A Story About Hair

Now that everybody has met my new haircut, I will regale you with yet another story about hair. When my sister was 19, she met a thirty-one-year-old guy. Let's call him Carlos. My sister had been living with me since she was sixteen, so I understandably felt responsible for her.

One day she went on a date with Carlos. A short time into the date, she called me on the phone. She was crying so hard that she could hardly speak. 

"Carlos is soooooo mean," she sobbed. "I can't believe he did this to me."

When I heard that, I imagined every single horrible thing that a 31-year-old man can do to a 19-year-old girl. My heart plopped into my stomach and my hands started shaking. I tried to control my terror, however, in order to avoid traumatizing the child even further.

"What. . . did. . . he. . . do. . . to. . . you?" I managed to squeeze out of myself.

"It's horrible!" she wailed. "I don't even want to say!"

I saw images of hospitals, police stations and myself assaulting Carlos with a chainsaw flash before my eyes.

"He went to a salon and got this horrible haircut," my sister continued.

"And??" I asked, shaking in terror.

"You wouldn't just say 'And?' if you saw how ugly this haircut is!" she responded indignantly. "It's hideous! I can't believe he did this to me! Now I have to put up with it until his hair grows back."

My sister and Carlos have been together for almost 10 years. They are still looking for a salon that will do justice to his great hair.

Hair

This picture from the visit of an Argentinean writer to our campus appeared at the blog of a fellow blogger and colleague Kola. The woman with the crazy hair who is standing with her back to the camera is the author of this blog.

Since the picture is so readily available, I wanted to take this opportunity to explain once and for all why my hair is so crazy and what is the ideological message behind it. Once, students asked me why I don't do anything to control my hair, and my explanation even inspired one of the students to dedicate his final essay to the exploration of the ideological dimensions of hair. A good teacher can turn anything into an educational opportunity. And a good blogger sees everything as an opportunity to write a post. :-)

As I mentioned before, I grew up in the Soviet Union. The Soviet system had a complex and far-reaching network of measures aimed at breaking the will and the individuality of every citizen so that they would be compliant and malleable from the earliest moments in their lives. Female hair was seen as ideologically dangerous. There is, of course, a long history of imagining long and unruly female hair as symbolic of unbridled and uncontrollable sexuality. The more repressive a religion is, the more it strives to mess with female hair. The Soviet system of repression was especially dedicated to destroying female sexuality as one of the most dangerous forces to any totalitarian, repressive, patriarchal regime. (Maybe I'll write a post about that some time if people are interested.)

When I went to school, I discovered that hair was the main site of a battle between female students and school authorities for the control over our bodies and our self-expression. We were constantly berated for letting our hair loose (in the literal sense that in the minds of the Soviet people would eventually lead us to do it metaphorically). We were endlessly told to braid our hair, put it in a pony-tail, or controlled in some way.

Since then, I practice faithfully my freedom to have my hair in as wild a state as it can get on its own (and you should see it when the weather is wet and rainy). It's my own way of saying that I have the exclusive and inalienable right to do whatever I see fit with my own body and everybody else should just accept it.