“All your girlfriends had long flowing hair,” she said, her tone thick with accusation. “What?” She was being absurd, but knowing that didn’t make her any less so. Pictures she had seen of his ex-girlfriends goaded her, the slender Japanese with straight hair dyed red, the olive-skinned Venezuelan with corkscrew hair that fell to her shoulders, the white girl with waves and waves of russet hair. And now this woman whose looks she didn’t care for, but who had long straight hair . . . She felt small and ugly . . .3 [my italics]
This passage, from Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, hit me like a slug to the chest! The jealousy and inadequacy I have felt upon discovering that all of an ex’s girlfriends had good hair, as well as the pointed rage; the sense of betrayal that a black man who purported to date only black women might not have been entirely honest in not admitting that this only extended to a certain type of black woman.
Do a little test. Think about the high-profile black men in Britain or the US. If they even deign to date black or mixed women in the first place, look at their partner’s hair. You know where I’m going, and if you don’t already, you soon will. Take a look. Tell me what you see.
HE WILL LOVE YOU TOO
In late 2017 I attended an event on black love and dating, during which I conducted a survey among the audience, over 95 percent of whom were female. The questions were about how they felt about their hair. How did they describe their own texture? What was their ideal hair? Did men respond to them differently based on the style they wore? Did they feel represented by the natural-hair community?
Almost ninety people took part in the survey. The vast majority of women described their own hair as “kinky” while using terms like “soft” and “curly” to describe ideal hair. Most also noted that the natural-hair movement was dominated by women with curly hair. There was a prevailing consensus that men preferred hair that was either “straight” or “mixed-race,” “soft” and “curly.” Not one respondent answered that men liked kinky hair as a first choice.
A number of respondents felt that while black men had a preference for “long, straight” or “soft, curly” hair, they hated wigs. This hatred of wigs is interesting, given that African aesthetics celebrates artifice. The association of “naturalness” with beauty is a legacy of Romanticism, the artistic and literary movement that emerged in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. The aversion to wigs shows how European norms have been internalized in many ways that we don’t even realize.
When I asked respondents if they felt men had a preference, one woman described their behavior as “slightly schizophrenic; I think they act like they prefer natural, but actually like the long flowing hair.” This type of sentiment was commonly expressed.
Sometimes, black men want women with straight hair but yet despise weaves.
Straight hair and bouncy curls. They don’t like to see wigs on the stand.
I think they like everything other than wigs, largely because of when it comes off.
I feel like black men prefer more of a mixed-race hair texture.
Yes, they don’t want a woman with “picky” hair.
Yes—but not always expressed.
Yes, long, soft, and “pullable” in bed.
Yes—loose curls, long hair. Of course not all, but a large percentage.
I think although they may not say it out loud, most men do tend to go for women with softer and longer hair.
A tiny minority of answers deviated from this. One respondent felt there was no preference “as long as it’s neat”; another, simply, “I think hair that flatters a woman.” But these were very much in the minority.
One interesting answer was “Yep, certain types of men have a different preference, but it’s all patriarchy.” I interpreted this as a reference to men who prefer natural hair because they think it conforms to ideas about “respectable,” demure women. The association with respectability is interesting, as often, in the past, natural was seen as unkempt and then militant. The idea of political consciousness is still there in the sense that you are perceived as a more genuine or authentic type of woman. This is not without its problems, veering close to the fault lines of the ho–queen hotep binary and the limitations of respectability politics.
The natural-hair hierarchy means it is easier for those with “good” hair to go “natural,” and to then be praised as “natural queens.” Meanwhile, women with the hair texture that is most stigmatized might be more likely to use wigs or weaves, and then face discrimination.
While I have had white guys try to “run” their fingers through my hair, black men tend to know better. Nonetheless, I’ve still heard a number extoll this “fingers through the hair” malarkey as an ideal. Whether it’s the girl with the wind-whipped hair framing her face or the chick wearing nothing but an oversized man’s shirt peering coquettishly through her tousled mane and wordlessly reminding you of last night’s vigorous hair-pulling, these are norms that have been constructed in a society in which black hair is an anomaly. But because we consume the same media, are force-fed the same images, this is our expectation of what beauty, femininity, dating, romance, and sex look like, regardless of what we look like.
When I had relaxed hair, attempts to conform to this standard were scuppered by certain activities, especially when dating. No quick dips into the pool or slipping into the sea with me boo, and, particularly during hot and humid summers, too much (ahem) physical exertion was more likely to produce frizz and reversion than sexy chic! But when my hair texture is one of the most versatile in the world, when the way I style it is only as limited as my imagination and white supremacy, isn’t it ironic that a hair type that can do so little remains the standard against which all others are judged?
What was encouraging in the survey results was that very few who responded believed that any of this was the result of some sort of natural preference. Almost everybody located the origins of these ideas in colonialism and the prevalence of European beauty standards. Yet if we know this, why do these standards prevail? One or two even went further, highlighting the fact that the way men looked at women and made judgments, of whatever nature, was itself patriarchal.
In his revolutionary text Ways of Seeing, the wonderful John Berger reassessed how we evaluate that which we “see,” how we behave correspondingly, and how this goes on to inform social relations. According to Berger, our ways of seeing have been greatly influenced by the tradition of oil painting, the primary visual art form characterizing the age of modernity. The reign of oil painting dates from approximately 1500 to 1900. Its governing laws and cultural norms still provide the framework through which we represent ourselves and how we perceive others. In its most current manifestation, this is the visual logic that underpins image-heavy social media networks such as Instagram, a platform many of the respondents referenced as deeply influential on romantic “preferences.”
One of the primary relationships to emerge out of the tradition of oil painting is that between the spectator and the object on display. Nudes were a prolific genre of oil painting, and it is in the nude depiction of women that we can locate the origin of contemporary female representation, particularly the implication that the female subject is aware of being seen by a spectator. Berger identifies The Judgment of Paris (c. 1528) by Cranach the Elder as having been pivotal in the development of these ideas.