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Hair Codes

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On every channel where I appear, women show up in the comments to say that my hair is too crazy and this prevents them from understanding my argument. Every channel!

I am yet to meet a single man who’d have any problem with my hair. It’s always women. And OK, I do have wild hair. I cut it as short as it’s ever been. I try to keep it less wild. But why is it such an issue?

I have always struggled with understanding the language and the rites of female communities. I was brought up mostly by men, and this is the result. Can anybody help? I’m sincerely stumped as to why it’s the hair and not absolutely anything else they could pick on. It doesn’t hurt my feelings or anything. But I feel that something is being communicated to me that I’m not managing to understand correctly.

24 responses to “Hair Codes”

  1. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    Group conformity to hairstyle/fashion/grooming standards is how middle-class American women signal ingroup/outgroup membership among strangers. They can’t understand your argument, because you don’t register as “one of us” in appearance, so their primitive brain circuitry won’t allow them to listen.

    It’s not just hair, hivemind females also do this with clothes, shoes, jewelry, makeup, speech, fingernail length, and mannerisms. Any deviation marks you as outgroup and therefore your loyalties are suspect. This is mostly not conscious, IMO: it’s lizard-brain stuff.

    I am of course the wrong person to ask about this, because I don’t play that game– it’s a lot of work just for the privilege of being able to communicate with women who lack the baseline self-awareness to see that they are doing this, and put it on hold long enough to listen to somebody who doesn’t look and act exactly like them… instead they have to get out there and assert their social dominance (to themselves mostly) by norms-enforcing on total strangers. On the internet, no less. It’s like talking to chihuahuas with nice manicures.

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    1. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      … and that is the very generous interpretation where it’s a simple mental block preventing them from understanding you, rather than them being too dumb to understand you, and using your nonconformity to assert dominance in a situation where they feel inferior intellectually.

      But that’s also a possibility.

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    2. Avi Avatar
      Avi

      @methylethyl

      Great explanation: enlightening.

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  2. Dame Eleanor Hull Avatar
    Dame Eleanor Hull

    They’re jealous of your curls, and that you aren’t engaged in some self-hating grooming practices.

    A couple of days ago at the gym, I heard an elderly woman complimenting a younger one on her curls, and saying that she used to get perms regularly (until she had to stop because her hair was falling out), “because curls made [her] feel so feminine.”

    I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking, “You’re a woman, you’re feminine, you don’t have to perform it in some specific way.” But hair-hate/hair-envy is really ingrained, at least in this culture. So many women want whatever hair they don’t have: straight if theirs is curly, curls if theirs is straight. It’s just keratin. But if you’re hung up on your hair, then yeah, other people’s hair can be distracting; it can indicate this whole imagined character and lifestyle that you can’t have because your hair is wrong. At least, I think that’s what’s going on.

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  3. ShadowsCollide Avatar
    ShadowsCollide

    Thankfully I’ve become all DILGAF with hair and grooming as an older woman in my early forties, as a kid with fine, stick straight hair the color of mouse fur I grew up thinking my hair was ugly and boring since my mother has thick, curly auburn hair. My hair is still there and it’s fine, I dress like an an indie hipster and I’m immune to my mother’s nagging about dressing like a lady since I wear loads of band T-shirts and jeans, or floral skirts with band T-shirts. I don’t want to wear all black Ann Taylor business casual and look like a filing cabinet, I like colors and designs.

    It’s definitely a woman thing to criticize other women’s clothes, women can be stupid and catty like this. Thing is these women want us to all dress in neutrals and blah makeup and look like dorks, I wear black trousers with band T-shirts to work as a substitute teacher and I’ve gotten a lot of compliments from other teachers and the kids. I still get a kick out of wearing band T-shirts and red or purple lipstick out of the house after growing up hearing that those are boy clothes and that ladies don’t wear visible lipstick, I know it’s immature

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    1. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      “look like a filing cabinet”

      😀

      DILGAF is the right response, in any case. Other women can value you for character and competence, or they can value you for conformity signaling. Not a lot of overlap in those, and I know which women I prefer to associate with.

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      1. ShadowsCollide Avatar
        ShadowsCollide

        I choose my shirts on what kinds of kids I’m teaching that day, tomorrow I’m working at a preschool and I’m wearing a purple T-shirt with a picture of Eowyn from Lord of the Rings. Little girls love that shirt since it’s purple and Eowyn is a beautiful blond royal woman, they want to know who the princess is. Another shirt I wear when I work with young kids has the milk carton from the video for Coffee and TV by Blur, the video is about an animated milk carton. The kids drink milk out of little cartons and love the picture of the smiling milk carton, they get a kick out of it

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      2. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        It took me a very long time to accept that I stick out as a sore thumb on female communities. I found that I feel u usually normal and accepted around German-speaking women but like a total misfit among all others. Absolutely no idea why.

