Dear readers,

Since this is my final editor’s letter before the Christmas break, what follows represents something of a festive stocking filler. My gift to you is a tale of discrimination, short-back-and-sides, and poor decision making. It’s a story which mixes the perils of razor blades with all the lovely nuances of the patriarchy. Fasten your seat belts and get those sleigh bells jingling ring-ting-tingling too, because this is what happens when you enter a sexist barbershop…

It was my 23rd birthday last week, and I thought what better way to celebrate another year closer to soaking up government resources and wishing for my sovereignty back – otherwise known as ‘getting old’ – than to get a fresh trim from the friendly, local barbershop. Now, for legal reasons, I’m going to keep the location of this shop anonymous. I had never been to this particular barbers before, but I was enticed by its claim to provide ‘bespoke gentlemen’ with modern haircuts. However, it soon became apparent that I had walked into a trap. Within three minutes of sitting down in the chair, the barber had referred to his ex-wife as ‘the missus’, ‘my old bird’, and ‘my last bitch’ at least twenty times. Strike one.

The colourful and admittedly limited vocabulary on display was enough to get my sexist-senses tingling. Apparently taking my silence as a form of approval, the sexist barber man, who we shall call Reece Parker for short – sorry to any Reece Parkers out there reading this, I know not ALL Reece Parkers are sexist – continued to elaborate upon his misogynistic views. Eager to delve further into the mind of this absolutely feral specimen of gammon cutting my hair, I asked him how long he had owned the shop, complimenting him on its location and its beautiful view of the high street. “Yeh mate, you get a cracking view of all the fit birds walking past.” Strike two.

It was at this point that his mate started waxing lyrical about the crossbow he’d just bought off of the dark web for 100 quid, and how he was planning to go deer-hunting with it the next day. Now, obviously it isn’t exactly sexist to shoot a defenceless deer, but it isn’t exactly endearing (if you’ll pardon the pun) either. “Does it come with arrows?”, was, of course, the first question which sprang to the barber’s mouth. I wept a silent tear for Mr. Ch’in of Ch’u – 700 BC inventor of the crossbow, anyone? – as his life’s work was tarnished by a man who, in his mere ability to call them by a non-derogatory name, treated deer with more respect than he did women.

With all this talk of crossbows, the barbershop boys had seemingly forgotten their main topics of conversation: ‘birds’, ‘tits’ and ‘shagging’. But, finally, it was time for THE question; the question I had been dreading; the question which had been on everyone’s lips from the second I walked into that God-forsaken place: “so, what do you think of female barbers?”. Strike. Fucking. Three.

If we’d have been playing a game of ‘Misogyny Bingo ©’, then this would have been a full house. But we weren’t playing bingo; we were playing real life – and I panicked. I had prepared myself for many things on my birthday, but I had not prepared myself for a question as categorically stupid as “what do you think of female barbers?”. Lost for words, and with a Sweeney Todd razor hovering perilously close to my neck, I said nothing, smirked along in shame, hoping my compliance would get me out of the shop sooner.

“I’m not being sexist right but the barber shop is a safe space for lads you know to talk about banging birds. And like I promise I’m not being sexist but if a bird’s working here then we’re gonna have to censor ourselves because then we won’t be able to talk about shagging cos then we’ll just feel uncomfortable. It’s not like girls can’t cut hair it’s just I don’t want them to work in the same shop as me. I’m not being sexist but does that make me a sexist?”.

Yes, it does make you a sexist. Your desire to have a space where you can make openly derogatory comments about women without any repercussions makes you sexist. Your choice to discriminate against giving someone a job because their gender will censor the crap coming out of your mouth, makes you sexist. Your ability to give a damn good hair cut while insulting women does not make you a talented barber, it makes you a multitasking, spiteful and ignorant sexist.

At one point in the hair cut, the barber leant over to the window and banged on it loudly with his scissors as a young girl, quite possibly still in school, waited to cross the road; think of Dudley banging on the snake enclosure in the first Harry Potter movie, only this guy didn’t need Hagrid’s magic to grow himself a pigtail. It’s this same sense of self-entitlement which sees numerous men cat-calling, wolf-whistling and beeping car horns at women when they’re out jogging, or just going about their day-to-day business. Ultimately, these small, casual incidents of harassment add up, until the ‘safe space’ of vulgarity which my barber so desperately wanted inside his shop expands to every street corner of Britain. The scary thing is, since I was possibly the barber’s only customer that day, something tells me that he was saying and doing these things, not out of malice, but out of sheer boredom. It’s a sorry state of existence when you have to rely on harassing women just to get you through the day.

Morale of the story? Don’t change barbers on your birthday. And, if you do, make sure you have more courage than I did to speak out during the conversation rather than after it. As I was leaving the shop, the barber asked me what my job was. I told him that I was a female barber, and that my mother was a deer. I’m not sure he understood the joke.

Merry Christmas you filthy animals,

Robbie Cairns
Editor-in-Chief
editor@thegryphon.co.uk

30/11/18