All the Muslims love my new haircut

I got a really drastic haircut this weekend which I would describe as “ugly on purpose” or maybe “a haircut a small child might have”. I had oppressively long hair for a while. I started growing it out during the pandemic and it stuck. At some point along the way I started parting it down the middle. It didn’t look good, but I got cool new glasses that same week so I mistakenly determined that it all came together for one cool and cohesive look.

Before I grew my hair out I was getting it regularly permed. I think it looks cool, and the people around me seem to agree. As my hair grows out, a chasm of silky smooth hair widened between my scalp and my fraudulent curls. At first it looks natural, my hair curls up at the neckline like a hockey player’s hair might. Over time, though, the curls hang conspicuous and shameful at the bottom of a linoleum-flat sheet.

The last time I had short, straight hair was in the summer of 2018. I reduced it from a giant unconditioned mop to a tiny undercut at the end of my freshman year of college. I had gained 20 pounds since I first grew out that giant, unconditioned mop, and the haircut revealed to me newly puffed cheeks and a rounded jawline. I hated my hair through that entire summer.

Haircuts are a clear measure of self-confidence. When people feel confident, they get the haircuts they want. When they don’t, they play it safe. There’s no room for risks when you already feel like you’re in the red.

I didn’t get this haircut because I’m confident. I got this haircut because I looked like a John Lennon impersonator moonlighting as a Jeffery Dahmer impersonator and it was negatively impacting my career. I cut my hair short because the conservative parents of my students think I’m a hippie and have trouble trusting me because of it. My physical appearance was a complete mismatch for the position in which I was placed. I work in the only majority Muslim city in the USA and I’ve committed a sitcom pilot’s worth of awkward faux pas. The first time I met a woman in a niqab, a student’s mother, I tried to initiate a handshake. I didn’t learn until my third week that earrings are widely considered haram for men. I learned because a student let me know that his dad was “talking smack about me”. Tattoos, too, are widely considered haram, but this doesn’t seem to have any direct support in the quran or the hadiths. I’m frustrated by this but I don’t want to weigh in on islamic jurisprudence.

Most people have remained politely neutral on my hair, only showing subtle cracks in the facade when they offer suggestions on how I could try styling it instead, or when their voices tilt upwards a bit too much when they say “it looks pretty good!” A few have offered polite and measured critiques, which I respect greatly. The most significant exception to this trend has been all of the Muslim people in my life. Every Muslim coworker, client, and friend I’ve seen has brightened their eyes and expressed—as sincerely as I can perceive—that they love my new haircut. I have been approached from across the street by an acquaintance who wanted to let me know that they liked the haircut. I’ll admit that this reception means a lot to me. I didn’t want to cut my hair short, but I want to be liked by the people in the community where I work. I want to impress them.

Of course, none of this indicates that they love the new style as much as they disliked the old one. Certainly it’s both though? People are more receptive to a new aesthetic decision when it’s replacing an aesthetic decision they hated. Like most choices that are “ugly on purpose,” there is something at the choice’s core that is appealing.

I weigh about the same now as I did when in the summer of 2018. My hair is about as short, too. When I look in the mirror now though, I don’t feel anything impactful. My face has aged visibly since then, though not in any cool ways. The lines under my eyes have deepened and there are never any unexpected red patches or wispy hairs. I still have glisteningly-smooth swatches of skin between each patch of facial hair on my face. My ill-fated pandemic beard made my chin look like Homer Simpson’s head.

“Ugly on purpose” is a fashion gambit. I played this gambit with my ill-fated Homer-Simpson-scalp pandemic beard and ultimately decided that it didn’t have a message worth saying. I played this gambit once with a pair of bulky gray-and-white camo pants that I wore to half of my grad lectures. A cool guy I knew would often say “cool pants,” leading me to believe that my gambit was successful. I bought them because I watched John Carpenter’s Escape from New York and decided that Snake’s camo pants—gray-and-white because he had served a tour in Siberia during the movies in-universe ongoing war with the Soviet Union—were the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life.

The pants sport a tigerstripe pattern identical to that worn by US and ARVN soldiers during the Vietnam War. The unique style was pierced by long uneven dark streaks, crafted locally by hand in hundreds of South Vietnamese workshops. The uniforms streamed back to the US on the bodies thousands of GIs over the course of the war. The design was so distinct from the hunting camo indigenous to US culture that tigerstripe was directly associated with the war that we were losing in for almost decade. When John Carpenter gave Snake tigerstripe pants—modified to fit the white snow and grey mud of a hinted-at Siberian theater of a climaxing Cold War—he helped viewers access the thematic through line of his speculative near-future world: You know how the Vietnam War sucked? I think that it was the USA’s fault. I wore those pants down to rags. They didn’t even fit me well.

This time the gambit isn’t as high-concept. Part of it is that I saw a very cool guy with this type of haircut and thought “I want to be like that.” Another part of it is that I resented being compelled to cut the hair short at all, and thought I’d do it in a way that could express this idea at a glance. Maybe I just wanted to do something drastic.

I think it looks cool, fuck you.