Barber-ism

I have a far less pileous pate than I once did, but what hair there is still needs to be cut once a month or so. Well, strictly speaking it doesn’t need to be cut, but I don’t like the bedraggled look that otherwise ensues; I’m not enough of an old hippie to pull off the look successfully. I just look unkempt – and for some reason older and grayer. I still go to a traditional barbershop (not a stylist) in nearby Morristown that charges $15. I’ve been going there for decades: long enough to see three generations of clippers. It is a pleasant enough experience.

Not so when I was little. As a kid I hated getting haircuts. I don’t know why. I didn’t mind the result. Short hair was fine by me. (At age 6 I cut my own hair with scissors but made such a wreck of it that I needed a buzz cut to hide the damage.) There was just something about the barbershop process I didn’t like. Freud had an opinion that a dislike of haircuts stems from them being symbolic of cutting something else. Knowing Freud, you can guess what, but I’m quite certain that notion never crossed my mind as a child. By the time I was old enough to understand what Freud was talking about, the haircuts no longer bothered me. I didn’t really change my style of haircut dramatically over the years even though I was in high school in the late 60s when long hair on men became a social statement. I didn’t fully embrace either the style or the statement, so my hair was never longer than in the 1974 pic below (with my sister in San Francisco) and (except for that buzz cut incident) never shorter than it is now. In 1974, by the way, that length was pretty conservative, as was the lapel width, which looks excessive today. Most of my friends in the 60s and 70s (except in prep school, which had codes) were considerably shaggier.

 

1962                   1974                              2019

Upper middle class hippies largely gave up long hair when construction workers and other working class young men started wearing ponytails in the mid-70s. Author Tom Wolfe had predicted this and wasn’t above patting himself on the back for getting it right. Some genuine hippies stuck with it, of course. In his book The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn't My Fault) (And I'll Never Do It Again) P.J. O’Rourke apologizes to subsequent generations for having “used up all the weird” in hair and clothes, thereby forcing them to rebel in more painful ways such as piercings and extensive tattoos. The current crop of Millennials and iGens (aka Gen Z) demonstrates he was wrong about that. Some of them sport hairstyles that would have startled folks at Woodstock in 1969. The hipster thing of ironically retro facial hair is also very non-60s/70s.

I obviously don’t have firsthand experience of the social implications of hair from the female perspective, but there are many books on the subject including Rapunzel's Daughters: What Women's Hair Tells Us about Women's Lives by Rose Weitz, a sociologist at Arizona State. She notes, for example, that (in general…always in general) straight hair comes off as more conservative and curly hair as more informal. Long hair is regarded as more sexually attractive but short hair as more professional. She recalls the remark of a female exec regarding the corporate management hierarchy that “you could draw a line: Above that line, no woman’s hair touched her shoulders.”

An interesting little book that covers the subject of hair compendiously, if not in great depth, is Hair by Scott Lowe. Hair, as Lowe writes on page 1, “has an incredible power to annoy your antagonists, attract potential lovers, infuriate your neighbors, upset your parents, raise eyebrows at work, find compatible friends, and allow you to create, or recreate, your identity.” Sometimes the style is a deliberate statement, as was the Afro in the 60s/70s, and sometimes it is an old tradition (such as beards in certain Islamist sects and among the Amish) that it would be a deliberate statement to buck. Metal rock bands of a certain flavor are called Hair Bands for obvious reasons. Shorn heads have long been a symbol of shame: famously, collaborators with Germans were forcibly shorn in liberated areas in WW2. Sometimes, however, shearing one’s head is a religious rite as among the Jains. There is, in short, a lot of symbolism emanating from those head and face follicles. Interpreting it across cultures can be a challenge.

For myself, however, I just sit in the barber chair and say, “Just shorten it up for me please.” “You got it,” is the usual response. There is no doubt a lot of symbolism in that simple exchange, but I’ll leave figuring out what it is to others – preferably not Freud.

George Thorogood and the Destroyers – Get A Haircut