The Best Time I Gave A Boy A Sexist Haircut
He thought any old girl was up for the job
“Cut my hair, will you?” My mother twirled a tea towel onto her shoulders, pointed to a large pair of sheering scissors on the table and sat down, “Just the straggly bits. I look like a drowned rat.” She said.
She usually asks my father to neaten it up when she deems it an emergency. From time to time I’ll find my father peering over his spectacles as he snips away at my mother’s hair moments before she flies out of the house to the one appointment of the month that she feels she has to look smart. But this morning she just had me.
She’s always said that I have inherited her excellent 3-D spatial reasoning and so, just like her, I can draw and sculpt. And I can. But she makes another leap in logic — cutting hair is something you can do — innately — if you’re good with your hands. Hair is just another medium, like clay or plaster of paris or wood. I can draw and sculpt, she reasoned, ergo, I can cut hair. By looking in the mirror in 20 minutes, she thought, her hypothesis would be proved, QED. Which is why when she pointed to a pair of scissors big enough to shear through brambles and told me to get to work, I was flattered and happily obliged.
My mother used to have waist-long red hair that she wore with a centre-parting and curled round into a bun that sat on the back of her head. As she grew older the red faded to a beautiful blonde. When she unpinned it in the evening it flowed down her back like a delicious stream of champagne. But then she cut it into a fetching Peter Pan-like bubbly shape which inevitably begins to resemble a mullet after five or six weeks.
I picked up the scissors with confidence and got to work. The confidence was only there for a brief holiday. The hair kept sliding along the scissors when I finished each downstroke. The result was wonky. Cutting several inches in one long guillotine movement doesn’t work. And then layering. Isn’t there something about cutting the hair in sections?
I got deja vu. This had happened to me before — not cutting my mother’s hair but someone else’s: my crush at school. He looked like he was raised on sunshine and steak in a prairie, building barns with his brothers and yachting in Bermuda during the summer. Which, it turns out, is exactly how he was raised. But we were only friends.
The only drawback to him was that his hair was a bit care-free. Being a total nerd as a teenager I liked boys who looked neat, with nice sensible haircuts. One day, while staring pointedly at the haystack sitting on top of his head, I suggested he make a trip to the barber’s. His chin lifted up as he tried to catch a glimpse of the top of his head, like a dog trying to catch its own tail. He fetched a towel and a pair of scissors,“You’re a girl, you can do it.”
It took for my mother asking me to cut her hair based on the assumption of my artistic talents to realize how fucking out-of-line this reasoning was. Of course at the time, the chance to be within six inches of this golden god focused my mind like a laser beam on just the first three letters of the word “sexism.”
A quivering light reflected off the blades of the shaking scissors in my hands, highlighting the fine golden hairs on the back on his strong tan neck. I began to cut.
Eventually I worked out that I had to hold the hair between my index and middle fingers to stop the hair being pushed along the blade by the diminishing angle of the implement. It was straight and tidy and had a rather fetching curve to the bottom. It was a tidy 60s bob that Vidal Sassoon himself would have been proud of. I informed my sitter and said that while the back was neat, it wasn’t like you could see it from the front so I had better tidy up around the ears and at the front or the whole exercise would be futile.
If you’ve ever looked at an ear, or more specifically the hairless area around the ear, towards the back you’ll know it can be quite a stretch of skin. A vast bald clearing, surrounded by the cliffs of Ear and the forests of Hair. Having never appreciated that area of the scalp before I began hacking away at this mop to free the owner’s right ear. And my, how I set it free.
After boosting my reserves of self-belief after creating a stylish women’s cut at the back of my client’s head I began to lose confidence in my innate ability as a girl to cut hair when I looked at the vast expanse of bald skin behind the ear. And when I checked by looking at him face on my face betrayed my worry, “What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Erm. Well I’ve only done one side so it’s just difficult to tell. Let me even it up and it’ll be fine.”
“Can I look in the mirror?”
“Best not.”
He stood up and walked over to his mirror. Silence. I was mortified. “I thought you could cut hair?” He asked plainly. No, dear reader, I couldn’t. He had assumed it, thereby making asses of us both.
You would be forgiven for thinking that the lesson of a bad haircut for his priggish assumption was sufficient teaching. But fortunately he had to walk around school for the next two days before he was allowed out to go to the local barber’s.
We didn’t hang out after that.
My mother, however, had no choice in whether we got to hang out or not. I was living with her so hanging out together in the kitchen was part of the deal. As I remembered the time I made my school crush look like a walking advert for community support services, I couldn’t see. My eyes teared up from repressed laughter at the memory of my unwittingly employed punishment that I had dished out at school while I continued to snip away at my mother’s rat-tails.
She’s got an appointment at the hairdresser’s at three.
Florence Walker is a contributor to Petrolicious, an occasional diarist for The Times and the London Evening Standard, and is the former Resident Sex Anthropologist at British GQ. You’ll find her everywhere @floxxiewalker
