There seems to be a law, at least in America, that when a girl hits sixty years of age she has to cut off all her hair and then coat it in product so that it stands up on her head like porcupine quills.

For a young girl, maybe an athlete, this is a sign of independence, moxie. But for an old gal, it seems a sign of surrender, a ploy to save money on shampoo, a sign that says, here, take my uterus and make me a boy.

This “law” has long puzzled me. I heard somewhere that old women start to lose their hair at some point. It starts to fall out of the skull in large clumps like the way a horse’s hoof churns up clumps of sod on the Santa Anita turf course. I never believed this, rather, the only logical explanation for women abandoning their gender and buzzing their hair in massive numbers has to be some age-related legislation.

To get to the bottom of this conundrum, to determine the real answer as to why old chicks with a decent number of good years left are walking into barber shops and asking for a regular boys haircut, I decided to start asking them.

Ya. I know, awkward … but I decided to do it as a public service, a sociology project out of the kindness of my heart that I can leave to my country.

It didn’t take long – just one embarrassing conversation with a heavy-set woman from south of the border – to find out that the only way I’d get anywhere on this journey, the only way I could get a semi-straight answer, was to ply the women with fake compliments.

“Hey, how’s it going, I really dig your hair, it must have taken tons of courage to cut your hair short.”

“Ya, it was a big change but my husband likes it like this.”

I laughed out loud at that one. When she asked me what was so funny, I said something hilarious from my childhood just flashed into my brain. What her husband really meant by he likes her hair like that is that he can go to bars with her now and other chicks will think she’s his adult son, and that way he can hit on other broads.

Another old hairless gal told me she cut her hair because “She worried about her hair her whole life and now she wanted something easy.” I translate that to mean, “I’m tired of stressing out about looking good, my husband lied, he isn’t rich or famous, so fuck him.”

A super lot of these middle-aged women with crew cuts were/are, well, husky. And so they almost all said something like, “As you get older, you transition, appearance isn’t the most important thing anymore, love stops being skin deep, it isn’t all about sex and sexuality.”

Okay … party on … but does the “transition” mean there’s some sort of turning point where women cut their hair, put on boxers and start shaving?

Here’s the best one. I asked a gal, maybe five or six years older than me, “Sweet hairstyle, have you always worn your hair short?”

She said, “I had really long hair almost my entire life and I felt like I was getting hit on all the time. So when I got divorced, I cut all my hair off and it was great to be able to go out without fending guys off … To be honest, I think most men now think I’m gay.”

That makes sense to me. Almost every human action in life is designed to send a message. When a dude gets his entire body tattooed starting with his head, he’s sending a message, he’s saying … “I’m dangerous and I don’t give a shit about what society thinks because I intend to live a life of crime anyway.”

So the Turn-Sixtyish-Cut-Off-All-Your-Hair law was enacted so that old gals could use it as a sign – a sign that generally says, “I’m done!” … I’m done with pigtails and ponytails and any other kind of hair tail … I’m done with caring about the outward appearances that distinguish man from woman … Why should men be the only ones who get to experience the thrill of shaving their necks?

In the end, I suppose the grandma with a buzz cut and the grandpa with a ponytail are in the same boat – a sad, confused, awkward boat headed for that place The Kinks wrote about where girls will boys and boys will be girls.

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