Bangs, Bangs, Bangs (On Hair: Part 1)

 

Recently, I got bangs. A junior hairstylist who went by Roadkill cut them exactly as I had hoped. Better than I had hoped. I was kind of nervous but not super nervous. I've shaved most of my head before and rocked a variety of short pixie cuts but my hair doesn't grow fast.

Everyone has an opinion on bangs. Everyone has an opinion on women's hair. When I was 22, I was in Detroit for a week-long activist training through the Sierra Club. I was chatting with a women whose hair was cut into a gorgeous curly pixie that accented her cheek bones and dark eyebrows. My hair was down to my waist at the time. I complimented her on her hair and we began talking about books and ideas. I mentioned that I would love to try out a short hairstyle like hers. A boy who had been sitting within earshot and had not previously been part of the conversation interjected,

You shouldn’t cut your hair! It is so long.

This boy and I had barely interacted or exchanged words up to this point. He himself had long blonde locks tied up into a ponytail and rarely wore shoes. He embraced the unwashed, low maintenance look that a very specific male can get away with. Cute, unwashed, homeless chic while attending one of the most expensive small liberal arts colleges in the country.

He never elaborated on why I shouldn’t cut my hair and I never asked.

A woman considering getting bangs is often used as a punchline or a common trope to signify a woman going through a difficult time. Maybe a breakup, maybe she was fired, or her dream job interview went terribly. Regardless, she is not mentally stable and now she’s about to make a horrible aesthetic choice. Irreversible. Put down the kitchen scissors and click pause on that YouTube tutorial girlie or else you will be making the biggest mistake. You don’t want to be unemployed and ugly do you?! The horror.

This can be seen in the opening of Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Atlantic article, "The Risk of ‘Getting Bangs’: When a woman picks up a pair of scissors, she also picks up a trope." Tiffany opens by quoting writer Allie Wach who tweeted in 2018, "Personally I believe wanting bangs is almost never about wanting bangs and if u want bangs u should go to therapy first,”.

This continues to perpetuate the idea that woman are emotional creatures. Overly emotional. Surely, too emotional to wield a pair of shears. Snip, snip and you will decrease in value. Your beauty is currency babe and those bangs your considering are equivalent to you driving a new car off the lot. There are countless articles by journalists interrogating the gender politics around bangs and tracking down the moral distain for bangs all the way back to the 1600s. 

What are we so afraid of? 

Curtain bangs, baby bangs, blunt bangs, side bangs, shaggy, micro, layered. There are SO many options. It's glorious. Try them all! From one bangs girlie to another get those bangs you beautiful bitch! The only tears you'll be shedding are tears of joy. 

Happy Tears by Roy Lichtenstein