ego.istic.org

Back in Liverpool last Christmas I was reminded of how much more prevalent long hair is in Cambridge than other places. I was browsing idly in a shop when a young girl of some five or six years walked past with her father. She gave me a long, examining glance, and then distinctly said to her dad, in incredulous tones, “That man's got long hair.” Said parent shushed her and hurried away, leaving me no time to ask, “Have you never seen a man with long hair before?”

Perhaps it was a good job I didn't, for it was entirely possible she hadn't. Living in Cambridge, it's easy to forget how rare long hair on men is elsewhere. Of my male friends, there are three (excluding me) with hair long enough to put in a ponytail, and another few with shoulder-length hair.

When I decided to grow my hair out, I read a website about the long hair experience by Bill Choisser. Among other advice, it has a section on the social aspects of long hair. (This page does go a bit over the deep end in places, but writing for the internet has that effect on us all.) It addresses many men's fear of being mistaken for a woman. This only happened to me once, while I was bending down to unlock my bike and only my hair was visible. It also deals with being refused jobs because of long hair. This has never happened to me, and my hair is much more businesslike in a neat ponytail than it was when it was short and scruffy. It claims that wearing long hair is always deciding to buck the trend, and no matter how well you keep it and how stylish you look, you will always be in the minority: there is no “magical place” where most men have long hair.

Mr. Choisser evidently had never been to Cambridge. It's still not the case that most men here have long hair, but it is definitely more of a mainstream choice. In the gatherings of mathmo types I frequent, long-haired men easily outnumber long-haired women. (But then, we outnumber women in total as well.) Any employer who had a hair length policy would simply be doing himself out of good employees.

Towards the end, he claims that men grow their hair out for two reasons. The first is for other people: to follow a trend, or (in Cambridge at least) to identify yourself with a social group. The second is for yourself: because you feel that long hair is part of your identity, just like transvestitism or Welshness. He is, of course, making an ‘us and them’ dichotomy, trying to draw the ‘real longhairs’, like the ‘real cyclists’ or ‘real dog-walkers’, out from the Johnny-come-lately Sunday longhairs; I am sorry to have to say that I fit into neither category.

I grew my hair for the same reasons I grew a beard as a second-year undergrad: curiosity and laziness. Actually, that's not quite true. Growing a beard, although I'd been toying with the idea, was triggered when I bought a pair of sunglasses and my friend told me that all I needed to go with them was a beard and a Porsche. I didn't get quite as far as the Porsche, but the beard was somewhat cheaper to obtain, and in any case, easier than shaving. Whereas I eventually got fed up of my family telling me to lose the beard as it made me look like Peter Sutcliffe (which it did somewhat), they had very little to say on the subject of my hair. My grandmother, who had of course seen the persecution of hippies in the sixties, worried that it might make it hard for me to get a job; she still does, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Now that my curiosity is satisfied, long hair is more of a convenience than anything else. It's nice being able to just tie it back when I get up in the morning rather than faff about with combs and/or gel. It means not having to spend time and money on getting it cut or clipped, and I never have a bad hair day. The only real disadvantage is that it takes longer to dry when I have a shower. Also that little girls from remote parts have trouble believing their eyes.