a big deal, because long hair is feminine, pretty, glamorous, sexy - our “crowning glory”. From childhood, most of the images we see of girls and women feature long hair. Think Barbie. Think Disney princesses. If I say “little girl” do the images that pop up feature long hair? I know mine do. Already the lines are drawn for children (to the potential detriment of all genders): long hair is feminine; short hair is masculine.

The “Why, Miss Jones, you’re beautiful” trope tells us that hair is a vital component of beauty - Miss Jones goes unnoticed when her hair is scraped off her face, but when she shakes it out and takes off her glasses, suddenly she’s beautiful in a way she isn’t when you focus on just her face, apparently (is it me, or is this right up there with the Prince not being able to recognise Cinderella by her face when it comes to red flags?).

Letting your hair down means being more fun and relaxed, and when a woman literally lets her hair down on screen or in a book, it usually indicates a softer, more vulnerable, more inviting side of her. Female celebrities are mostly long-haired and those who cut their hair short tend to trigger a lot of strong opinions. On screen, we most often see women with cropped hair if a point is being made of making them less feminine - GI Jane, for instance - or if they are being punished or shamed by having their hair cut off (a punishment that says so much about our attitudes to women’s hair!).

My own sense of hair being crucial to femininity has been enhanced by my mother repeatedly telling me that I had no hair until I was two or so and that she often had to correct people who assumed I was a boy.

Following a short cut in my early twenties, someone told me they’d not only genuinely not recognised me at first but had thought I was a man. One friend said she wished she was “that brave”, and I still have no idea whether that was a compliment or an insult.

I did it again in my mid thirties, only for my then husband to tell anyone who would listen that he thought I looked like a butch lesbian. He definitely didn’t mean it as a compliment. Another family member said that she preferred women to look like women. Ouch.

To be honest, it surprised me that I was thinking about cutting my hair off again twenty years later. And it was very much a case of wanting rid of the long hair rather than actively wanting short hair, if that makes sense. Quite simply, I was heartily sick of my long hair: it got in my eyes, my mouth, my food; it clogged up the shower drain and the hoover; it rustled annoyingly on my hearing aids; it never looked or behaved how I wanted it to.

But I also felt that my long hair was a clear label of femininity, and it was something to hide behind. Cutting it off would leave me exposed to my own face (I was once told that even my biggest fan wouldn’t describe me as pretty) and to the judgement of others, which I knew from experience could feel devastating.

Having absorbed the message that women are supposed to have long hair, that you cannot be feminine, sexy and glamorous without it, I was scared to remove this symbol of conformity and, indeed, hope (even though I strongly suspect that only someone with a haystack fetish would ever have found my long hair sexy or attractive).

And yet still I couldn’t stop thinking about cutting my hair. In the end, it was the constant overthinking and the amount of headspace it was taking up that pushed me over the edge.

I booked the appointment with a sense of excitement…and also the belief that I would probably end up replacing the current noise in my head with a repetitive refrain of “What the fuck have you done? You’re going to be ugly and miserable forever” - but a change is as good as a rest, as they say (although do you ever wonder if “they” know what they’re talking about?).

I can’t pretend there weren’t a lot of nerves when the hair started coming off. One of the voices in my head would not stop muttering about “crowning glory” and how I was going to regret this. Another rolled its eyes a lot (yes, voices can have eyes, apparently) and insisted that it was only hair and would grow back. Another ceased its whimpering for long enough to tartly point out that previous growing out experiences had proved long and painful. Another one watched giddily, bouncing up and down and squealing with excitement (that one was definitely my favourite that day).

The reaction from others was overwhelmingly positive - not politely positive, but the kind of surprised and almost rude positive that suggested sincerity (well, to me, anyway!). The most common response was something along the lines of “OMG, I almost didn’t recognise you…wow…but actually it really suits you”. A few days after the cut, my husband looked at me thoughtfully for a while and said “You look like you now” (my taste in husbands has improved dramatically).

And how do I feel about it? I bloody love it, rather to my surprise.

There’s been no reverse Miss Jones moment - I haven’t suddenly started to see myself as beautiful (I’m not and have no illusions about it). But I am seeing myself without hating what I see: that was the surprise. The bit I really love is how much lighter and more liberated I feel.

I’m a cis woman, but standard stereotypes of femininity and female sexiness have always felt beyond my reach. As a younger woman, I saw this as a problem with me and constantly strove to look how I thought I should look, spending a small fortune on clothes, lotions and potions, cosmetics, and hair cuts/colouring/products, none of which produced any lasting change or satisfaction. I was painfully self-conscious and ill at ease in my own skin, needing validation from others to feel good about myself.

To stop chasing the out of reach was such a relief. Losing the hair felt like taking off a mask, a hard won acknowledgement that my worthiness (or lack thereof) does not lie in my looks and that I do not have to try to be something I’m not in order to have value. To look in the mirror and see my middle-aged, not-pretty, bare face without the long hair to soften it or distract from it, and to be ok with that was an incredible rush.

Every hair cut since has seen me take it shorter, until this week we got to a buzzcut - so short it was done entirely with clippers. It’s my favourite yet.

Just to be clear, I don’t have a problem with long hair and I have no interest in persuading anyone else to cut theirs off. What I do have a problem with is social and cultural norms around what being a woman should look like, and the way this can lead to so much pain and shame for those who fall outside of those arbitrary parameters. No woman should feel pressured to perform femininity in order to be accepted and/or valued as a woman, or indeed, simply as a human being.

When it comes to women’s hair, it’s about more than just the hair: it can be about radical acts of self-reclamation and self-acceptance. And those acts will look different for all of us.

#yourlifeyourway

Image by Mia Mocchi on Unsplash.