LONGER HAIR IS NOT NECESSARILY HIPPIE

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Since the hair is more easily modified than, say, the nose or the chin, it is only predictable that every now and then man will decide to change it. After all, male vanity has always rivaled and frequently exceeded the female variety. One of the many theories now advanced in explanation of the new display of male plumage rests on the premise that the human peacock is merely showing his true feathers. "Perhaps man is coming into his biological destiny, suppressed in our Puritan milieu," says Psychologist Robert D. Meade of Western Washington State College. "It is the male in all nature, you know, who spreads his gorgeous tail feathers and erects his ruff for the inconspicuous little brown mate." Other speculation holds that the trend represents a concerted male effort, led by youth, to blur the lines distinguishing the two sexes. This area of thought suggests that the day of the caveman, whose present-day counterpart paraded his virility with such readily identifiable characteristics as the Prussian haircut, is in decline; the day of the womanly man who burns his draft card and lets his hair down is beginning to dawn. Flowing locks were once a symbol of virility, as the story of Samson bears witness,* and it is no longer safe to disparage the vigor of the man in shoulder-length curls. He may be a poet. But he may also be a member of the Hell's Angels, a West Coast motorcycling fraternity whose maleness, however overexercised, lies beyond dispute.

And Beards, Too

Whatever the Freudian significance of hair and its style fluctuations, it seems probable that the root causes of the new trend are neither deep nor esoteric. Any understanding of it must begin by making a distinction between the hippie and the respectable non-hippie with longish hair.

The hippie is all juvenile protest. He wears his hair extravagantly long because short hair was once the Establishment's style, and he opposes the Establishment. In a predominantly long-haired society—the African Bushman's, for example—he would doubtless shave his skull. The respectable longhair, on the other hand, is protesting nothing, and, what's more, his hair is only respectably long.