Dear Mr. Smith: What's with guys wearing long hair and pulling it back into a girly half-ponytail - you know, just the top part? Do you approve?
You've noticed this coiffure perhaps more on tough guys than on hipsters - on guys in European soccer jerseys, maybe on construction workers in tank tops. It's an extremely feminine hairstyle that only the most confident attempt.
There is no name for it as yet, as far as I know: Let's call it the half-pone.
It occurs when you have long hair and you pull back just the bangs and the top part into a small ponytail, leaving the sides and back hanging free. Women, you know the style because it's how you have your hair in all your elementary-school yearbook photos.
We might call it the samurai, too: Swordsmen in period-setting Asian martial arts movies wear it to make them look medieval and sensitive. (They might even braid the resulting tail.)
David Beckham was once seen sporting it, cementing its association both with athleticism and, unfortunately, Eurotrash. When I see it on men today, I assume they are good dancers and have a wife back in Croatia and maybe one in Barcelona, too. I also assume they own a guitar and some Gypsy Kings cassettes. These guys are not the least effeminate; they are just peacocks.
And you bet I approve. I approve of all androgyny, actually, if it's flamboyant and confident.
I have always wondered why men are not allowed to do interesting things with their hair any more - they certainly were in the 17th century, when wigs and little ponytails were seen as quintessentially masculine.
(Men were browbeaten into a conformity of sobriety by the rise of democracy is the answer - just one of many unpleasantnesses democracy has to answer for.)
I remember seeing, in the late 1970s, the album covers of the group Japan (you remember: David Sylvian's proto-New-Romantic band) and being impressed by their luxuriant locks, dye jobs and even barrettes; I thought, well, thank God, the conformity is over. But it never happened - even the heavy-metal bands of the eighties refused to tie up their hair in any girly ways. So I see this new development as progress. Why should girls get all the fun?
If Beckham's much-discussed fashion sense of the early 00s showed us anything, it's that a guy can show a little sensuality in his dress and still get the hot chicks. (It was Beckham's daring style that caused the bitter commentator Mark Simpson to coin the derisive term "metrosexual," in a hysterically bitchy article in Salon.)
Furthermore, I happen to know women who have admitted to secretly lusting over construction workers with the half-pone: These guys manifest an attractive combination of strength and sensitivity.
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