I finally figured out what it is we have in common, Erika Sauter:
You are another Rebel Without a Grudge: you do what you want because there is no particular reason not to, and seem only to have your rebelliousness provoked when your doing so provokes a reaction which you find simply uncalled-for.
I can relate: for an entire lifetime, I have found it irritating and an intolerable imposition, that the convention for men is to keep our hair short and our faces shaven. There never was any particular reason for these preposterous customs, nothing is to be gained from a man slaughtering the hair God gave him, and nothing is threatened or lost if he does not.
In my childhood, long hair and a beard on a man were taken as political dissent against the war in Vietnam, or a statement that a young man had no intention of submitting to a military draft. Such a man would be labelled a “peacenik” or some such. I remember years later when some politician made the outrageous statement regarding some diplomatic scenario, that perhaps we ought to “give peace a chance.” The lampooning he was treated to in the political cartoons, universally featured him (whoever it was) in long hair and a beard, carrying a sign with his Lennonesque slogan emblazoned on it…
Whatever. I was too young by the most fortunate five-year historic offset ever, to get drafted. They stopped the thing in ’73, I turned eighteen in ’78. I always wondered what my actual response would have been if my number had come up, but what offended me viscerally about the whole equation, was the idea that anyone should presume to take my hair away.
I always hated going to the barber as a child, and threw a fit about it every time. Don’t ask me how that got started, I have no idea. I just didn’t care for some asshole thinking he had more business determining what I looked like than I did. And to this day, now in mid-fifties, I continue to wonder what grave necessity of civilized life is at stake or ever was, when I continue to pursue my practice of monthly (more or less) shaves and decade-ly (more less than more) haircuts.
I have noticed quite a bit, that men seem to do these inane and needless self-abuses out of an ongoing need for women’s approval. There seems to be universal agreement among women, that men ought to be clean-shaven and “clean-cut.” Again, whatever. I figure it’s my life to live, not any woman’s with her stylistic bigotries she presumes to enforce upon my sense of hygiene and appropriateness. Don’t like how I look? Then go away and mind your own business, is pretty much my response to that particular womanifestation of the ubiquitous matriarchy ruling men’s lives.
If a man just prefers, or thinks he does, to clear-cut God’s own forest of the hair he was given the blessed capacity to grow, then let him. But as with your underwear thing, when one really thinks it through, the question of “why is this a thing at all?” emerges in my mind as the only one worth asking.
And like you strutting about happy as a clam in your undies, I too never meant anything by it. It’s just what I prefer.
