What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

a note on shaved heads

I have never liked going to the hairdresser. It was an ambivalent experience as a little kid, but the older I grew, the more I hated it. I was never a really feminine teen, but I’m afab, and there’s such a strong social stereotype that girls love having their hair done that every hairdresser I went to would, without fail, assume three different things: that I knew about different types of haircuts and hair terminology; that I enjoyed getting my hair done; and that I had any interest whatsoever in hair maintenance beyond washing and brushing. And this made the whole thing a really unpleasant, anxiety-inducing experience, because they’d start out cheerfully asking me if I wanted X Y Z, with specific terminology, and I’d have no idea what the fuck it meant, which lead to me getting frustrated and embarrassed when they’d keep on probing for details while looking either scandalised, annoyed or confused at my lack of comprehension. I never went in for a wash or a trim unless an adult was compelling me to; otherwise, I wanted it short, but I was generally too nervous to ask for what I wanted, which was a really short cut, because I didn’t know how to describe the style the right way, and nobody ever seemed inclined to help me figure it out. The one exception was the time I figured out what a pixie cut was in high school, and knew to ask for it – I loved how it looked, but I still didn’t enjoy having it done, and even though I hated the inconvenience of growing it out, it was easier to endure an accidental mullet, with all the teasing that entailed, than to regularly visit the hairdresser.

And all the time, I was fascinated by women with shaved heads. In the internal landscape of teenage!me, my Sekrit Aesthetic looked like this:

image

IRL, I’d met exactly one girl my age with a shaved head. She was a classmate at my first high school, someone who was loud and brash and started smoking at thirteen: she didn’t like me and I hardly knew what to think of her, but god, I quietly envied the fact that she’d been brave enough to do it.

And the thing is, because I didn’t enjoy having long hair, looking after it was only ever a chore – never a pleasure. I hated blowdrying and had no skill for it anyway, so if I washed my hair, I’d have to leave it to dry naturally, which usually took an hour or so – and if I let it do that, then brushed it and left it loose, it looked great. But if I put it up in a ponytail to get it off my face, it’d get a dent in it and look weird if I put it down again, and if I hadn’t washed it for a day or so, then it looked gross in any style other than tied back – and of course, if I exercised or played sport, I’d need to take a shower afterwards at a time of day I normally wouldn’t, but if I washed my hair then, when it was comfortable to do so, I’d be sacrificing the potential for it to look nice and freshly-washed the next day, to say nothing of the fact that showers, which I enjoyed, were much less pleasant if I had to worry about keeping my hair dry. Which meant, despite the fact that I hated haircare and hair maintenance, I spent a really inordinate amount of time when I had long hair doing mental gymnastics on the subject.

Here is what those gymnastics looked like: Okay, if I wash it after sport, before dinner, then it’ll still be damp when I go to bed, which means I’ll have to either wash it again in the morning or wear it up. But I really want to wear it down the day after tomorrow because I’m going out, which means washing it that afternoon, so I have to leave off having a shower until then, but it’s going to be really hot tomorrow so I have to adjust –

Unceasing. Constant. Bullshit.

And then, at the start of Year 10, I got my first pixie cut. Suddenly, all I had to do after swimming, which we had for PE in the middle of the day, was towel it dry and maybe spike in some gel, while all my long-haired classmates brought blowdriers and brushes and endless haircare products to get their hair back to its usual state. And I don’t doubt that many, if not most of them, enjoyed the effort this entailed, or at least considered it worthwhile. But that didn’t stop the bulk of them expressing envy at the fact that I could just walk out of the changeroom without any extra haircare, because mine was so short. But I still, as mentioned, let it grow out again, because I hated going to the hairdresser in a visceral, panicky way that I now recognise as a symptom of dysphoria: it was an environment where I was gendertyped more heavily than elsewhere, and it really stressed me out. But I couldn’t articulate that then, and so I kept putting up with it.

No adult ever suggested to me, as they might have done to a boy or an amab kid, that shaving my head was an option. And because my model for ladies with shaved heads consisted exclusively of women in SF films and a single girl who disliked me, it never occurred to me to ask.

You’d think that might’ve changed as soon as I became an adult myself, but no. Instead, I told myself I couldn’t shave my head because it wouldn’t suit me, because regular cuts would still mean repeat trips to the hairdresser; because I’d gained too much weight and my face would be fat and I’d look horrible. I still wrote stories about girls and women with shaved heads, but I didn’t do it myself. I just.. put up with it.

And then, last year, when I finally figured out that I was genderqueer, I realised I was using “you can cut your hair when you’re thin” as a really toxic form of self-motivation. I didn’t need to lose weight to have short hair. In fact, I didn’t even need to go to the hairdresser – I could just buy a set of clippers and do it at home. So I did. And it was, quite literally, one of the single best things I’ve ever done for myself. I didn’t realise how strongly I’d coupled haircare to showering, in a way that consistently demotivated me to shower, exercise or even get dressed, until I shaved my head, and suddenly I was doing all those things more often, more easily and with greater pleasure than I could ever remember, because I didn’t have to worry about my fucking hair any more. (It’s also around this time that I realised I was a grown adult who’d never seen what I looked like with actual underarm hair, because I’d started shaving it the second it grew in. So I grew it out for an experiment, and realised I preferred it that way, too.)

What I’m saying is this: if you’re afab, you’ve most likely been socialised really fucking strongly to think that shaving your head isn’t a viable option, even if you hate haircare, because Gender Roles. But it’s something I’d urge you to consider, if only as an experiment, because I honestly didn’t realise how much of a constant mental burden thinking about my hair was until I gave it up entirely. And since I’ve done it, I’ve had multiple women come up to me and say how brave I am for doing it, how they wished they could do it themselves, how much easier it must be to look after. And I tell them: yes, it is easier; yes, they can do it. Give it a try. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying haircare and loving long hair or anything like that, but so many of us just put up with it because we’ve never been told or shown that we’re allowed to do otherwise, even though we hate it.

So if you’ve been waiting for permission from the universe to cut your hair off, this is it. Go ahead. It’ll still grow back if it turns out not to be your thing, but if you like it – trust me. It’s worth finding out.

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