Barbie gave me my first inkling of the power of women’s hair. A friend and I were about 10 when we decided that my Malibu Barbie needed a haircut.
We whacked off a fair measure of her highly flamable golden tresses intending to give her a more up-to-date bob. When we were done, she looked like she had cut her hair with a pair of secateurs. While Malibu Barbie came complete with a head-to-toe tan and a surfboard, she did not, alas, come with a spare head or new set of hair.
Surveying our version of the Vidal Sassoon bob, we decided that she no longer looked pretty. And so Malibu Barbie was discarded in favour of my original, paler Barbie, whose waist-long hair we could plait and brush with her very own Barbie brush.
Clearly, Malibu Ken preferred his Barbies with long hair. He ran his fingerless hands through Barbie’s hair, Malibu Barbie already a fading memory. Within seconds they were having sex. Women with long hair, we 10-year-olds knew then, have not only beauty but power. Sexual power.
This belief was reinforced as we grew older. In the 1970s women had to have long, sleek hair in order to be considered for all that free-love-sex activity. There was even a whole musical about hair.
The Eighties were the age of Big Hair. The more you had, the more attractive and the more powerful (àla Dynasty) you were. The 1990s brought us more options in the coiffeur department, but it was still obvious that if you wanted to be sexy, you had to have lots of hair. Not only were — and are — there no Barbie dolls with short hair, how many porn queens have you seen with cropped coiffs?
Various religions have known about the ”long-hair-equals-sex” equation for centuries. Why else require women to hide away their hair, lest a view of their luscious manes make men buckle at the knees with wanton desire?
It was sex and lust that brought down Samson, whose entire manly strength lay in his hair follicles. He lusted after Delilah who, of course, had long hair. He gave away his great secret because he could not resist her pleading and doubtlessly her frequent hair-swishing. She shaved Samson’s head and, poof! — gone was his manly strength.
In a kind of kinky reverse-Samson, a man, known as the ”Haircut Bandit” was recently arrested in Los Angeles. For weeks he cycled around parking lots and bus stops chopping off chunks, sometimes entire ponytails, of women’s ”ultra-long tresses”, according to wire reports. When the police raided his home, they found a thin carpet of hair covering the floor and mounds of hair on the bed and in his closet. Where some men pin up pictures of naked women, he had photos of women’s ponytails mounted on his walls.
A college in the United States has even dedicated an entire course to hair. Entitled ”Magical Hair” it examines the question, ”Why is hair such a potent natural symbol?”
The course debates whether ”attractiveness has long-term evolutionary consequences” (the ”no one will shag you if you’re ugly” thesis) or whether beauty is a social construct and we’re all just slaves to the media and advertising.
Certainly, now that we have entered the 21st century, short-haired women are considered as sexually attractive as long-haired women. That ”long-hair-equals-sex” myth has been largely debunked. For instance, among lesbians in Berlin, baldness was de rigeur about three years ago. The absence of hair was seen as extremely sexy.
For heterosexual women, however, chopping off their hair in times of personal crisis is an enduring phenomenon. Time and again, TV dramas and films will show women who have been abused or rejected standing in front of a mirror in high emotional distress or sitting on a bathroom floor in a zombie-like state, hacking off their hair with a large, usually blunt, pair of scissors. The act of cutting off long hair becomes a form of self-mutilising desexualisation.
The end of a significant relationship is a common herald for a ritualistic cutting of the hair. A hairdresser confirmed that many of her female clients have requested drastic changes in hair length after a break-up. The hairdresser-cum-counsellor usually cautions her clients from taking drastic measures, but some will not be dissuaded from cutting their Barbie-length hair to within a few inches of its life.
For some women, dramatically cutting their hair after a break-up signifies the beginning of a new chapter in their lives. Others speak of the need to regain control after being rejected in love. One divorcee said she did not want to be seen as a little girl anymore, that she wanted to be seen as strong and in control of her life. Cutting her long hair to a chin-length bob demonstrated this newfound control to the world.
Perhaps a current shampoo commercial does, if rather annoyingly, say it best. Hair, the pay-off line goes, ”is an outer reflection of my inner self and it completes me”. In other words, when you are having a bad hair day you are, in fact, just having a bad day, period.