Hair All Over The Place: Reflections On Having Short Hair As A Woman

It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that women should have long hair–especially those who are young, single and ideally heterosexual. Thick, black and cascading hair is one of the hallmarks of being an Indian woman. And if you believe shampoo and hair oil companies, long hair is practically synonymous with womanhood itself.

So what happens if god forbid a woman decides to chop off her hair?

I have sported short hair for several years now. Even as a child, after I outgrew those awful mushroom cuts, I never grew it longer than my shoulders. Come junior college, I decided to get a pixie cut. It was a spur of the moment decision, and nothing had me prepared for the number of times I would be made to feel conscious of my hair.

Everybody had something to say about it. I think the whole gamut of human emotions can be contained in the phrase, ‘you cut your hair!’ Although the negative opinions outweighed the positive, there were still quite a few compliments. Many said I was gutsy to have chopped it off.

nothing had me prepared for the number of times I would be made to feel conscious of my hair.

Random strangers and people I barely knew, walked up to me, just to say how much they liked my hair. It still happens now, but less so. As for me, I felt stellar for simply walking into a parlour and paying a good amount of money to get my hair done. Seriously, why do women’s haircuts have to be so expensive? Mansplainers on Quora say it’s because women are just willing to pay more, so it must be true. 

On the downside, I realised that several people think that their opinion about my hair matters to me–a lot. But it doesn’t; because it shouldn’t. The ones that are against short hair expect me to quickly grow it back and stop offending their refined sensibilities about female aesthetics.

Some of these folks wore funeral-worthy expressions of sorrow, and others seemed so dramatically horrified that you would imagine my shorn tresses were being used as hair extensions by Samara from The Ring. It does make me want to grow my hair back and haunt them in a similar fashion.

Also Read: Why I Decided To Shave My Head

A few people bluntly told me that I looked like a boy, with nasty glints in their eyes and every intention of making me feel bad about it. On digging deeper, I realised their attitudes were often backed by rigid and heteronormative gender binaries. They spouted unsound opinions, such as – men find short-haired women less attractive, and would pick a woman with long hair over them. The idea that some renegade women are not doing all they can to be attractive is pretty disturbing for certain people.

In public spaces, I’ve had people stare at me unabashedly, some have pointed my hair out to each other, while others have given me outright hostile glares. In Bombay, complete strangers in the local train ladies compartment have asked why I chose to cut my hair and how my parents allowed it.

I’ve even received generous advice stating things like ‘ladkiyon pe lambe baal hi jajte hain.’ I wonder if such things happen to men who grow their hair long. I guess it’s great to be reminded every now and then, that women are collective property, and listening to people’s uncalled opinions and catering to their interventions is our gendered inheritance.

I guess it’s great to be reminded every now and then, that women are collective property.

The most troubling memory of strangers’ reactions to my hair is of one evening in my late teens when I was walking down an empty road. A man standing in a corner of the road with his friends yelled out loudly: ‘yeh ladka hain ki ladki?!’ – cue laughter. Startled, scared and even ashamed, I picked up my pace and ran away.

Despite having embraced a good amount of feminism at that age, they still managed to make me feel bad about my hair. On writing this article, I realised that there was not much distance between the sexism of those men and that of the friends/acquaintances I mentioned above. For both parties, I had deviated from a norm and the backlash was well-deserved. How fragile are these gender norms!

A few years ago there was a popular meninist post doing the rounds on the internet, it denounced women with short hair, saying that they are ‘crazy and deranged’. This is simply because short hair, according to the author, is a political statement. Isn’t he making a mountain out of a molehill? Surprisingly enough, I find myself agreeing on that one point. After all, women cutting their hair short, as almost everything women do, becomes an issue to people. It turns into a political statement whether you want it to or not.

Also Read: Why I Dreaded Visits To The Barber: On Short Hair And Hair Politics

Featured Image Credit: Polygon