“Hey Sinéad.”
Why I shaved my head in the ‘90s and stopped shaving my armpits in my 40s
by Sarah Orman
Image for Pexels by Tima Miroshnichenko
“Why don’t you shave your armpits like the other moms?”
Standing across from me at the wedding reception, my 13-year-old son’s face was a combination of pride and fear, as if he’d just pried open a heavy door and wasn’t sure what was about to jump out at him. I was not prepared for his question, so I said the first thing that popped into my mind: “Because not shaving is an easy way to say ‘fuck you’ to the patriarchy.” That, I thought, and it’s one less thing to do in the morning.
My son nodded. He seemed satisfied with my answer, or maybe he was just relieved that I hadn’t reared up and chomped his head off. But as I watched him walk away towards a cluster of girls with long straightened hair, I realized there was a lot more I could have said.
**
It was a hot day in 1993 when I shaved my head for the first time. I was 16 and had recently graduated from the alternative high school in which my desperate parents had enrolled me after I rebelled against more traditional forms of education. In a matter of days, my parents would suggest that if I was not planning on going to college, it would be best for us to go our separate ways. But for the moment, they’d simply given up on trying to control my comings and goings. I’d become nocturnal, spending most nights dancing at clubs in downtown Austin.
On the night before I shaved my head, I met two guys who had just moved to Austin from West Texas. One was tall and lean while the other was short and stocky, but they shared a look: jeans rolled up thick at the cuffs, Doc Martens, button-down shirts, suspenders, and closely shaved heads. I took them for skinheads when I first saw them standing on the sidewalk outside my usual Tuesday night club, but the shorter guy, who turned out to be the roommate in my narrative, was quick to quell that impression with a well-rehearsed lecture. Their uniform, he told me, had to do with British ska and the sharpie movement, which was not, as I might have wondered, a society formed in celebration of fragrant and indelible markers but an acronym standing for Skin(H)eads Against Racial Prejudice.
It wasn’t entirely clear how someone less well-versed in Thatcher-era British subcultures was supposed to tell the good bald white guys from the bad bald white guys. Still, the roommate’s explanation must have made them seem safe enough; at 16, I wasn’t great at identifying red flags or any other form of sexual semaphore. After the club closed, I went home with the taller sharpie.
I woke the next day to bright sunlight piercing the venetian blinds in an unfamiliar apartment. I was tangled in sweaty sheets, my long bangs sticking to my forehead as I peered over at my still-sleeping new friend. It was early in the summer, and as a native Texan I knew my overgrown bob would only get more annoying as the days got hotter, but a professional haircut was not in my near future. I’d recently lost my part-time job as a receptionist at my mother’s favorite salon (scheduling appointments fell well outside of my skill set, which mostly consisted of mixtapes, smoking, and quoting Monty Python). I needed a haircut to suit my new independence, and here were these boys with the tools to make it happen.
The shorter sharpie, owner of the house clippers, agreed to shave my head but cautioned that he had no guard. “Cool,” I said, failing to grasp that I was agreeing to have my head shaved down to the scalp. After the deed was done, the boys gaped at me with goofy smiles, a look I would get used to. “Wow,” they said. I made excuses and locked myself in their tiny bathroom. I hardly recognized the person in the mirror. A memory surfaced: a game I had played at a slumber party with other girls from church when I was younger. Taking turns, each girl had pulled her long hair back and draped a blanket over her nightie so the others could vote on whether she looked more like a boy or a girl. As each girl took her turn, we had all voted.
“Girl.”
“Girl.”
“Girl.”
Then came my turn, and the verdict was unanimous: “Boy!”
This was not the outcome I expected, but I quickly realized the whole game was a setup. I never felt ill at ease in a female body, or if I did, it was never because I would have felt more comfortable walking through life as a boy. The suggestion that I didn’t fit my gender didn’t originate with me but with other girls. They found me too tall, too blunt, and just generally suspicious because I wasn’t into the things that girls were supposed to be into in our milieu, i.e., makeup, choreography, horses, and being sweet.
I set my purse on the sharpies’ dingy sink and started putting on more lipstick, mascara, and eyeliner than I would normally wear. I looked again: slightly better. At least I looked recognizably female. Unfortunately, no makeup could hide my funny ears. And my body seemed bigger. I hadn’t realized how the hair on my head balanced out my breasts and hips. Oh well, I thought. Fuck it. I walked out of the bathroom and into my new life as a bald girl.
Naively, I did not expect shaving my head to be a big deal. I did not know I was about to lose my second summer job answering phones at my dad’s law firm because, as the office manager would explain, clients started asking if I had cancer. I did not intend to launch a flaming arrow into anyone’s highly combustible gender-based worldview. I certainly did not expect to hear “Hey Sinéad” every day for the next two years.
People assumed that I had shaved my head to look like Sinéad O’Connor. I was a huge fan of Sinéad; when I saw her perform in 1990 and she sang only two songs before running off stage, my fascination only increased. When people asked, I insisted that I hadn’t shaved my head to look like Sinéad, but it would be a lie to say that she wasn’t part of the formula. Sinéad provided inspiration, and the discomfort of long hair on a hot day was my motive. All I needed was a big dose of teenage recklessness (check!) and an opportunity.
