hair cutting kids

(originally this was an informal note for myself. i decided to post it on the blog.)

i was thinking of something after reading about circumcision. cutting children's hair when they're too young to refuse could be viewed as a violation of their physical body. it's nowhere near as traumatic, and it's definitely trivial compared to circumcision. it doesn't directly cause physical pain or injury, and their bodies are able to continue functioning, except for they're unable to perform the particular function of creating a certain type of physical appearance. they're unable to do whatever functions that the hair does. 'cosmetic changes' to the hair could potentially also be viewed as 'functional' changes, if you take this concept to an extreme.

the idea is that when you remove the long hair, it's years and years of irreversible setbacks that cannot be undone. perhaps the child doesn't want that to be done.

i have heard lots of stories, only from girls of course, about how they once had very long hair, as a child, and for some reason, somebody cut it off. it happened to me. i grew slightly long hair when i was young. it wasn't entirely long - they kept my bangs short, because 'that's the way it's done.' nobody made any explicit, conscious decisions about the beliefs and assumptions behind haircutting.

well, when i got into about second grade, for some reason, 'we' decided that i would get it all cut off, into a short bowl haircut. i don't know why. maybe i wanted to make my hair look like mom's, because at one time, she also had long hair - she looks beautiful in the old photos - and then she chopped it off to a bowl cut. i don't know if it was my idea, or my mother's idea. i don't know how my father felt about this either - i don't know whether dad had any preferences or feelings one way or the other about what he wanted mom's hair to look like. there might have been marriage problems, too, because that's about the time when the hospital management changed, dad began his midlife crisis, and we moved to west virginia so that dad could get a new job.

i remember going to get it cut. we went to some informal haircutting person, not an official beauty salon. i don't remember having any feelings about it. based on my memory, i didn't care about anything at all, and was totally neutral. i don't remember any trauma, and i don't remember any regret, and i don't remember thinking that i lost my hair and i wanted it back. the memory is too vague.

haircuts are often associated with trauma - as in, the traumatic problems begin first, and the people cut their hair in response to the trauma. i remember doing that several times myself during difficult and traumatic periods of my life. if life was painful and unstable and crazy, like when i was dating terry, and when i was in college, i would impulsively chop my hair off and drastically change my style, and it expressed the emotion 'i have been injured.' it expressed outwardly that i had been damaged or traumatized - and yes, when i got older, when i was in my late teens and early twenties, cutting my own hair myself, i WAS consciously aware of the 'damaged/injured/traumatized' symbolism of drastic haircutting. sometimes it was an expression of anger or self-injury. it said: i want to hurt myself, but i don't want to do any REAL damage, so i'll just chop off all my hair and drastically change my appearance. and then afterwards, i suffered the feelings of pain and regret and loss, every time i looked in the mirror and saw that my hair was gone. of course, i didn't ever grow any real length - the most i grew, during that time, was a year or two of hair, down to shoulder length.

in the movie 'what dreams may come,' annie does the typical self-injury haircut when she gets committed to the mental hospital. her long, beautiful hair is all crudely and unevenly chopped off. this is the EXACT type of self-injury i'm talking about - a relatively gentle and mostly harmless form of self-injury that won't actually kill you. but it reminds you every time you look at yourself and every time other people look at you. in a way, it's like saying 'i survived a severe injury.' the pain is still there, and the scar wound is openly visible to everybody.

that's different from the 'maintenance' haircuts, where people keep their hair in a certain style for a long period of time, and get it cut once every month or two. the self-injury haircut is when you drastically, suddenly change your hair during a period of emotional trauma, stress, and instability. the maintenance haircut doesn't change suddenly, and its symbolic meaning is different from the self-injury haircut.

the symbolic meanings are somewhat different for men, because many people will say that a man's drastic haircut is an improvement, a cleanup, instead of a painful loss.

now, i compared it to circumcision because that's what i was reading about today, but i am realistic enough to know that haircutting is nowhere near as permanent or traumatic. there really is a difference between those things. but in some ways, there are similarities. for instance, a child might not want his or her hair cut. but they have no choice about it, because the parent decides for them, and forces their preference on the child. meanwhile, the child might grow up to become a teenager, and look over at a classmate's hair, which is much longer than their own, and say 'i wish MY hair was that long,' but they can't help it because it wasn't their choice - and now, it's too late to do anything about it. they would have to start from scratch, and wait about a decade for the hair to really look long. but usually, the thought passes through their mind, too briefly, and they never make an official decision to start right now and commit deliberately to a decade of hair growing. then, they just move on, and think about something else. it's seen as something of minor importance, to everyone except a hair-obsessed person like me.

