Hairesy: Why Hair Is Never Just Hair
So... I chopped off my bangs.
If only I had the kind of friend who would have caught me beforehand — seized the kitchen scissors from my clutches as if they were protecting my very neck. I wouldn’t be sitting here, full monty with the forehead.
You know the saying: real friends don’t let friends cut their bangs.
But honestly — thank God I don’t have friends like that. Because my friends would just say fun bangs.
And then we’d talk about exactly what I’m about to talk about here.
From buzz cuts to bobs, bonnets to dictators, fairy tales to natural hair — hair has always been used as a means of control. And people have always taken it back.
Watch the Video here
The State Controls Your Hair
You’ve probably heard that North Korea has an official list of state-approved haircuts. That’s actually a myth — but here’s the thing. The fact that we all believed it so easily tells us something true. Hair control by the state isn’t far-fetched. We know it’s possible. We feel it in our bones, even if we’ve never thought about it before.
Because we know hair matters.
The reality is that the truth is wilder than the myth. There’s no rigid list, but there is cultural and ideological pressure for men to keep their hair short — hair conformity as loyalty signaling. And the 2021 Youth Education Guarantee Act brought actual street-level crackdowns on young people adopting foreign hairstyles. Hair in North Korea is a political tool and a threat to the state.
And then there’s Kim Jong Un’s own hair — modeled after his grandfather Kim Il-sung, the founding father. His hair is literally a legitimacy claim. It says: I am the continuation of something sacred. The state actively promotes his style, directing teachers to adopt it as a good example for students. His hair is simultaneously his alone and being replicated through other people’s bodies. He’s not just branding himself. He’s trying to multiply himself upon the people.
Afghanistan under the Taliban is the most extreme contemporary example. Women must cover their hair and faces entirely in public. But men are controlled too — prohibited from shaving or trimming their beards, and Western-style haircuts are punishable. Barbershops have been closed for giving Western-style cuts. More than half of all arrests made in the first six months under the morality law concerned the appearance of men.
The Taliban is controlling hair to signal what kind of person you are. Are you Islamic or Western? Compliant or corrupted? Your hair becomes the proof of your conformity.
Hair As Branding
Trump uses his hair as a brand. Always the same side swoosh, flat in the back, swirled creamsicle comb-over in the front. Memorable, a conversation piece, and nobody else wants it — so it’s never appropriated. He is a walking, talking logo. And the more people talk about his hair or create caricatures of him, the more he occupies space in people’s heads rent free.
Being iconic is far more powerful than being beautiful. Einstein understood this too — he would deliberately mess up his hair before photos. The wild, uncombable look said: I am too smart to be compromised by what you think of me. His brand preceded his proof.
Women have done this as well. Anna Wintour’s blunt bob has not meaningfully changed in decades. Dolly Parton’s big hair is as much her trademark as her voice and her kindness. Frida Kahlo’s braids and flowers were inseparable from her identity and explicitly political — a statement about indigenous Mexican identity. And Joan of Arc didn’t plan it — she cropped her hair to pass as a soldier — but that short crop became so iconic that every depiction of her for six centuries has replicated it. Unintentional branding that outlasted her by hundreds of years.
Cutting It Off
When someone cuts their hair — really cuts it, not a trim, not a refresh — something else is usually happening. Across cultures, across centuries, across every kind of story we tell, cutting the hair is an act of taking back control. Or having it taken from you.
Hair is a symbolic yoke. Hair is made of the finest puppet strings. And whoever wields the blade holds the power.
Prisoners have their heads shaved on arrival — not for hygiene, for humiliation. To erase their branding. Women who collaborated with the enemy in occupied France had their heads shaved publicly in town squares after World War II. The crowd understood exactly what they were doing. They were using hair to punish, to mark, to strip away identity and dignity.
But the scissors cut both ways. Sometimes the person holding them is taking something back.
Samson
Samson was consecrated to God from birth as a Nazirite. His uncut hair wasn’t vanity — it was a covenant, a physical sign of his identity and his relationship with the divine. An ongoing prayer.
When Delilah, hired by his enemies, finally wore down his defenses and had his hair cut while he slept, he didn’t just lose strength. He lost himself. His connection to God, his purpose, his faith, his sense of who he was — gone with the hair.
But his hair grew back. And so did he.
So when someone says don’t worry, it’s only hair, it grows back — my response is: it’s never only hair. But it does grow back.
Frida Kahlo
In 1940, after her second divorce from Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo picked up a pair of scissors and cut off all her hair. She then painted herself sitting in a chair surrounded by the fallen strands, wearing one of Diego’s oversized suits, holding the scissors. At the top of the painting she wrote the lyrics of a Mexican song: Look, if I loved you it was for your hair. Now that you’re bald, I don’t love you anymore.
The lyric is about superficial, performative love. So she cuts it off. In the portrait she is Rivera — or rather, the version of Rivera that occupied her head, the one that always clapped for her feminine performance. And she is surgically removing him from his occupation and making him watch. It is an excising of the male gaze.
She looks powerful and destroyed at the same time. It is one of the most honest depictions of heartbreak and defiance ever put on canvas.
But she grew it back. Returned to the braids, the flowers, the traditional Tehuana style that was inseparable from her identity and her politics. The cutting was a purge. The growing back was the return to a more flourishing version of herself.