Older women and young men seemed the most bothered by my unconventional look. Women sometimes gave me the benefit of the doubt. When I visited a friend’s family for a weekend and his grandparents were uncommonly kind to me, he later explained that his grandmother had assumed I had cancer. I got no such courtesy from the guys on Sixth Street who let doors close in my face and went out of their way to bump into me on the sidewalk. “Excuse me, sir,” they would say with a smirk. Some of them creatively added, “Hey, Sinéad.” I hated them at the time, but now I’m grateful, in a sense. Back then I didn’t have a lot of defenses built up against the wrong kind of guy. Those nights on Sixth Street ensured that I would never confuse chivalry with actual kindness.
I got used to whispers behind my back as I stood in lines, stunned expressions when I turned around. My wardrobe at the time was mostly black, loose, and androgynous. I got confused for a man so often that I thought it would be a good idea to put up signs. I bought a sticker of a silhouette in an A-line skirt—the kind that designates a ladies’ restroom—and stuck it on the back of my car. Then I went to a tattoo artist and asked for a Venus symbol on the back of my neck. The trouble with tattoos on the back of your neck is that it’s difficult to monitor the progress of the design. My Venus symbol came out looking more like an Ankh, so I was always having to explain the distinction. I have no doubt that there are some people from Austin in the early ‘90s who still remember me as “Sarah not-an-Ankh.” But I don’t believe my gender was unclear when people paid attention. The dudes who shoulder checked me on the sidewalk knew I wasn’t a member of their sex just like the little girls in Sunday school knew that I was a member of theirs. Both groups simply felt compelled to remind me of the rules.
Despite all the controversy, I loved having a shaved head. As a bald teenage girl, I never had to pay to get into a club again. My fuzzy head was a great way to meet people—an immediate topic of conversation, a magnet for affection. I was a bald girl for about two years, but I never owned my own set of clippers. Finding a guy eager to shave my head was never difficult; at the time, I told myself that there was no need for me to do it myself. Now I question my younger self’s logic. If I had really wanted to stick it to the patriarchy, I could have at least acquired the means of my own rebellion.
**
After two years, I went back to school, got a job, and let my hair grow back, though not in that exact order. The next time I thought about hair as a symbol of defiance, I was 32 years old and a new mother. So many women I knew cut their hair short after they gave birth. “I just don’t have the time to deal with it,” they would say. I was determined to be different. My life was changing in massive ways that I felt powerless to control. My infant son grabbing clumps of my shoulder-length hair in his tiny fists was the least of my problems. I clung to my impractical hair length as a subtle signal, meaningful only to me, that I had not entirely sacrificed my independence.
Then came 2016, the year I turned 40. In November, I watched a qualified woman lose the presidential election to a male reality TV star, and I stopped shaving under my arms. It was not as though I thought my body hair mattered in relation to the fate of our country or the blatant racism and sexism on display in the presidential election. But I needed to do something, or lots of things, and so, in addition to the petitions and the meetings and the volunteering—all the new political activities that I would embrace in the years following the wakeup call of Trump’s election, I also used my body hair to signify dissent. It was a form of rebellion that had worked for me before.
The following spring, I noticed the hair under my arms was getting long and decided to leave it. I was meeting a colleague for coffee that morning, and I knew we’d be sitting outdoors. We are lawyers—not the most progressive profession when it comes to grooming choices. I put on my favorite black-and-white sundress, with a waist that accentuates my curves but a short skirt loose enough to accommodate my stride. In the bathroom mirror, the black curls under my arms were impossible to ignore. I paused for a moment and considered going for the razor. Then I thought, fuck it. And walked out the door.
I didn’t identify a connection at the time. It would take years, and a good therapist, for me to understand that the bald teenage girl I had abandoned in the name of getting my shit together was still inside me, waiting for me to notice. But it’s obvious to me now: the fuck it when I was 16 was the same fuck it when I was 40. I used to associate that fuck it with my younger self’s bad choices, recklessness, and risky behavior. Now that I am 47, with long gray streaks in my shoulder-length hair, I think my ability to say fuck it is the secret to how I survived.
These days, my armpits are hairy year-round. Just like when I was bald, going out in public with hairy underarms can be awkward. It still takes a special amount of courage to display my natural ‘pits at certain events, like the wedding where my son confronted me about my grooming habits. Sometimes, I just wear sleeves. When I do go out in a tank top or a bathing suit, I keep my arms down while I scan the crowd for other non-shaving women. These other women, when I find them, are usually younger than me and wearing hipper clothing. I like the feeling that we have something in common, just like I silently cheer when I walk into my favorite coffee shop in Austin and see a barista with breasts and facial hair.
I shave my legs sometimes and not others. I try to do what pleases me, not to get too mired in the semiotics of my appearance. But the world keeps reminding me that a woman’s grooming choices matter more than they should. When Sinéad O’Connor died last summer, people I hadn’t heard from in years texted me to share their grief. It was a bittersweet reminder of how my teenage self persists in other people’s memories. I felt unworthy of the attention; no one should think of me when they recall the incandescent Sinéad. But I do share this with her: that for two years in Texas in the 1990s, I felt the censure of a society hung up on boy-girl categories of gender because I dared to transgress the norm. When people stared at me with shock, confusion, and disgust in their eyes, I felt a tiny fraction of the opprobrium that greeted Sinéad when she became a public figure. Neither of us would ever be the same.
I don’t want my son to grow up to be like the guys who bumped me on Sixth Street. I don’t want him to become so easily unmoored by any divergence from the playground binary of boy versus girl. When I think about his question now—“Why don’t you shave your armpits like the other moms?”—I add a coda to my original answer: “Fuck you, patriarchy. You’re not getting my son.”
