This article by Laurie Penny on women and short hair, which in turn is a response to another article claiming that women with short hair are ‘damaged’, has been making the rounds on the internet (H/T Gillian Russell on Facebook). It makes a number of very important points concerning ideals of femininity, and the kind of policing that women are submitted to, by men and women alike, concerning their appearance.
Wearing your hair short, or making any other personal life choice that works against the imperative to be as conventionally attractive and appealing to patriarchy as possible, is a political statement. And the threat that if we don’t behave, if we don’t play the game, we will end up alone and unloved is still a strategy of control.
(There is a lot of serious, interesting scholarship on hair out there (not only restricted to hair that grows in heads), which I am not able to address here – but do go check it out, for example this book).
I’ve had fairly long hair for most of my life, but when I was 17 and a bit of a capoeira fanatic I had my hair cut really short (I felt all that hair was in the way for my capoeira moves). Reactions were mostly positive (including my boyfriend at the time), but one comment I got was epic. The guard at my high school (!!) deemed himself in the right to comment on my new haircut, in fact to ask a question: “Is this a penitence?” Why else would any woman want to wear her hair so short?
Many years later, after having my second child, I developed a condition that made me lose patches of hair (all good now: all grown back, and no more hair loss). I was very surprised by my reaction of total panic; I was suddenly made painfully aware of the equation ‘hair = attractiveness’ that Laurie Penny talks about in her piece (which includes the story of her sister who also went through a period of losing hair.) Sadly, I can’t say I am no longer under the grip of this equation, but reading this piece made me reflect once again on the complex relationships between bodies and politics, which are for the most part still somewhat neglected within (analytic) philosophy.
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