- Lots of little kids stared at me, to the chagrin of their parents - who usually were trying to look like they were ignoring me.
- Several old ladies complimented me in the grocery store, saying that they loved my hair - "really!"
- A nurse at the hospital tried to keep me from leaving, thinking I was one of the patients.
- One of my sisters refused to look at me for days.
- I was granted the honorary title of "Sister of the Year."
- My boss nearly fired me.
- Temple attendants mistook me for a man.
- Other English majors congratulated me for challenging gender stereotypes.
- People I don't even know were moved to shake my hand and praise me.
- I was offered free haircuts (for the future), hats, and a wig.
- Many, many people asked to rub my head. (And a few didn't even bother asking!)
Why did I shave my head?
To support my sister. Or to shock people into reconsidering their definition of beauty. Or to keep men from asking me out. Or to show my disregard for societal demands of womanhood. Or to escape from the summer heat. Or to get attention. Or to expand my field of life experiences. Or to relieve myself from the pressures of doing my hair. Or to emulate women of strength. Or to explore my own identity. Or to check something off my bucket list. Or to prove I wasn't afraid to do it.
Maybe all of the above. Even I'm not exactly sure which.
What interests me more is why it matters so much to everyone else. It's MY head. Why should my follicle status be of such great import to other people?
For a long time, I really couldn't wrap my mind around this. I just couldn't understand why people would be so emotionally involved with my hair (or lack thereof). At first, I thought it was a socialized sexism - if women don't look like our definition of women, society crumbles. But then I realized that there was a bigger issue at the core of this debate, an issue that defies gender distinctions:
What is the morality of appearance?
Can your appearance, in and of itself, be either virtuous or sinful? There are a great many religions (including my own) that have a dress-code of some sort; and there are even more societies that have clear guidelines for what constitutes "decent" or even "legal" appearance. Whether you're talking about clothes, skin color, hair, piercings, accessories, tattoos, or even basic physical build, most people believe that some combinations of appearance are somehow "wrong." And they are generally not passive about those beliefs either.
They feel offended. They feel afraid. They feel assaulted somehow.
As a person who has felt the backlash of this attitude heavily and recently, I am tempted to reject this kind of philosophy. And I'm sure that there are many people (not the least of which are racial minorities) who have asked themselves the questions that haunted me during that first month: Who are you to decide whether my appearance makes me a good or a bad person? Why do you get to make rules about how I look? I'm not hurting you! Why should I be treated any differently just because I am different from you?
And yet . . . I am not guiltless in this. For one thing, I believe fervently that people should wear clothes in public. If I saw a person walking naked down the street, I would probably feel assaulted. How is that different? Can appearance really have that kind of an affect on other people? And if so, what is our responsibility towards others, with regards to appearance?
Was it wrong for me to shave my head?
This experience has given me so much to think about. As always, the more I delve into the questions, the more unanswers I find. All I know is that I did shave my head, and I am learning a lot from it. I even have the audacity to hope that other people are learning from it as well. But as to that . . . well . . .
Maybe you'd better ask my sister who stopped looking at me.
4 comments:
She'll be so glad to see how much hair you've grown when she returns.
Great post!
This is a lot of the emotions I experience when I get serious about dying my hair violent pink.
...which I always chicken out of. So, you're a much braver, better woman than I.
As part of an English class assignment, my daughter was asked to change something about her appearance for a week and then keep a record of people's reactions to her. She dyed her hair "red" with koolaid. She actually looked quite beautiful in the color and yet, she had both positive and negative (to her) responses. This was the teacher's attempt to help the students have more empathy for those who are different, be it race, religion, whatever. If you've never read "Black Like Me," I'd recommend it. It's by a white man who darkened his skin and lived in the South in the late 1950s to see what it was like to be black. Fascinating and disturbing. He became very involved in the Civil Rights movement after his experience.
I felt this way a lot and have had a lot of the same thoughts that you have expressed here. It was like the time I permanently died the ends of my hair in bright my-little-pony colors. People kept on asking me if I was okay, they assumed that I must have had an emotional break down or something. I was just like: "I was bored while watching the Oscars."
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