This week’s word is late in coming to you for one very good reason: I’ve been distracted. You know when you get a hair stuck in the back of your throat and you can’t shift it? Well, this was a bit like that only it was a number of hairs and they were on my top lip.
Some are born hairy, some achieve hairiness and some have hairiness thrust upon them. I fall into the latter category. Growing a moustache should feel like the most natural thing in the world because, well, it is, isn’t it? But it isn’t – not for the likes of me. It’s weird. It changes you, makes you think differently, act differently, even dress differently. I tried to avoid mirrors but then it began to encroach over my lip, collect dew and food and demand to be stroked. In short, it began to rule my life.
But then I shouldn’t have been surprised because it is hair, after all, and hair rules the world. Forget religions, governments, arms manufacturers, drug cartels and search engines, it’s hair that’s got us all by the short and curlies. Hair is an ever-growing, ever-changeable asset that defines tribes, genders, beliefs, tastes, occupations, eras…
There is a particular type of moustache, for example, that can be traced not only to a time (early 1980s) but to a place (Liverpool), a profession (football) and even to a club (Liverpool FC). The Liverpool team of the early 80s were easily distinguishable not just because of their annoying habit of winning things but because they all looked the same.
The point was well made by Alan Bleasedale in Boys From the Black Stuff, his 80s TV drama about life in unemployment ravaged Liverpool. There’s a scene in which Yosser ‘Gissa Job’ Hughes finds himself face to face with Liverpool midfield general Graeme Souness, the ultimate football hard man, and unsettles him with the simple statement, “You look like me.”
The one physical feature the two had in common was a moustache, but it was enough. Without the tache they would have looked nothing like one another, but with it they could have been brothers.
Such is the power of hair.
You can say what you like about eyes, teeth, noses, ankles etc, but nothing touches hair when it comes to animal magnetism. You don’t wake up, look in the mirror and moan that you’re having a bad nose day.
Since the invention of clothes, our physical need for hair has diminished, yet we still continue to grow it in abundance. In fact, the animal whose hair grows the longest is, guess what… the human. In second place is the musk ox. The only reason the average musk ox tends to look more shaggy than the average human is that it is not as image-conscious.
Every human alive, without exception, cares about their hair. Even confirmed non-conformists conform to the convention by wearing their hair in a non-conformist style – even if that means doing nothing to it. It’s still a statement. When teenagers were invented in the fifties, the first thing they did was go to the barbers… and every pop culture thereafter followed suit.
In 1967, when America was in uproar over Vietnam, civil rights, drugs, sexual freedom etc, the whole mess was portrayed in a musical, which sparked its own bit of outrage with its profanity, nudity and anti-establishment subject matter. The Lion King it was not. But they didn’t call it War, or Rebellion, or Ankles; they called it Hair. Because if you grew your hair long, you marked yourself out as a rebel, a reactionary and possibly even a subversive. Fifty years on, not a lot has changed.
As The Who sang in 1971, “The beards have all grown longer overnight.” Plus ça change. We continue to stereotype blondes, brunettes and gingers. We tease baldies (even though it’s really a sign of virility) and we still check up and down the street before stepping out of the barbers.
And as I discovered last month, if you grow a tache like Souness, you’re likely to be branded a 70s porn star or a paedophile. Even in an age where abundant facial hair is very much in vogue, the wrong configuration on the top lip is as dangerously unfashionable as flares, wing collars and pubes.
Well, they had to come up sooner or later. Even pubes have not escaped our obsession with styling. It’s ironic really, given that their original purpose is believed to have been for sexual attraction. I know this because I did some tentative research. I didn’t learn much, to be honest, other than that it’s not a subject you want hanging around on your hard drive, especially when you’re sporting a tache like Souness, nor one you want to dwell on while you’re eating the leftovers of last night’s crispy seaweed.
Today, of course, they’re mostly used for stuffing cushions.
We’re not alone in our obsession with the aesthetics of hair. Other mammals are equally aware that’s it not just there to keep them warm. The only way my cats know who’s who is by the markings on their fur. And before you ask, fur and hair are the same thing. It’s all your keratin protein filaments, innit? The same stuff that makes fingernails, claws, porcupine quills and rhino horns.
But it’s our ability to style our hair that sets us above all the other mammals. If gorillas had learnt to shave and dye their hair blonde then there’s every chance one of them might have become President of the United States by now.
Wait a minute…!