(i'm not sure i like calling myself the f-word, 'fetishist,' because that's kind of a pejorative word, something negative-sounding, and also, it makes it sound like this preference is very rare and unusual. however, i'm sure that i could technically be put in that category. my fascination with hair is 'extreme,' because i have a set of strict rules that i do act upon in real life. i've decided that 'extremism' means: any set of rules, different from the mainstream's rules, that you act upon for real. it doesn't matter what those rules are, or whether they're good or bad, safe or dangerous, trivial or serious. it's ANYTHING. you're an extremist if you insist that you must ALWAYS wear orange-colored shoes, to every occasion, in every circumstance.)

(my hair knowledge is limited. i'm talking about caucasian hair, which behaves totally differently from wooly-textured african hair. i'm interested in african hair but i have very little experience with it. there are websites that talk about how to grow and take care of natural afros, twists, braids, dreadlocks, and other natural styles that are alternatives to chemical straightening. i've seen chemically-straightened hair, on my friend in college, and it was very time-consuming, damaging to the hair, and the results were, in my opinion, not very touchable - the hair was stiff, fragile, and breakable.)

you can convince children that they want what you want them to want. some children will argue with you or be rebellious, but i myself was mostly agreeable and just did what i was told, at least in some areas. and my parents were lenient about most things anyway, so we didn't have a lot of arguments about what i would do. anyway, you can just convince kids that there's nothing questionable or significant about cutting hair. it's an issue that's viewed as trivial or just ignored. if you behave as though there's nothing unusual about this, then the kid won't think to ask any questions themselves unless they see somebody else asking questions.

i'm an advocate for long hair and beards on men - with the understanding that, in reality, people have to look a certain way at the workplace and most employers will put some kind of pressure on you to meet their criteria, and i don't tell people to go against those rules, because i'm not sure whether i'd be strong enough myself to break those rules, if i were a man. they tolerate long hair on the head, at some places, but beards are much more difficult. i've considered that maybe long beards could be braided or pinned up or tied in some way so that they're kept 'neat and tidy' during work and so that they are kept away from foods or machinery. the refusal to cut hair and beards would be supported if people could say it was their religious practice, because the amish grow beards - but then, the amish aren't working at normal jobs either - they're on their own farms or doing carpentry work, and stuff like that. anyway this is something that i am sympathetic about. i don't like pushing people to do things if i myself wouldn't be strong enough to do them. do unto others as you'd have done to you. (oddly, some of 'the voices' told me that they expected ME to grow a beard, and they were disappointed to see that i wasn't making any progress at it. i don't have a beard, just a mustache, and a couple of chin whiskers. so, unfortunately, i won't be able to participate with all the other anarchists out there in the world growing their beards. they will have to have all the fun without me.)

well, anyway, the whole concept was that cutting children's hair does something irreversible to them, which they might regret later on. they lose an opportunity for a potential long-term project or investment or achievement, however they might view it. it's nowhere near as bad as some other things that can be done to them; however, it MIGHT be something that parents ought to think about - to at least consider that maybe, this will be something the child regrets, and might want to have a choice about when they're old enough to choose.

(note, i'm not advocating that everybody grow full-length guinness world record FINGERNAILS. it interferes too much with productive work. i will have to google some photographs of years-long, curly fingernails to see what they look like. if YOU want to advocate uncut fingernails, then feel free to start your OWN long-fingernails tribe! but i personally am not interested. this is one of those things where people pick and choose which details are important to them, in their subculture. and you can't have absolute logical consistency in the principles behind it, if you examine them very closely. i've tried to write out the beliefs, rationales, principles, and symbolic meanings associated with hairstyling, hair cutting, and allowing hair to grow, and actually, i haven't been able to make a perfectly coherent belief system that stands up to logical argument attacks. sooner or later, it always ends with me saying 'this is my personal preference. i just like it that way.' it's the same end result as the other fundamentalist religious communities, who point to a passage in the bible and say, 'this bible passage tells us that the women must not cut their hair.' i could make a fake bible and say that the invisible pink unicorn told me so. the IPU is a parody god created by atheists on the internet.)

