The Reverse-Samson Effect: How Cutting My Hair Changed My Life

In case you’ve never picked up the oldest storybook ever written, allow me to take you back to biblical times and share a brief tale about a man named Samson, an Israelite strong enough to tear down a city gate with his bare hands. He falls in love with and marries (God forbid—literally) a pagan woman, but her father, a Philistine (also known today as someone from Palestine), eventually decides to give her to someone else (that sentence induces just as much rage for me to write as it does for you to read), which—long, violent story short—starts a huge feud between Samson and the Philistines, resulting in their attempt to arrest him and his breaking free from their ropes and killing 1,000 of their men with (I swear I’m not making this up) the jawbone of a donkey. So when Samson later falls in love with Delilah, another Philistine woman, the rulers of the Philistines see an opportunity and encourage her to find out the secret to his super-human strength. As it turns out, he reveals his hair is the secret to his strength (apparently hair – razor + God = supernatural strength), and so she shaves his head in his sleep, calls the Philistines, and they’re finally able to overpower and imprison him (oh, and gauge out his eyes). And they all lived happily ever after. The end.

Okay, now that story time is over, fast forward with me all the way through the Postclassical Era, past the Early and Mid Modern periods to today. As a self-aware 26 year-old woman (and 3-year old toddler-feminist) living in today’s culture, I’m constantly becoming more conscious of the expectations our patriarchal society has placed on me. Since puberty I’ve been in a no holds barred, uphill battle with misogyny-induced low self-esteem. I’ve gotten in a few good punches in the last couple of years, but I’ve definitely been KO’d more times than I can count.

As soon as we’re preschool-age, both the media and society in general threaten us with the warning that if we don’t act and look a certain way, we will end up alone and unloved. This message paralyzed me for years with the fear of doing anything that might deem me ‘unattractive.’ My long, voluminous locks became the culmination and embodiment of male expectation.

When I started to talk about cutting them, I was met with disbelief. The essential argument was: Long hair is universally attractive to men, and what sensible woman would ever want to do anything that reduces her capacity to please men? This response made me realize that cutting my hair short could be a public proclamation which solidified my decision and turned the whole idea of chopping off my hair from something personally symbolic into more of a social statement.

So I did it.

And I was shocked not only by how little attachment I felt to my long hair, but by how liberated I instantly felt. That hair was dense with societal expectations, and by cutting it, I severed the hold that those inherent fears about being alone and unloved had over me. I no longer find myself picking apart my flaws or worrying about my weight, but instead focusing on and celebrating my merits, which in turn has made me a stronger, more confident and whole human being. So, there you have it: the Reverse-Samson Effect.

Maybe for you it will be the Pam Anderson Dissolution or the Anti-Sleeping Beauty Equivalency or the Leslie Knope Variable. Making any personal choices that might go against the obligation to be conventionally appealing to the patriarchy is always going to make a statement, and, in the process, give you more autonomy.

Header image credit: Cristiana Gasparotto/Flickr