December days: My hair

[cjwatson]

liv asked me:

Can you talk about your hair? Have you always worn it long? How do people react to it? How does it fit into your image of yourself?

This is a really good prompt! The answer ends up involving quite a lot of my background and self-image.

I have what people would probably tend to think of as quite classically Irish features: red hair, greenish-blue eyes, high forehead, pale skin. (My understanding is that geneticists think red hair was probably a trait brought over by the Vikings, but let's leave that aside.) My sister and several of my maternal cousins have very similar looks, and my two-year-old son seems to take after me too.

At least where I grew up in Belfast, though, darker phenotypes were a lot more common, so I stood out in a way that wasn't particularly welcome to a fairly shy child. I heard "ginger" or its derivatives as a frequent insult, usually deliberately mispronounced to rhyme with "finger"; not very creative, but I suppose it could be worse. I mean, I'm a middle-class cis white straight man, so generally speaking I'm kind of awash in privilege, but this was a problem it took me a long time to shake off. My hair darkened to auburn as I got older, but accuracy has never been much of an obstacle to playground insults, and I still hear it occasionally as street abuse (but very occasionally, as people don't tend to bother six-foot men all that much!). More saddeningly, my son has heard it once or twice too, though we try to shelter him from that kind of thing as much as we can.

As a result, I'm very proud and possessive of my hair, and I have quite a strong aversion to the adjective "ginger" even when it's accurate and not meant unkindly: I'll only ever describe my son's hair as "red". Now and again people ask me if I would ever consider dying my hair, and I always say no. Partly this is because I'm worried about damaging its natural colour, but I think a lot of it is because it would feel as though I were giving in to the bullies in some way.

I haven't always worn my hair long, though. Throughout school and university (I suppose because I was still sent off for a haircut when I was home for the holidays and didn't bother to argue), I always had it cut short. It was forever wavy, and I have a double crown so it was always sticking up at the top. Not a great look really. In April 2001 I had my hair cut to a quarter of an inch all over, and that was the last time I've ever had my hair short, not least because while it was growing out it spent a while in an Einstein-style mop and I've no desire to go through that phase again! By the time I started going out with ghoti around the start of 2004 it was firmly entrenched as long, and ghoti has been at least as possessive of it as I am; she's the only person to have cut my hair since 2001, and that only to trim the ends for special occasions such as our wedding. I almost always tie it back in a simple ponytail for neatness and to keep it out of my eyes, but sometimes I leave it loose for a change of style.

In the circles I usually run in, long hair on men is mostly unremarkable, but of course it's not that way everywhere. ghoti's brother, having not met me or most of our friends before our wedding, cut his hair short for the purpose of looking presentable, only to find that the groom, best man, and a good proportion of the male guests all had long hair ... oops. It's still unusual in society at large, but I'm fortunate not to hear adverse comments very often, and it's never been a problem in professional circles.

My hair is really quite central to my self-image, I suppose. At this point I find it hard to imagine having it any different way.

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

Comments

[naath]

Long hair is clearly awesome, more people should have it ;-p

[cjwatson]

Amen!

[liv]

Thank you so much for answering my prompt! You're quite right that the answer communicates a lot about you, which is really cool and interesting, except I'm sorry that some of it involves people being horrible to you.

[cjwatson]

Fortunately most of that stuff was getting on for twenty years ago now and is only really a very backgrounded part of my psyche rather than a deep-seated wound or anything like that. These days I'm totally OK with looking a bit distinctive! I do find a lot of people assume I'm Scottish (even when not kilted); how much of that is appearance and how much accent I'm not sure.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

I now have Tim Minchin's song Prejudice as an earworm.

I grew up as red-headed but copper/auburn (and with dark eyes) rather than strawberry blonde/ginger. I do suspect that auburn-haired people get a lot fewer really nasty insults, but apparently it's still hilarious enough for strangers to make witty wisecracks about*, and unusual enough that little old ladies come up to me and stroke my hair. I got a lot of joshing, banter and teasing about my hair (and skin**), but not much in the way of physical violence or ostracism. My sister (who has strawberry blonde hair and pale eyes, and burns through factor 50 sunscreen *much* easier than I do) did not get off so lightly.

*Occasionally, these are chuckleworthy. E.g. going to a red squirrel reserve with my family as a teen, some people pointed at us and went "Oh look, there's a couple of red squirrels over there!"

**Do I burst into flames in sunlight like a vampire? Do I sunbathe under a sieve? Give me your arm Becky, I want to show $person how good my tan is, miming being blinded by a brilliant light, What's got two legs and looks like tippex? Becky. Ect ect. Tiresome but pretty harmless, can usually be headed off if I join in with the jokes.

My parents OTOH royally stitched me up by teaching me to reply to the question "Where did you get your lovely hair colour from?" with the answer "The milkman". Thanks. Thanks a bunch.

[cjwatson]

I wondered if another redhead would reply ...

My skin is getting close to yours (oo-er) but tans a bit more IIRC.  In fact what usually seems to happen is that I forget to put sunscreen on early in the summer, burn, and then end up with a sort of light protective tan for a while.  This is probably a terrible sign of something or other.

I'm afraid I giggled (NOT ogled, thanks autocorrect) at the milkman line ... red hair does often seem to skip generations, although my dad had a reddish beard when he was younger.

[gerald_duck]

Really? People ask if you'd consider dying your hair?

I thought various red/auburn/orange/ginger shades were what people dyed their hair to from duller blacks and browns!

Indeed, that inconsistency made me assume a certain amount of the bullying was borne out of jealousy.

As for long hair, having worn my hair as long as it would go ever since I was free of my mother's evil clutches in such matters, and now watching it gradually recede, I'm very glad I made the most of it while it was there. Though in my case as a not-entirely-cis person, having hair that occasionally passed for female was quite nice.

My mother eventually stopped nagging me about my hair the day I went for a job interview with long hair and got the job.

[cjwatson]

To be clear, the people who ask that generally aren't also people who give me a hard time about my hair, more people who are into hair-dying.

Since I reached the point of being able to consider it dispassionately, I've reckoned that I probably stood out for other reasons (much more of a nerd in school than I am now ...) and it was just a convenient point of attack.  I'm mostly over it nowadays though.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Not only the people he didn't know had long hair, every one of our nice uncles has had long hair for most of their adult life! That haircut was bizarre.