One of my ex’s rather brilliantly said that you can tell what era a person was happiest in by the way they wear their hair. An old guy in a DA, ferinstance, had his time in the sun in the 1950’s. A woman with Mall Hair was probably queen of the 80’s. And of course we’ve all all had haircuts that represented – and perhaps even caused – some hideous times in our lives. Getting-over-him haircuts. Drunk-with-your-hairdresser haircuts. And mine: the pixie.
The pixie haircut is what a boy-short coiff is called when you put it on a little girl and the most famous adult pixie is probably Mia Farrow’s in “Rosemary’s Baby;” (there is reason to believe the pixie is a heretofore unrecognized element of Satanism).
My mother loved short hair, thought it looked smart & chic and also hated dealing with my hair which, when I was a kid , was always looked like something you’d pull out of a clogged drain. One year she conned me into getting a pixie. Naturally this was followed in short order by the news from the eye doctor that I was as blind as Mr. Magoo and would need glasses.
No little girl should ever go through childhood looking like Ernie Douglas.
Between this and the fact that we all crave what we don’t have (my hair is still web-fine) I developed a mad love love Big Sex Hair. My icons of big sexy hair are all pictured here – Raquel Welch, Bobbie Gentry, Charo and Janet Jackson (the Control era) and now that my hair is finally long (after years of growing out – see drunk-with-your-hairdresser haircut) it’s finally coming close to being the Big Sex Hair I’ve always craved. And I love poufing it, teasing it and if I tilt my face up, feeling the tickle of it against the small of my back.
So, why is big hair sexy? Well, duh: because it tends to look a lot like you’ve just been having sex. After you’ve been rolling around in the sheets – alone or not – your hair is huge, unruly, wild, glorious. Big Sex Hair is just a very choreographed version of this chaos, a controlled mayhem – and that’s exactly what good sex really is.
