tuesdayisfordancing:butchscientist:butchscientist:liberal family members when a woman cuts her hair.

[dragonlady7]

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liberal family members when a woman cuts her hair very short: I respect your decision but I can’t lie, I think you look better with your hair longer. Is this just an experiment, do you think you’ll grow your hair out after this? Again, I respect your decision, but I do think longer hair looks better than you. I think it is very important that, while I know I have no say in what you do with your hair, I need you to know that I think you look better with your hair long. Don’t be offended, but it is of utmost importance that you understand that you look better to me when you have long hair.

I’ve seen several replies along the lines of “you’re confusing liberals and conservatives”, which I’m not. I specified liberal relatives because in my personal experience, conservatives are more likely to just straight up say “your short hair is ugly and you need to grow it out” while liberals will go “I am a good socially conscious person and therefore know I am not supposed to try to dictate other people’s appearance, however I still need to make it very abundantly clear that I think your short hair is ugly in hopes that you’ll get the hint and grow it out”.

A fun game when you have long hair is to count how many people think “never cut your hair” said oh so fervently is a compliment! That is not a compliment it is an unsolicited instruction!

Oh, and sometimes people will reveal to you in a relieved tone that they never liked your short hair, which they had kept from you when you had it, but since like, you’ve clearly now come to your senses it isn’t remotely awkward for them to mention it now.

I had a weird weird variant of this, though, when I was in my twenties. I think it’s because I grew my hair long enough that it was beyond normative– I couldn’t feasibly wear it down, since it was past waist-length; I had to wear it up in old-fashioned styles, and could not do whatever was fashionable that year.

And people could not stop telling me that I just had to donate that hair. I couldn’t possibly be growing it longer than fashion for any reason but to donate it to Locks of Love. (Which, by the way, is a horrible organization that mostly throws your hair away, and sells the rest, and doesn’t actually give wigs to kids with cancer, like not even one.)

I don’t think I have to point out that yes, it was largely vaguely leftist folks who were telling me what I ought to do with my body, some rather emphatically– more than one person expressed a desire to cut my hair off for me– to the point of brandishing scissors, on more than one occasion, different people, different times, all of whom clearly thought of themselves as compassionate empathetic liberal human-rights sorts. I could not be growing this hair for me, I could not have a reason to justify keeping it for myself, I had to give it away, and they were uncomfortable that I would not, and wanted to take it from me.

It was weird and uncomfortable and you know what? It’s because hair that long is nonconforming too. I couldn’t do fashion with it. I didn’t fit in. And I wasn’t refusing to fit in for self-sacrificing reasons.

I don’t get it so much now but I’m old enough I think now that people don’t quite have the same expectation of conformity. Because that’s what it is– conformity. (Your picture was not posted)

Comments

[oracne]

OMG yes. I had long hair (never cut) until partway through high school, and then I wanted a pixie cut, but had to work up to it over a year or so. And I've had short hair--"boy" cuts--every since. It's been shorter than ever in recent years. And everybody has a freakin' opinion because I am a woman and they feel like they have some kind of ownership of my body. I took to joking about it to fend some of that off, which I wish wasn't necessary.

[sevenall]

Countless times, I've been told to cut my very long hair off and donate it, since "your hair grows so fast, you can afford it" or "your braid/braids are boring and unfashionable". This discounts completely the pleasure I take in my long hair. It is beautiful and it is mine.

I thought there might be a racial component to it, as I was often told how other Asian women would sell or donate their hair for wig material, as if I was not a person, only an appendix to the commercial crop of hair on top of me. Expectations of conformity indeed, but also unpleasant implications of what can be considered a commodity.

During a medical incident in 2018 I had to cut my hair. In hindsight, this was not at all a hardship, compared to the weeks afterwards enduring comments from family and friends.

[dragonlady7]

ah and my pressure had a weird anti-racial component to it since my hair is naturally blonde and has never been dyed or processed... and now that i look back i would not be at all surprised that there was something gross in that since most hair you can buy for wigmaking is Asian.
(Never mind that my hair is too fine and brittle to be particularly useful for wigmaking... listen maybe I looked into this, since my hair is so thin-- if I grew it quite long and cut it and kept the cut off bit for myself I could then make myself an extra braid for my braid crown! I still might, but it would be hard to do.)

But that was the thing-- me enjoying it, me liking how I looked, me finding the unfashionable styles I deliberately put it into enjoyable-- none of that meant the slightest thing to anyone, it was not worth acknowledging at all. Weird and gross!

[dragonlady7]

Now that i think of it, the harassment might not have stopped for me due to age, as much as it stopped because I started pinning the braids up more and more effectively, and so it doesn't look like my hair is particularly long in my everyday styles. Only if you really look and realize that it's a single braid wound around twice, and not just a large gathered bun of short hair. But most people don't look, and it's close enough to current fashions, whatever those are, not to matter. (It was more obvious back when people were doing elaborate bangs and such, which I'm delighted seem to be out of style now.)