What comes after????????

[Fred in Skirts]

What comes after?
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he hive.jpg

[Coder]

A thing of nightmares... not sure I'm going to fall asleep tonight!

[crfriend]

A thing of nightmares... not sure I'm going to fall asleep tonight!

I'm not sure about this meme. True enough, most guys don't sport enough hair to have decent "up-dos" done, but in the interest of full equality why should the option be denied?

The modern notion that men Shall Have Shorn Hair is quite recent, dating back to, perhaps, when the last huge conscript armies were put ashore in foreign lands and where shorn hair would have made deserters instantly recognisable.

Even men's hair in Victorian times would be regarded as "long" by so-called "modern standards". Why deny modern men the same option?

[r.m.anderson]

Maybe those powdered WIGS were actually real pompa dos ?

[moonshadow]

As for the meme in question, I myself have never been crazy about the "beehive" hairdo anyway, regardless of gender. I've never been a fan of large and complex hairstyles.

Among women, I've always fancied the simple long hair with trimmed bangs look, and I think it's a look that seems to work on all genders. Simple, easy to do, and can easily be pulled in a ponytail when the hair may get in the way.

Honestly, it's probably a blessing that my hair is getting dreadfully thin, for if I could grow my hair our properly, I'd be tempted to do so, and currently I'd be the only long haired guy at work, and it's difficult being "that guy". I let it get pretty long when I worked for Food City, that is, until I caught a picture of myself viewed in profile, and I absolutely hated what I saw, the thinning up top, combined with the longer hair in the rear and sides made me look very "off" in my opinion. I also realized I don't have a defined neck [from the side] which bugs me, but there's not much I can do about that. It just kinda slopes down off my chin.

Though, there were times, when it would hang just right, and seemed to look nice...

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Then there was the following photo which is one of my favorite "long hair" poses. I just wish I was a little thicker at the top of my head...

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It was just long enough to pull back into a cute little ponytail, and I had just enough thinning bangs left to tease from the front, giving what was (IMO) a cute little femme effect.

Anyway, I accepted the hand of nature and mid-age, and just started the habit of buzzing it every other week or so, and instead started to explore the world of hats. I particularly like the large floppy "women's" hats, combined with big sunglasses.

Back when I was younger (like in my very early 20's) a friend and I attempted to grow our hair very long, however this was a decade or so before current trends with gender equality and what not, and growing hair out as a guy made finding a job out of high school somewhat difficult. Even recently at a Panera Bread, I overheard a district manager tell another manager to "get after (I forgot the name of the kid) to get his hair cut". It seems the company policy at Panera Bread (at least that one) was that males are not allowed to have hair past the neck line.

I remember what it was like 20 years ago, company policies with regards to men's style and grooming were HIGHLY restrictive compared to that of women. We couldn't do ANYTHING, and in many cases, we still cant. It's a damned shame is what it is, and I can't believe people still tolerate it. Skirts are easy because you can always throw on a pair of pants when you need to, such as for employment purposes, but with hair, you can't just take it off when you have to work and put it back on when you get home.

Carl, you are exactly correct, and I'd like to remind the neo-con prudes, who demand that EVERYONE adhere to their narrow 1950-1959 world view, that believe it or not... and I know this may come as a shock to some people, but get ready for it...

... the history of humanity is a bit larger than the ten year period known as the 1950's. Yes, believe it or not, the world continued to spin, and humans did indeed exist prior, and after. It was NOT the pinnacle of human achievement. The 50's were a great time to be alive if you were living in the U.S. and white, Christian, straight, and male.

Let's rewind about five hundred years to Leonardo Da Vinci’s rendition of what the middle eastern world looked like 1500 years prior:

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You know, a couple of those apostles I'd almost mis-gender if I saw them in any other context!

But let's look at the styles of just about 150 years or so ago...

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The 50's are over. Good riddance as far as I'm concerned. The U.S. experimented with own version of uniformity, I get it, we had to look the part of the proper capitalist society, to assert our superiority of the communist bloc. Even though ironically neither side was particularly "free", for the exact same reasons.

It's over, the world has moved on, even we [the U.S. population] have moved on. Now if we could only get those in power to move on.

[moonshadow]

Anyway, in case you're curios as to the shot that killed long hair for me and convinced me that my days of experimenting with hair were over... Mother Nature won....

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This is a frame of a short video a coworker took of me as we were messing around the old warehouse, attempting to smoke a motor that had bad windings.

And it's only gotten thinner since then...

[Sinned]

Yeah, I see what you mean, Moon. Until relatively recently I had long hair and often wore it in a ponytail. But, like you, the solar panel and general thinning in volume made the ponytail look more ridiculous. So I cut it all off and just get my daughter to run the lawn mower over it every few weeks. The inevitable ravages of time. Sigh.

[crfriend]

I'm not letting go of my long hair. Full stop. It's a matter of pride, and one that caused a lot of consternation in my family when my guardians were still alive. So sad, and so needless.

I'd been forced to have a buzz-cut my entire youth, and when I first got the chance rebelled against that insult to my humanity -- and started to grow it out.

I had a couple of setbacks over the years, including one time I cut it to "corporate length" to make a girlfriend happy -- and she immediately saw how miserable I was with the result. Unfortunately, she preferred the shorn look, and that relationship eventually disintegrated. The subsequent one was vastly better for about 20 years, and then that one, too, blew itself apart when her brain rotted out.

Here I am in a very bad photocopy of a Polaroid shot from the early 1980s at my first professional gig leaning on the side of a KI-10:
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I'm squarely in what's known as the "awkward stage" there which happens when it's long enough to start looking long, but still to short to really do anything with it. The original caption read "ADP tech supports KI-10 processor". Note the chain for the pocket-watch. Even then I was starting to develop some sense.

[Dust]

Moon, as far as the 1950's are concerned, I'd say we're on the same page. Not sure if I've posted my "stop fetishizing the 1950's" rant here or not, but I think you covered a lot of it. I'd just add that because the 50's were a time of a lot of early television, people seem to think that those early idealized 50's shows were both accurate, and everything that came prior to them were about the same or never happened because we don't have much video of them. Reminds me of the dad in Calvin and Hobbes saying that the world used to be black and white...

[Dust]

On the awkward stage, I think the longest my hair ever got was nearing the end of it, but that experiment ended before I could find out. My wife wasn't a fan, and my patience was wearing thin with it myself. Plus, as a guy, I never really learned to care for long hair properly, so it trended to just be a greasy mess...