This morning I went to work feeling like a can of hairspray. This is owed to my new haircut, which I guess is called a “maintenance cut,” which is another way of saying that I am growing my hair out, and that it had gotten sufficiently long so as to make me look grubby, so I went and spent more money to get less hair taken off my head. The back had gotten long enough to stick out of the sides of my head when viewing me from the front. The top didn’t have enough weight to slick back, so it would always fall forward in these two middle-parted waves, making me look like a Pomeranian. The sides would poof up and make me look like Paulie Walnuts. All of this is owed to the fact that my hair holds moisture, to borrow a colloquial phrase, like a motherfucker.
All of this is to say that I abandoned my typical style of getting a severe mid fade, letting it grow until I resemble a Lego man, and then getting another severe mid fade. I went to a fancy New Haven spot called Skull & Combs and got perhaps the most sophisticated haircut of my life. This is not saying much. But he cut texture into the top and left length there. There was no buzz of a razor until the clean-up stage at the very end. The blow dryer ran for what felt like twenty minutes. And then we slathered enough product on my head to make it as flammable as a nineteenth century factory chimney.
I’m going for the Jax Teller thing from Sons of Anarchy. Unfortunately for me, though, I don’t have blue eyes, and I’m not blonde or Hollywood handsome. I’m what you might call Scranton Handsome, or perhaps Buffalo Handsome. This is no insult to those cities (I’m no slouch), but I don’t have that “are you sure that’s a real guy” kind of handsome. But I suppose we all aspire to something.
Essentially, this is the highest level of effort I’ve put into aesthetic grooming in my entire life, and that includes the awkward middle school and high school years, when the approval of others was one of many false idols of which I’ve since (mostly) abandoned worship. Paradoxically, the less you care about what other people think of you, the more effort you can put into how you look without feeling ridiculous. It’s kind of like writing this; I might judge a sentence here or there, but I don’t really care what people think, and even though that might be owed to my expectation that very few people, if any, will read it, it lets me write more. So, the less you care, the more freedom you have, and the more you can do.
This change in grooming habits comes at an interesting time. As we all watch the psychofascist American right resurge, the culture war shines one of its many lenses on masculinity. While plenty of people try to expand the notion of what it means to be a man, and welcome in new people, others try to regress, with a wish that it was once again 1950. Opposition to a man metrosexually grooming himself seems rife with contradictions, to me—the people who valorize eras where men wore elaborate suits and gelled their hair back into an oil slick typically wear Sperry’s and salmon-colored shorts, and this hypothetical guy I’m inventing based on things I’ve seen on twitter probably makes fun of transfolk for wearing makeup, regardless of their gender assigned at birth or chosen identity. Essentially, where you fall on the spectrum of not-groomed-at-all to heavily-groomed doesn’t actually predict whether you get ridiculed for being “unmasculine,” which usually comes in the form of epithets like “gay,” “pussy,” or worse. Plenty of macho-appearing men put a lot of effort to look that way. Fuck, have you ever tried to trim a beard before? It’s a royal pain in the ass.
But anyway, what actually gets criticized in situations like those described above is grooming that makes you look feminine. But then you get people like DeSantis, who was probably wearing heels for most of his campaign, and sponsors some of the most regressive and viciously anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the country.
Make it make sense.
I’m aware there are zero citations in here. But hey, this is my blog, and I’ll do what I want.
Anyway, I’m thinking about all of these things because every time I look in the mirror and earnestly blow dry my hair backward on the hottest setting, comb it back, blow dry it cool to keep it in place, apply pomade, and then tinker with it until it sits right, I can’t help but feel a little goofy. I like looking good, and my discomfort is probably owed to internalized homophobia more than anything, but even though the whole process only takes like ten minutes, it makes me feel like a primadonna, and makes me reminisce on grade-school level insults hurled at me in childhood. The memories parade by my conscious eye like boats on a speeding current.
Maybe these insecurities and anxieties have as much to do with gender norms and internalized criticisms as they do with my discomfort with excess. I’m of the camp that believes its best to look good while using the least amount of effort, and that there’s a sweet spot where both axes intersect where you look hot, but you didn’t spend twenty minutes on narcissistic hand-wringing in a mirror to get there.
At the same time, I’m American.
Living to excess is to Americans as water is to fish—it’s so present we might not even notice it if we aren’t paying attention to the right things. All this contributes to an enduring fantasy of mine in which my hair gets long enough that I can just push it back with my hands, let my stubble grow a few days, and look like Charlie Hunnam in Sons of Anarchy without any effort. Either way, there’s nothing ascetic about fussing about my appearance– it’s all excess.
Another aspect, perhaps one to focus on in another entry, is how much energy I and others devote to the appearance of the outside, when underneath it all I nurse ongoing mental health battles, try to corral substance habits that could run away if I let them, and endure a lifetime bowel disorder that required half my guts to get pulled out when I was twelve and makes me shit ten times a day.
I guess we’re all lucky that unless they cut you open, no one can see what’s underneath. Unless you let them.
Thanks for joining me for this one. It was more meandering than the past few entries.
This instance of ‘performative journaling at the End of the world’ was brought to you by my mother’s can of AquaNet that I pilfered this morning to achieve that sleek, slick hair control, without excess shine and/or grease. Your mileage may vary.
matt nilsen 