as i said, i've heard many stories from women who grew long hair and then suddenly had it all chopped off - this is very common. many times, they can't explain any particular reason why their parents decided to cut all their hair off suddenly. sometimes, they DO express feelings of anger, regret, injury and loss. sometimes they talk wistfully about how they loved their long beautiful hair, and sometimes, they say they cried when it was cut. afterwards, usually, they NEVER GO BACK to trying to grow it long. instead, they make the adjustment, and start learning to style it in ways that can change from day to day and year to year, following the trends and fads on television, magazines, and local cultures. and then, there are a whole bunch of beliefs and rationales for why adult women should keep their hair short within a certain range.

with boys, it's very different. it isn't even an option - their hair starts getting cut very early in infancy. they never experience a dramatic, sudden loss, the way some girls do. instead, long hair is just inconceivable, something that never happens and never will happen, from the day they're born, till the day they die. they never think of it, and it's never seen as important. if they do experiment with long hair, it might be an experiment lasting a year or two, but they are unlikely to keep it for decades or a lifetime. it usually happens through accident or neglect, when people just don't want to bother getting haircuts, don't want to spend the money, or just don't care that much.

one thing that made me feel better was reading about the symbolic meanings of men's long hair, throughout history. historically, it has meant that you are rebelling or protesting against something in the main society. since a lot of people ARE protesting things nowadays, like the war in iraq, this theme fits. i'm not sure why, but i didn't notice a very visible hippie-protest culture against the war like they did for the vietnam war in the sixties. the protesting is done over the internet, and the people aren't necessarily meeting each other in person and making changes to their physical appearance. it also has been associated with anarchism and protests against the government.

however, my way of looking at things is unusual. i'm not thinking of merely a temporary protest. i'm imagining a long-term way of doing this and taking it for granted as the normal way of life, in a particular subculture. some tribes of the native americans took long-haired men for granted as a normal thing. it would be seen as a tragedy to cut off hair that had grown very long.

you don't see any kind of visible, noticeable tragedy if you're 'used to it.' if you cut the hair once every month, or every few weeks, then there is no sudden drastic change, and you're never conscious of what's being lost. it's only noticeable when you cut a large amount at once.

there are negative meanings associated with long hair on men. most people already are familiar with these meanings right away. i saw the latest indiana jones movie (i didn't like it much), which had some material about aliens and mind control. but one of the things that happened was that there was this guy, lost and isolated out in the jungle, who was kept with a group of people, and i forget who they were - they were sort of 'the bad guys.' anyway, he went crazy, and started talking in riddles, and didn't recognize anybody he used to know. and, of course, his hair and beard had grown long and unkempt. whenever he 'regained his sanity' and 'rejoined society,' and began recognizing people and relating to them without talking in riddles, at the end of the movie, his hair had of course been all cut off and he was clean-shaven. so long hair and beards mean you're isolated and crazy and cut off from society.

it also means you're abandoned or shipwrecked. i've jokingly called it 'the desert island makeover.' it means you're no longer in the neat-and-tidy world where everything is safe and predictable, and instead, you must fend for yourself, alone, and not worry about your appearance anymore. again, that's a meaning which we might see in anarchists or people starting their own colonies and subcultures, but it isn't explicitly a 'rule.' it's just something that happens by accident, and whenever the hero rejoins society, he doesn't keep the long hair and beard 'on principle.' he cuts it off and he fits in again.

well, this was originally a casual, informal 'note' in my opera browser (you can recognize the notes because i use 'notescript,' with all lowercase letters), and then i thought about maybe posting it as a blog, but if it gets too long and repetitive then i'll change my mind and declare it to be 'not readable by the general public.' long obsessions don't make for easy reading. there is some disease or disorder where a person absolutely must write constantly and never stop writing, and i forget what that disease is called (somebody said 'polyglossia' or something, i think it's similar to that), and i don't really have that disease, but my habit of journal-writing for hours on end is very similar to that. they noted that in that disease, the written material isn't necessarily high-quality, in fact it's usually not at all. mine tends to deteriorate like that over the hours. so the best thing is to just send it out there before it's too late.