A Hairy Revelation

Okay, so you’re probably all wondering; “What possessed you to write an entire article on the subject of HAIR, and not even a typical, teeny-bopper article about how to give yourself the latest style of the minute in three easy steps?” Well, I’ll tell you.
See, it all started about two weeks ago, when my sink backed up. Because I had been insanely busy that week, running back and forth to and from various classes, meetings, and rehearsals, I didn’t even notice until that fateful night that the very same mountain of suds had been languishing in there for a good three days. I checked to see if the stopper was in place. When I saw that it wasn’t, my worst suspicions had been confirmed. I had to do something about the situation pronto, or else become the proud tenant of my very own private water park. While the second option may seem appealing on paper, I knew HFS wouldn’t be too crazy about it, so I resigned myself to taking action.

My first instinct, of course, was to call an R.A. to investigate the problem, but then I reminded myself that I was a perfectly intelligent, healthy, capable young woman, in my second year at Bishop’s, and I was perfectly capable of handling any minor mishaps that might befall me in this building. So, I rolled up my sleeves, stoked up my confidence, and charged into the bathroom to get the plunger. Then, with the energy of a five-year-old after a few too many violent Saturday morning cartoons and bowls of sugary cereal, I plunged the hell out of that sink, to make it clear just exactly who wore the pants in our relationship. It responded by belching out a stream of nasty brown sludge water, all down the front of my shirt. At that, I let loose a string of obscenities that rivaled those often heard from even the most die-hard (okay, intoxicated) fans at any given basketball game, and, emboldened by my new-found anger, I impulsively reached my hand down into the deepest bowels of the drainpipe. After a few moments of feeling around, and silently vituperating the poorly constructed New Side plumbing (the very same plumbing that caused the toilet to leak out the back and flood my entire room with two inches of water last year, while ironically leaving my bogmate’s room bone-dry), I unearthed a soggy, matted, mousy-brown clump of my own hair. At that moment, I knew instantly that I had no one to be angry at but myself.

As I picked up a J-Cloth and began to mop up the residual sludge around the sink, my gaze shifted from the tainted water now noisily making its way back down the drain, to the multitude of products that surrounded it. Each gaudy bottle, tube, and unnecessary gadget stood out as a monument to the extreme irony that I had been perpetuating for my entire adult and adolescent life. Not only were there unopened bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and Frizz-Ease (along with the obligatory blow-dryer, of course), all designed to facilitate the daily ritual of cleansing and styling the hair on my head, but there were also scores of products intended for getting RID of the hair in other places, that it’s somehow not socially acceptable for females to have. I was suddenly struck by all the hidden pressures that are forced on Western women, by well-meaning mothers, older sisters, and friends, from adolescence onward: Brush this, spray that curl this, crimp this, straighten that, shave this, wax this, pluck this, Nair that, and you’ll be beautiful.
Don’t argue, don’t ask why, just do it, you want to be pretty, right?
Come on, just do it.
Nice girls don’t argue.

So, until that night, I didn’t question things, I didn’t argue. I dutifully brushed, sprayed, and shaved, made (semi) regular appointments at the hairdresser, and invested a ton of my time, money, and energy into conforming to these completely arbitrary standards of femininity. But now, I urge you to rebel against what you have been taught, and ask yourself whether all this is really worth it. Imagine a world where everyone was born bald. Imagine the time that you would save from your grooming regimen. We wouldn’t question our absence of hair any more than we question the agony we go through now to obtain those elusive “supermodel” tresses that we all crave so much. Of course, maybe we’d do equally stupid things, like tattooing designs on our bald heads to decorate that vast expanse of gleaming, empty skin, as a mark of individuality. Maybe it’d be fashionable to have abstract shapes surgically implanted in the tops of our heads, like the burbling, incoherent, incessantly cutesy stars of a certain children’s television program that just happens to rhyme with “Smelly grubbies.” Or maybe, just maybe, we’d get over our sense of vanity, and do something productive for a change, like building houses for the homeless, or putting an immediate end to war, famine, and pestilence. But I guess we’ll never know.

Actually, I admit that I’m kind of a hypocrite about the whole thing. Shortly after Halloween, I was told at an SRC meeting that we would be organizing a “Shave to Save” event, where people would get their friends to sponsor them to shave their heads to make human hair wigs for cancer patients, and the money would be donated to cancer research. While I was impressed at Connor’s ingenuity and initiative in coming up with this idea, I was horrified at the thought that I might be pressured to part with my beloved hair. Needless to say, I breathed a sigh of relief when Connor told me that it was optional, but as I walked home from the meeting later that afternoon, I began to wonder why I was so attached to the mass of dead skin cells that had been growing out of my scalp for the past twenty years, ever since I first came into the world, as a tiny, gorilla-esque newborn, with a thin layer of dark brown fuzz that covered the top of my head.

Why was I so reluctant to relinquish this veritable security blanket of chestnut-brown follicles? I tried to tell myself that I couldn’t participate in Connor’s noble cause because, as a female in a performance field (music), I had to at least attempt to fit society’s perceptions of what a young woman should look like, but at the same time, I knew it was more than that. So much of a girl’s identity is wrapped up in her hair, from the first time her mother ties the first delicate wisps of blonde, brown, black, or red into pigtails as a toddler, to the inevitable moment when she looks in the mirror and, seeing more grey than any other colour, decides to give up the whole charade and get one of those generic “old lady” perms. In between, that girl’s life is so aggressively punctuated with comments such as “Hold still, let me brush your hair so you look pretty for your school picture!”; “Ooh, I love how long your hair is, it’s so beautiful!”; and of course, “Don’t cut your hair short, you’ll look like a boy!!!”; that it’s nearly impossible not to listen, because of course, every self-respecting female knows that looking like a boy is a Very Bad Thing. Goddess forbid that we ever upset the unquestionable laws of nature in favour of practicality, comfort, or other personal preferences. So they tell us, just go with the flow, and you’ll be accepted by your peers and by society. And unconsciously, unwittingly, we obey. After all, every girl wants to be accepted, right?

Now you’re probably wondering if I’m going to go and shave myself bald or get a brush-cut in order to make some kind of a statement. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you all, but the answer to that is an emphatic no. Because I have been so successfully brainwashed, I’m still too insecure to go against the mental messages with which I have been indoctrinated since infancy, but I figured that, as long as we all realize what we’re doing, as opposed to mindlessly going through the motions, then it’s a start. I will undoubtedly continue to spend scads of money on the required products and put them in my hair, only to wash them out at the end of the day and see my investment swirl down the shower drain in a hypnotic, counterclockwise tornado of futility. Lather, rinse, and repeat ad infinitum until the sad day when we all eventually succumb to The Perm. But in the meantime, open your eyes. No, actually, CLOSE your eyes, and open your mind, so that you can embrace your true self beyond the rigid parameters of your gender role that force you to aspire to shampoo-commercial perfection.
While you’re doing that, I’m going to go wash my hair.