Month: January 2020

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The American male entanglement: long hair, from the 1960s to the 2020s. Wait. What?

Why are all us Texans made out to be international laughingstocks … again?  This time, like the last time in the mid ’60s, it’s over the way school boys want to style their hair.  Damn Beatles.  Back in those days, three Dallas male students were expelled for violating the school dress code governing hairstyle.  Newspaper pictures of the adolescents reveal they looked like any post-Beatle pop star of the era.  They were not emulating “My Three Sons” but “The Monkees.”  Then in the mid ’70s, the U.S. Supreme Court had to spend time ruling on what became a national issue of whether or not a school boy could wear his hair over his ears and even over his shirt collar.  Damn evolving Brady Bunch boys.  During the Vietnam War years, employers from schools to the U.S. Postal Service and police departments were perplexed over the ‘long’ hair dilemma.  The generation gap was wide open over this lone issue.  The older generation thought men should look like men by maintaining a weekly haircut and daily shave.  The younger generation thought long hair was cool, super cool, and to the girls very sexy.  As long as the hair was washed, even if shaggy or tousled, and not a filthy smelly tangled mess, what’s the harm?

PEEEPULLL:  Get a pictorial world history book, will ya?  See all the ‘long-haired’ men throughout Western European history, every single one of them from childhood to old age.  Even their powered white wigs came with braided pony tails and big pompadours like Liberace.  Hmm.  Just exactly what is this hang up against long hair on men anyway?

The male hair issue is not solely about rebellion.  The waist length hair of say Big Brother and the Holding Company was a political statement against the draft and the Vietnam War.  But guys going Beatle style was just … well, to get girls.  They saw how girls squealed over the lovable Mop Tops.  And guys will do anything to impress the gals.

Too cool for school

The long hair issue was a big deal during my school days.  Dress codes were strictly enforced. Boys had to wear their hair short while girls could not wear short dresses—the ‘determination’ made by the tip of our middle fingers against the sides of our legs standing up.  Yeah, these were real rules to be taken very seriously.  We were told that kids who went to schools with no dress code were undisciplined and much more apt to stir up trouble in the classroom.  These were the days of paddling and after-school detention, so it’s not like there weren’t any disciplinary measures we would avoid at all costs.  We behaved and followed the rules, 99% of us anyway, including me.

At the beginning of every school year, boys’ hair was always a big issue.  Every summer boys, whose parents permitted, grew their hair as long as they wanted, at least to the fashionable lengths usually covering the ears and neck.  Then school would start, and every dress code re-read in homeroom, and some guys would show up with their long hair knowing they would have to be sent to the principal and get their hair cut.  They walked out heroes.  But upon returning the following day, their faces were solemn.  They were broken little guys.  Their hair was cut, chopped above the ears.  It wasn’t funny anymore.  They lost their sense of empowerment.

High school in the late ’70s was a whole other scene.  Guys were allowed to grow their hair longer, but it couldn’t be too long.  There was the high school classmate who kept his straight hair super long, against the dress code, so at school he wore a woman’s short wig.  He also wore John Lennon glasses.  All summer long he wore his hair in a pony tail sans wig.  During the school year, he was just trying to get along, deal with The Man without getting expelled, whatever it took to earn that high school diploma—which he deserved.

By 1980 at a neighboring high school, there was a senior who wore his hair real long, straight and dark like his complexion.  He was Native American.  The school left him alone.  Perhaps the school board figured the white man had caused enough grief to his people.

Shake it loose and let it fall

And ‘white man’ are the revealing words in this overblown issue and moot point of male hairstyles.  Add ‘modern white man’ or ‘mid-century post-WWII white man,’ and we may get to the root of the hairy chronicles.  Yet that doesn’t explain the neo white man, my own generation of leaders who deem the Houston-area teens’ long dreadlocks as unorthodox and unfit for school. 

The teens’ dreadlocks have a cultural component, not so much political or rebellious statement.  In the case of the two African American teens sporting long locks, their family is from Jamaica.  Give ’em a break.  The issue is not so much about hair styles, fashion and rebellion but control, generational control.  And that’s always been something young people will rebel against.  Am I right, ya’ll?  Hell, yeah!!  Coming back now, the memory of the wild and free spirit of youth.

For years I taught in the public schools with very strict dress codes including oddly enough male hairstyles.  The fads some years back were the Fade and the Faze, still in style today.  Etched into the back of one junior high kid’s shaven head was the Dallas skyline; other boys had artistically shaved emblems supporting the Dallas Cowboys, Stars or Mavericks.  That I suppose would be distracting for kids sitting behind the head, yet everybody got used to it.

But along with specific color polo shirts per grade level worn by both boys and girls, khaki or black slacks only, mandatory belts, black or brown shoes—discipline was still the number one problem.  Let’s not forget about the uproar sagging caused nationwide.  Young people will find ways to disrupt the order and routine that school is supposed to instill.  Besides, at this point in history, guys wear the hairstyles of my father’s generation, long hair seeming old-fashioned if not a nuisance many young males no longer want to deal with or maintain.

