She asked me why, I'm just a hairy guy,
I'm hairy noon and night, hair that's a fright,
I'm hairy high and low
Don't ask me why, I don't know.- from the song "Hair" in the musical Hair
I would like to attempt to answer the question posed in Hair. You will find little mention in textbooks or symposia volumes of the fact that hair functions as a social garment. Yet that is one of its main functions.
Mice who skitter among the dark moon shadows beneath thick mantles of herbs have a monotonous gray-brown pattern concealing them from mouse-eaters. Their main contact with fellow mice is through dank scents left on stems by the trail, or the droppings sprinkled on the mouse path. There are dozens of species, yet experts have to cut them open or look at teeth or resort to such tactics as counting teats to identify them. At first glance, all of the species seem to be made with the same cookie-cutter; most of the important differences are inside.
This isn’t true among a lot of other animal groups, particularly the ones that depend mainly on visual signals - most birds, primates, hoofed animals of the plains, clear-water fish, and lizards, for example. These species have resplendent colors and flashy patterns, particularly the reptiles and fish who can change their skin into brilliant reds, blues, and yellows in myriads of pattern permutations.
Unlike fish and reptiles, mammals have few bare patches of colored skin. Their social garments are coats of hair. Hair is mainly what they see of their fellows and it is this hair that must carry the signals of love, seniority, youth, aggression, submission, and sex. Hair ornamentation is their trapping of rank - tall crests down the back of the neck, manes that flow from around the head and neck, tassels and tufts, splotches and spots, lines and stripes, colorful tails and faces, contrasting genitals and ears, wooly thighs and hairy chins. Some of these specialized hair areas are erectile to super-normalize the signal or add false contour; other areas are dangling, ever-present symbols, like a goat's tresses or a lieutenant's parade plume. Hair is a warm, many-tangled tentacle in which bacteria can digest the body sweat and produce the salty stink of a social aroma. We hate for hair and love for it.
While still in your mother's uterus you were cloaked in a fine soft hair called lanugo. It is usually shed well before birth - perhaps a vestige of some hairier day in our ancestry. At birth and during the first few years of our lives we are not naked - not hairless. Babies and children have almost as many hairs as adults - or, for that matter, chimpanzees and orangutans. The hair of the young, however, is very soft and almost invisibly fine; anatomists call it velum hair. Velum hair gives bare skin a soft powdered texture, considerably softer looking than bare skin itself. It is smooth to kiss and stroke. It is what we want to cuddle, nuzzle, care for, protect and love. Soft, velum-coated baby skin is our standard of inoffensive child-like beauty. And for that reason, it is the coat many men want women to wear.
The ends of most social hierarchies (there are a few special exceptions) can be characterized by the baby or newborn at the protected low end of the spectrum, and an older male at the high end. Hairiness is associated with most of the more important components of status - sex, age, and size. It is easy to see why, in the locker room, a hairy body is nothing to be ashamed of. In a society that must emphasize cooperation and de-emphasize direct serious competition, excess hair may be too gross for most tastes, because it is a symbol for rough masculinity. If the best key to physical prowess among humans is the amount of body hair, the corollary is the more body hair, the greater the intimidation. And one's success, his evolutionary fitness, in a highly organized society may depend on how well he cooperates, not how much he intimidates.
So here is the same human tissue - hair - used to represent the entire spectrum of status; to invoke love and care for the baby, and yet to give the dominant a more intimidating image. This, I believe, is what underlines our antithetical feelings about hair. As babies, we suckled and fingered our mother's soft and fine hair. As parents, we pat the soft hair with tender affection. As lovers, we run our fingers through scalp hair.
But at the same time there is that other curly hair we cover or remove. Women spend considerable time grooming and cleaning their scalp hair to add to its display, but in most of our culture shave their underarm and leg hair and remove their trace of moustache, if it exists. Men do a similar thing in cropping the beard back to where it is nothing like the full, 20-inch natural organ.
The hair on the head and body have thus taken on a quality above and beyond their original function - to give a false contour or to incubate and disperse an odor. It now possesses visual beauty and vulgarity, but these are just extensions of the original biological signal.
But we don't love all hair: just some. The lady at the ball with her elaborate curls and coiffure decked with jewels and gold netting would be repulsed if the man next to her whipped down his pants to display his body hair. The hair which is referred to in the song "Hair," "hair that’s a fright," doesn't have the qualities of baby hair: it is smelly, coarse and greasy.
Old male stump-tailed macaques, a predominantly ground-dwelling monkey, have an inordinately well developed sebaceous or grease-producing organ. In these monkeys there are striking age and sexual variations in hair character. Old male macaques have dirty, greasy hair. Emanual showed that sebaceous secretions are also more abundant in human males than females at puberty, and remain so throughout life. The difference in greasiness parallels the change in hair texture and amount.