Sinead O’Connor
When Sinead O’Connor shaved her head in the late 1980s, her record label begged her not to. They wanted her more conventionally feminine, more marketable, more aspirational.
She shaved it anyway. The image became one of the most striking of the entire decade — a woman who refused to be packaged their way. She wasn’t having a crisis. She was averting the crisis of lost identity. She was saying: you don’t get to sell my sexuality. The shaved head was a rejection of the male gaze, of the music industry’s ownership of women’s bodies, of the idea that her value was tied to her looks. It made people deeply uncomfortable.
Which was exactly the point.
Britney Spears
In February 2007, Britney Spears walked into a hair salon in Tarzana, California, picked up the clippers, and shaved her own head while the world watched and laughed. The tabloids called it a meltdown. A breakdown. Evidence of instability. For years that image was used against her — proof that she had lost her mind.
But Britney has since said something different. She said it was about her body. About the fact that for years everyone had controlled her image, her hair, her appearance, her weight, her everything. The shaving was an act of reclamation — this is mine and you cannot have it. The world punished her for it in real time. What looked like madness was actually someone trying desperately to belong to themselves again.
The Bob
In the 1920s, women began cutting off their long Victorian hair and the world treated it like a moral crisis. Commentators called it unwomanly. Immoral. Dangerous.
It was just a haircut. Except it wasn’t.
Long hair had been the physical symbol of a particular kind of femininity — decorative, domestic, patient, contained. The bob said: I have somewhere to be and I’m not carrying all of this with me. It was the first widely visible sign that women were done performing a role that had been assigned to them. Short hair as resignation letter.
Black Hair
If we are talking about hair as a site of control, this is one of the most documented, most ongoing, and most consequential examples there is. And I want to be upfront — I don’t have firsthand experience with this. So I’ll say what I know, and I’d love to hear from those who do.
For generations, Black women and men have faced pressure — in schools, workplaces, and professional spaces — to conform their natural hair to Eurocentric standards. Chemical straightening wasn’t just a style choice for many people. It was the price of admission. The cost of being taken seriously. Locs, afros, braids — hair that grows naturally from Black heads — has been called unprofessional, distracting, even dirty. By institutions. By employers. By schools.
The discrimination has been so real and so pervasive that legislation was written specifically to address it. The CROWN Act — Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair — exists because people were actually losing jobs and opportunities over their natural hair.
Choosing to wear your hair naturally in that context is not just a style decision. It is an act of resistance. A reclamation. A refusal to let someone else’s standards be the price of your dignity.
This deserves more than I can give it here. I’d love to hear from people with lived experience of this in the comments.
Gray Hair
Gray hair is funny. Not funny ha ha. Funny revealing.
At a certain age — and that age is basically anything under 80 — you are expected to dye your hair. No one passes a law. No morality police show up at your door. But the message is everywhere and it is consistent: cover it up. Don’t let it show. Keep performing youth for as long as you possibly can.
Naomi Wolf wrote about this in The Beauty Myth — the idea that beauty standards don’t exist to make women beautiful. They exist to keep women busy. Chasing something. Spending something. Capitalism needs you chasing youth because youth is something you lose. They couldn’t sell you aging — you get more of that for free every single day. Bad business model.
And the patriarchy has its own investment in women feeling like they lose value as they get older. If you believe you have an expiration date, you make different decisions. You settle. You stay in relationships that don’t serve you because the clock is ticking. You accept less because you’ve been told that less is all you’ll be able to get soon.
Gray hair is just hair. But refusing to cover it up is a refusal of all of that. It’s saying: I am not auditioning anymore. I know my value and it has nothing to do with my hair color.
And here’s what I found on the other side of it. You don’t die. You get used to it. You start to actually embrace getting older instead of fighting it. And once you’ve questioned one thing that deeply — once you’ve pulled on that thread — everything else gets questioned too. The whole world opens up a little.
It’s amazing what happens when you stop performing for an audience that was never really looking out for you anyway.
Why I Actually Cut My Bangs
And that brings me back to these bangs.
I didn’t cut them as a statement. I cut them because hair on my face drives me insane. I’m sensitive. I needed it gone. I felt one too many tickles on my allergy-sensitive face, grabbed a pair of kitchen scissors, twisted my bangs, and attacked them like a thorny rose bush overtaking my thoughts.
But here’s the thing. My hair has always reflected my actual life: I read, I write, I get distracted. My hands always have stuff on them, so I hate brushing my hair away. I also need something to touch, twirl, and fidget with. Most of my life I’ve had too-short bangs, and I’ve finally figured out why. It’s my sensitivity.
Micro-bangs aren’t recommended for women over 50.
But then I find myself dancing in the kitchen to My Sharona, and I feel as I have always felt — a woman in total control of her own damn scissors.
When people say why did she do that to her hair, they are making an assumption: that your number one priority is to be attractive to others. For a lot of us, that’s way down the list.
Your hair is yours. The scissors are yours. Wield them like the scepter they are. And what you do with them is nobody else’s business.
That’s not hairesy. That’s freedom.
Stevie Lynn is the creator of Crunchy Anarchy — Resisting the Human Industrial Complex and Learning to be Human Again