When it comes to hairstyles especially on young males, which in the grand scheme of things is just a passing fad, the best advice comes from the ones who inadvertently started the sensation to begin with—The Beatles themselves: Let it be.

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We’ve come a long way, baby

To the young girls out there, the title refers to a feminist ad campaign for smoking a specific cigarette brand aimed at women.  For girls of the Boomer generation, we liked the spirit of the wildly sensational magazine ads: an old heirloom photo depicted a 19th century woman washing clothes on a scrub board or performing one of a dozen menial housewife chores, her long hair pinned up, neck collar tight, corset cinched ’neath a long-sleeved blouse, long skirt, black hose.  Then in another ‘vintage’ photo, the lady is scolded and scorned for sneaking a cigarette break.  In the foreground of the ad was a large color photo of a 1970s’ model: a take-charge woman donning a pant suit or maxi dress, windblown hair, slinky blouse unbuttoned to reveal tan skin, lips glossed and a devil-may-care smile, her long cigarette held loosely between the forefinger and middle.  The ads were alluring to young girls figuring out if they wanted to smoke or not.

But today’s blog is not about the filthy habit and deadly consequences of smoking cigarettes.  For us American women, the year 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which guarantees women the right to vote.  American women had protested for almost a century prior, so engrained was the societal concept that female humans were possessions who change their last names when married, do not work outside the home, are to give birth time and again regardless of health or die trying, do not wear the pants in the family, are to be seen and unheard.  Basically, it was the old man adage that women are subhuman with tiny brains, fickle, dainty, silly beings incapable of taking seriously the election of governing leaders.  Indeed, we—society as well as American women—have progressed a very long way.

And yet … every day we learn of a fellow woman or girl who has been abducted by one or more men, a mother who’s missing, a wife vanished—only to learn later of foul play or rape or both.  Then there is the Me, Too movement, Bill Cosby prison sentence, Harvey Weinstein trial, and the recent realization that Hollywood was and has always been from its inception a Boys Club where the casting couch was the only way for a want-to-be actress talented or not.  Did you know that silent film star Mary Pickford warned America’s young girls to stay away from Hollywood?  She lovingly advised them to stay home with their families rather than risk their lives and reputation to go to Hollywood in search of a movie career.  But throughout the country in communities large and small, the silver screen with larger-than-life humans was too captivating for many a naïve, stubborn and adventurous gal.

The women in white

The women’s suffrage movement of the early 20th century is captured in early moving pictures and black-and-white photographs.  The marching women were called suffragettes and chose to wear white clothing to stand out in the era’s drab photographs.  They looked like angels.  Some states and regions permitted women the vote prior to the Amendment but only if she were a widow and a land owner.  More and more women protested, for decades mind you, and were unrelenting until the ultimate boys’ club, the U.S. Congress, granted the vote to all women.  To be clear, the American right to vote had to be guaranteed nationwide by constitutional amendment.  Isn’t that just incredible and practically unbelievable to all of us alive today?!?  My grandmother would have been 19 the year women were granted the right to vote in any and all government elections.  The vote was about power, and white men made sure everyone was not going to have it or obtain it with ease.  Throughout the 20th century, it took several acts of Congress to guarantee every single American citizen, including women of color, the basic democratic right to vote.     

Ever since 1920, the great American century kept blowing and going as women little by little gained more freedom of choice beyond voting, like a college education, independent housing, banking, careers, even marriage and the role of wife or housewife and eventually the choice of motherhood.  Another anniversary for women to celebrate this year is The Pill, the most popular contraceptive first widely prescribed in 1960.  Shoot, even Loretta Lynn sang its praises.  Then the sex revolution was in full swing right up to the tennis match dubbed Battle of the Sexes at a time when FM radio played every day Helen Reddy’s empowering pop anthem “I Am Woman.”  Women always knew they could be anything they wanted to be … if it just weren’t for men standing in the way.

Now 100 years after the women’s vote, we have more women in Congress than ever in U.S. history and have had a couple of chances to elect the first woman vice president and president. (Pssst.  Hillary Clinton was the first woman elected president by popular vote.)  Still … there’s the daily news, overshadowing all we’ve accomplished since the days of yesteryear, our grim reality, revealing how much work there is to do so ALL males, not just men in general, treat women and girls with respect and as equal human beings.  Young women can’t go jogging alone?  Women can’t leave an abusive husband or boyfriend?  Women have to always carry a weapon and be on the lookout for an attacker?  Women can’t wear anything they want or don’t want to wear?  A woman can’t live by herself?  Women are still asked by male employers if they have children?

So, we women have the right to vote.  That’s been great and cause for immense social progress in the past 100 years.  By now we certainly can work at most any job, including the military, and pursue our individual aspirations.  But even so, women must always remember to never flick the figurative cigarette, appear too carefree, in control and self confident in the presence of some men, not all but some, a few even—and those not always easy to distinguish.  We can live our lives freely but only to a certain extent, more so when young.  When it comes to the two sexes, that’s the way it’s always been and strangely enough to modern minds still is.