Like old male macaques, our hair would be dirty, dandruff and greasy if we didn't wash so much. Most washing is a social appeasement gesture to rid ourselves of the adult grease and smells; its sanitary value is pretty much a myth. Washing grooms our scalp hair back to its childlike powder fluff, just as shaving creates a pre-puberty effect.
Many sub-cultures throughout the world have adopted the custom of oiling or greasing their hair. Like the wearing of false bears among the ancient Egyptians, this seems to be an increase in status signal by adding artificial exaggerations of threat paraphernalia. The Congo natives use castor bean oil, while New Zealanders favored shark oil. The Polynesians used pia gum from the coconut tree, and Tahitians, coconut oil itself. Egyptians concocted their pomades from six different kinds of animal fat. Grecians also had special hair mixtures. The more blatant male-female distinctions between the post-Gibson Girl era and the pre-bobby-soxer era were marked by the greasily pompadoured man - the early Clark Gable look. Now, however, male styles have shifted toward the feminine. Both sexes wear their scalp hair with "that natural" (natural for a pre-puberty juvenile) "lustrous, squeaky clean sheen."
If indeed our present social grooming of hair came about because of the increasing need for a low social profile in order to function well in an intricate open society, it is not difficult to understand the rebellious upsurge of bizarre and exotic hair, with accompanying dress styles. It is symbolic of an objection to the "organization man" kind of existence, where lives are run and determined by rigid norms beyond our control.
In a closed folk society of simpler, more sedentary days, one knew his position. Full beards, wooly chests, and rancid odors reinforced the lines of authority by giving a rather awesome or even fearsome visage. In present-day society we come in contact with many strangers daily, yet seem to have dragged the old fear of strangers along with us. We continually must appease and be appeased, to reassure that we are "friendly" and to be assured that the other guy is a "friendly" too. The ungroomed, hairy hippie of the 1960's, though symbolizing something that most were sympathetic with, inadvertently used a basic threat device appropriate only in a much different setting. So instead of pacifism, naturalism, and love, to many he symbolized greasy, hairy King Kong in the dark alley - a stylized antisocial stranger dressed to intimidate all folk. It may have been a better idea for the flower children to become more childlike, but that was impossible because the establishment's elaborate grooming rituals had already returned us to a very childlike appearance.
The polarity of values about hair is particularly apparent when we look at the kind of garments we wrap around ourselves. The velum of children and Lolitas is mimicked in soft velvety material and downy furs. Rabbit, lynx, mink, sable, fox and muskrat are traditionally women's furs. Men sometimes use wooly sheepskin, wolf, and bearskin, but seldom don the softer materials and furs except in societies where men are feminized. In aristocracies, for example, gentleness is displayed to separate members from the coarse lower classes. At times in the past men have resorted to powdered wigs of long, fight velum hair to match their silks and velvets. The blouse was tied at the collar to conceal the curly chest hair, and the tie has continued as part of formal dress today.
In its partially groomed state or in special situations such as at the beach, coarse hair can add status under our present value system. A clean, well-trimmed beard is not very offensive; rather it adds some years to one's appearance, carrying with it a subtle increase in stature. Daniel Freedman and his students at the University of Chicago tested undergraduates on their response to beards. Generally, men with well-groomed beards were thought to look older; females responded with comments like "more masculine and mature" and felt more feminine toward them. Freedman also refers to the phenomenon of beards affecting individual distance; people are willing to stand nearer to a beardless man while conversing than to a bearded one.
All this should not surprise us, because threat devices give status, and human beings are to a great extent attracted to one another by status. It's not the only component of social and sexual magnetism, but it is undoubtedly an important one. There are elements of status to which we often are not attracted: status achieved by belligerence or gross flaunting of power, hyper competitiveness - a "poor loser," "lording it over someone," "taking advantage." At least in Western societies, letting one's natural status ornamentation develop to its fullest extent does go beyond the limits tradition (and perhaps the necessity of forced intimacy in elevators) allows.
To contend that our smell and threat hair was selected in evolution because of its sexual magnetism is only half true. Coarse hair was selected for because it gave a clear signal of our status, even though there was a large component of offense involved. Status must have been the main theme of our hair patches, judging by how other threat-sexual lures function in other organisms. Those females who favored the dominant males left more genetic material behind them because of the differential privileges incurred by association with them. At the same time there is the counter selection pressure favoring the behavior of those men and women who are attracted by the markings of the young - because they give their children more intensive care and attention. In a social situation where adults must rely on mutual care and attention, it may be the more baby-like appearance that is genetically most successful.
In the next section I will shift emphasis toward the organs of sexual attraction. The evolutionary crosscurrents between attraction and status are so intertwined that, to a great degree, it is a continuation of the pattern of love and menace we have seen in hair.