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  4. oldcowboy3 Avatar
    oldcowboy3

    Hmmm, as the famous philosopher Al Bundy observed: “Don’t try to understand women. Women understand women and they hate each other.” Now I am in my mid 70’s and can assure you that men love women not because of any hairdo’s or clothing, but because of how they look, sound, smell, taste and feel; and if we didn’t, we would have most probably have placed a bounty on their heads many years ago ;-D

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Exactly. My husband looks slightly dazed when I ask him if he likes my new outfit or hairdo. He clearly to idea what I’m even asking about. But I understand that he is male, so he doesn’t perceive separate aspects of my look. He enjoys the whole thing altogether.

      It’s actually a fascinating thing how men and women see in different ways. A typical female story of workplace situations starts with, “So the Provost came in, wearing this ridiculous shirt and low-rise jeans…” I have never met a man who’d open a conversation about a Provost with her totally unrelated outfit.

      The Provost does tend to dress strangely, by the way.

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      1. oldcowboy3 Avatar
        oldcowboy3

        LOL, it is even worse than you imagine, I had to google “low-rise jeans” to be sure what you were talking about ;-D

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          You would get it if you saw her, though. She has a massive paunch that spills out of her low-rise pants and short blouses in very alarming ways. Why such a well paid woman can’t dress in a way that doesn’t demonstrate a very bare midriff I will never understand.

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          1. oldcowboy3 Avatar
            oldcowboy3

            Okay, I did not need to see that image ;-D

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              Dude. Neither did we.

              Liked by 1 person

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  5. oldcowboy3 Avatar
    oldcowboy3

    When we were working in the bush, particularly in the Arctic, men grew longer hair and beards, which we dabbed with liquid DEET to help slow down the forty eleven million biting flies (and yes it is true, they are all females that need a blood meal to ensure fertility). We knew that DEET was terrible stuff because it ate many organics like the paint or plastic on our pencils. Most women wore netted hats and gloves but that interfered with seeing and working. There is no good answer, when you finally get back your dog sniffs and looks askance, and your wife insists that you have three showers to erode some of the rank smell of DEET and wood smoke ;-D

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  6. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “every channel where I appear, women show up in the comments to say that my hair is too crazy”

    Are these Ukrainian women? Or does this happen when you appear in English and/or Spanish too?

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This is on Russian-speaking channels. And the most annoying part is that on one of the channels most viewers are Jewish and should really get where the hair comes from. We have tons of red-headed Jews in our part of the world, so the color shouldn’t be throwing them off.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “viewers are Jewish —red-headed”

        Extrapolating from Poland (so probably not that close but might give you an idea or two….

        Having a put together neat appearance counts for …. a _lot_. I remember years ago more than one person was chirping to me at work how great a particular new teacher (new in our unit… had transferred from another unit). None of these people had ever been in his class but their judgement was about the fact that he always wore a suit to work “solidna firma!” everybody enthused.

        Maybe they make a shortcut… ‘unruly hair = unruly mind’…. or ‘if she can’t even keep her hair in order…. how can anything she says be important?’

        Also in Poland there’s a traditional prejudice against red-heads (rudy -male, ruda – female) who are thought to be unreliable and ‘fałszywy – insincere’.

        Big unruly hair is not that common here and I think most women in intellectual fields would simply cut it as short as possible but there is a political commentator with very unruly hair (part of her brand by now)

        https://x.com/tvp_info/status/1909342919905194332

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Have you seen Yulia Latynina? That’s serious hair. I hate her because she’s an FSB shill but hair she’s got.

          Talking about appearance, the new administration prohibited us from wearing our regalia to the student awards ceremony. It’s incomprehensible because the regalia made the event look much more impressive. And logistically it’s easier to make things work when you can visually identify who’s the professor in every group. I very sincerely don’t get these edicts. And this tendency away from formal wear.

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          1. Avatar
            Anonymous

            “the new administration prohibited us from wearing our regalia to the student awards ceremony. “

            It looks like a power play to me. Your new administration doesn’t want the professors to wear the regalia of authority. In ordinary clothing, during a ceremony, you are anonymized.

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            1. Frank Legros Avatar
              Frank Legros

              I am Frank Legros.

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      2. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “the color shouldn’t be throwing them off”

        Women, in most places and times, are more likely to find something about a person’s appearance (clothes, makeup, hairstyle) when the real issue is they have issues with what that person is saying: “I don’t want to hear this from someone who’s wearing white after labor day!” “What nonsense! did you see her eyeshade?”

        Men, are more likely to find something in the person’s behavior in other contexts: “How can I believe this guy… he plays pickleball!”, “What does he know about investments, his girlfriend’s not even hot!”

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  7. Avatar
    Anonymous

    I once was in a mindfulness/self-compassion class where we had to pair up and find things we have in common. The woman I paired up looked at me sadly and said:” I don‘t think we have anything in common.”

    “Why”,I asked.

    “Well, for one you are not wearing any jewellery”, she said.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      That woman should definitely work on mindfulness and even more so on compassion, without the self part.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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