In December I gave my friend some of my scissors for cutting paper and had her chop it into a short bob. It was the first time I cut my hair in my life. I don’t mean just trimming it. I had trimmed it many times, on my own. I did it because I was so in love with my old hair. It’s a complex. I briefly played with the idea of shaving it off like Sinead O’Connor, but I scrapped that for another time in my life.
Hair is so important to human identity. It is the only thing that we can physically change completely many times over, at least in a natural way: She has long hair, short hair, no hair, curly hair, purple hair. Because we have the ability to change it we believe we can change our attitude towards life- to change one’s hair can put them into certain categories, look at punks, look at bleached or straightening hair, each one of these changes represents a kind of person. After bathing in long blond hair for 18 years I decided I was leaning too much on its beauty, its constant need for attention. I needed to go on with my life without it, at least for now.
By the dim light of my small living room at 1 in the morning I watched a video of Brigitte Bardot singing a song for Harley Davidson on Youtube. Besides the short leather frock and leather boots that rose to her upper thigh, the most material she had on her body was her hair. She was her hair more than anything else. It seemed to shout “I am sex” and there she was. The way she so confidently flipped it around. She never touched it but it was perfectly capable of moving itself. She wore it down as if it had been tossed by the wind, as if it had been tossed by a night of romping.
There are so many different types of long hair, but this Brigitte Bardot hair, is the ultimate hair- it is the goal and the ideal and then untouchable. Look at Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and there is the same hair: The hair of the goddess of beauty, love and sex. When released it is dangerous. This is the hair fetishized by men in a time when women covered their heads. Long waving hair is like a robe that covers or uncovers a woman’s body, like the grass skirts from a Hawaiian luau.
But this is all mythic. The funny thing about hair is that there is always something wrong with it. Like many other things belonging to women, it must be fixed- check it: Too greasy, too dry, too limp, too curly. When a woman’s hair is “just right,” well, that’s just boring- wait until she gets old and either it falls out or she has to dye it every month. A woman will want to change her hair because of social preconceptions, the inability to make it how it wants to be, or to rebel. Many woman feel as though she must always have different hair to be what she wants to be and do what she wants to achieve. Does it matter, though? Is every woman, whether consciously or unconsciously trying to achieve, or, as I was, avoiding the hair of, for example Brigitte Bardot or Venus?
My mother told me that she hated her hair for a long time. It was the longest when she was 17, growing down, a little past her shoulders- “now coloring my hair is the biggest thing” she told me. My mother had almost black curls when I was young, and now they are a kind of champagne color, lightest right after she has them dyed. “It just gets too frizzy, I want waves, I love long hair.” I always felt that this made her seem girlish, the way she obsessed about that long hair. I believed I wanted short hair to release myself from this seemingly girlish obsession. But perhaps I am overlooking all the other women who worship it. She has about five products that she puts in her hair every morning, to make it look more like that hair. Sometimes the products make it sticky and sometimes the curls are full, but she has never had the hair of Brigitte Bardot.
My roommate, Anna, has had a similar history with her hair, though, perhaps the other way around. Anna has always had long hair. She has this beautiful gold hair. She’s ¼ Swedish and I always thought Swedes had nice hair- though this may be a preconception. Anna has recently grown her hair out. It falls to her mid-back region. Though she complains about the mats that she gets in the back from her scarf, she told me that she likes it long. Anna is never too animated about it, but she simply likes her hair. While we were sitting in a ridiculous Times Square movie theater yesterday waiting for the movie to start and eating bagels, I tried to dig Anna. I wanted to find some kind of relationship between the growing of her hair with that of Bardot and our lovely Venus. She looked at me like I was crazy. “I just like it” she said. Sure, anyone can like something, but there’s got to be some kind of meaning behind it. This is my usual inclination. Whether, there reason or not, Anna has beautiful long blond hair and she likes it that way. This leads me to believe that either she is not being genuine about her pursuit for these “good looks,” or even when they come naturally she just doesn’t care.
I felt myself part of a movement when my hair was chopped. While my hair was trying so desperately to be the waves of Brigitte Bardot, while it was the flowing like the Venus of my character, in its prime- I cut it away. For some reason I thought this was going to change my identity completely, I would be a different person. But now, with my hair gone, I begin to wonder what the big deal was? I still like my hair, even when it’s short. Though there may be a difference subconsciously I can’t feel it, I cannot act upon it, as if my attitude towards the world had changed.
Maybe the myth is just a myth, maybe we don’t live a myth even if we want to: Short or long, I like my hair. Different people like hair to be different ways and maybe the ideals of Brigitte Bardot and Botticelli’s Venus are representatives of hair from the past. There is nothing to hide anymore, It is popular belief that we are our own bosses in this generation, perhaps hair and its style will mean less now.
