Against Cumbersome Hair

Advisory: rather "frank" words are used in this post. And let me be clear: I'm talking principles here. I'm not making any rules.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to have floppy long hair. And yes, I'm about to mock half of America's white teenagers. I was talking to a 24-year-old friend this week, and he made the comment that his generation "don't know how to fight, don't ever want to fight...they're pussies." And so it is. Floppy long hair, with those flips that get in your eyes, are a symptom of that. Justin Bieber is referred to as a "cutie", not as a stud.

The contemporary teenager's impulse to cover his eyes with long hair is not the first time this has happened. Emo kids did it. Gothic kids did it. These groups are defined by their effeminacy and weakness. Some pseudo-punk and skateboard kids did it. Those kids were the bitches of their groups, not the fighters and leaders. Now the hair-in-your-eyes thing is widely accepted. Your chess team captain won't sport it, and most of the football players won't, but all the white kids who fall between that range will.



Masculinity has become a widely reviled thing (not least in the overwhelmingly feminized state school system) over the past few generations, and each new generation of boys allows effeminacy to take a more mainstream place. It is no longer the temptation of social outliers to signal surrender with outward signs of effeminacy, it's the mainstream thing to do.

I had a good bit of difficulty understanding how on earth anyone could debate whether or not Adam Lambert was homosexual, except to say that the rest of society has introduced a lot of ambiguity themselves. There is no ambiguity from Adam Lambert; it wasn't about how long his hair was (among other fashion choices), it was about what he was signaling: receptivity and attractiveness. That, I'm afraid, is the tendency you see among teenagers generally: a softness that signals, if not sexual receptivity, passivity.

I want to be clear that the problem here is not long hair. I don't really get to grow long hair, it just kind of grows straight out into a white man's afro, but most of you know that my grooming standards tend toward the bushy. The problem is actually the signal being sent about readiness to fight; the problem is cumbersome hair.

The haircut classically associated with masculinity is the crew cut, or anything else high-and-tight, that masculinity with a '40s and '50s edge, like Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life. It's the military haircut of a military generation.

But you can have long hair and not look soft at all.

This Indian warrior, the famous Sitting Bull, is an old man, but he still signals his readiness for action by binding his hair back. If he needs to get some violence done, he's not going to be worrying about whether or not his hair is in his face, or if his clothes are too cumbersome, or if his shoes will allow him to run. These are perceived as feminine things in great part because when women are dressed like that, they signal permission for men to protect them. That's what butch is, the very conscious and self-aware decision to reject that for oneself, and even very often to offer that protection to another, which is where the lesbian butch and femme relationship comes from.

Boys and men should not be belligerent. When a woman signals pure passivity, reliance, and dependence, both men and woman alike tend not to respect the woman at all (although that certainly does attract a certain sort of man). That's what a bimbo does. If a man signals pure aggression, he's either a thug or an asshole. There is certainly room for soft things in a man's life (I, for example, have extremely soft hands). But men and boys should signal a readiness to protect things worth protecting. And you can't do that very well with hair in your face.

My boys are sporting their summer haircuts right now, so they're looking like shorn lambs. But we let their hair get reasonably long; especially the baby's. I firmly believe, however, that if we allowed our boys' hair to get cumbersome, difficult to wield, time-consuming to maintain, we would not be training them to be men of action. We'd be training them to be boys forever. Which is a vice of my generation and the ones following it.