Hair

Hair - the great frienemy of everyone who has it.  Join the CrimeJuicy gang as we pick apart bad hair days to hair as an inescapable tool of social control, to hair as depicted on 27,000-year-old pictographs to the 13 pounds of weaves seized in New York sourced from internment camps.  Hair trafficking?  Beard tax?  Haircuts under penalty of death?  Come dive deep!

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Transcript

Hair

Carrie Anne: [00:00:00] Welcome to the CrimeJuicy podcast. I'm Carrie Anne. 

Krista: I'm Krista 

Becca: and I'm Becca. 

Carrie Anne: We're going to be talking about hair. 

Becca: Hair as means of establishing social hierarchy in everyday life, hair as social control, the function of hair we're just going to be talking to ton about hair and we hope you like it. 

Krista: We chose this topic just because everybody has it and everybody has an attachment to it.  Then there's, all the cultural appropriation that's going on and it's wrong if your hair is done a certain way, because you aren't part of that culture, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's hair.  It grows back. It's hair.  Do what you want with your hair. If you want to put it in braids, put it in braids.  As long as you're not represented and yourself as somebody from that culture.  I have very, very curly hair. I look like two different people when my hair as straight, as opposed to when my hair is curly. And I have also experienced weird microaggressions from my hair, but not in the way of me being culturally appropriated; of me being told that my hair looks better when it is done a certain way as opposed to another.  And that is part of social control and systemic racism in that sense that I have had issues with my hair and being okay with, I guess we would say the Afrocentric nature of it. It took me a really long time to be okay with my hair being curly.  A really, really long time. And it sucks. And I know that hair is also tied to how some people feel about themselves. Some people will never cut their beards off because they don't feel confident or comfortable enough without it. I know that some men feel less attractive if they lose their hair or they feel, even though people say they hate it, they absolutely love their hair and would be absolutely distraught if it was gone.

Absolutely distract. I don't know how you two feel about it. 

Becca:  I have dreadlocks and I also have naturally curly hair. Curly hair is a different creature and that creature is an alpaca. No matter what you do - I never grew up learning how to actually take care of my curly hair.  It's locked up because it works best. It works best for me in the head and I feel confident with it. But I did have to shave my dreads off in 2012 because my stepdaughter brought home head lice from preschool and I completely felt it. It's a really interesting experience being a bald woman in this culture.  People that had known me for years didn't recognize me and people assume something terrible has happened to your health.

Carrie Anne:  Did they think you had cancer?

Becca:  They did, or that I pulled the Britney Spears or something.   I'm glad my hair has grown back. It's taken nine years. I definitely do feel a lot more confident with longer hair.

Krista:  How do you feel about your hair, Carrie Anne? 

Carrie Anne: I like it longer.  When it's shorter it's easier to take care of, but when it's longer, I feel better. And at my age, I'm supposed to let it be short and I'm going to grow it out again because fuck it.  I don't care about the age anymore. I'm not going to listen to my aunts who cares.

Becca:  And that's, I think that's the big thing that we're bringing up tonight is that society and other people having an opinion about your hair is bullshit. And it's, it's used as a form of social control and institutions across the board and throughout history.

Krista:  Corporate America is the greatest fucking example. That, oh my God. It was so ridiculous. So ridiculous. The amount of times that just backhanded comments about my hair being curly.  It just, you know, oh, it would be, oh, are you sick? Do you not look just because I chose not to take the time to heat my hair to make it more comfortable for you, you assume that something's wrong with me?

Becca:  Oh yeah. I always got more compliments when I straightened my hair. If there's any bit of humidity in the air, it just bounces right back. 

Carrie Anne: Oh, I could straighten my hair and it's going later, you know, an hour later it's already gone.  

Krista:  Depends on how the products that you can use to prep your hair. I've found some pretty good things. And I have like coils, they bounce right back. Like you pull them out, they bounce right back and I found the lazy way to take care of curly hair, because I am all about that.  It's just a matter of trial and error, you know.  And people don't get it. And I always tell people, I either look crackhead chic or done.  There's no in-between so depending on what time you catch me in the day.

Becca:  Crackhead o’clock! track had a clock. 

Krista:  Yep. It sucks because there is a lot of things that are tied to having hair like mine, especially being biracial and just the certain things that people expect from me just by the texture of your hair, which is extremely fucking weird to me. 

Becca:  Yeah. Speaking of fucking weird.  Hair a form of establishing a social hierarchy in everyday life, we talked about here in corporate America, hair in the medical complex. It's cool that dyed here is becoming more acceptable. I remember like that, you know, people were getting kicked out of school for having like blue hair back in the day, you know.

Carrie Anne: For having pink hair and I didn't dye it.  I just sprayed it.

Krista: You can only have natural hair colors?  What fucking natural hair color?

Becca:   Yeah. It's an important means of, you know, kids can go buy hair dye. It's something about their, and it's something about like their appearance that they can control and, you know, during a time of identity formation, it's it's pretty damaging to take that.  I think it's pretty damaging to…

Krista:  That's the least harmful form of expression. It's hair. It grows back. 

Becca:   But because it's intrinsic, it's such potent symbol of social control. So in the 1640s, when the Manchus conquered China one of the first things they did was a force a particular haircut on all the males under penalty of death.   This particular haircut was you shaved the front of your head and then you got to have a long braided ponytail in the back. Penalty of death, got to have this hair.  Also in the 1600s in Russia, Peter the Great issued a beard tax. If you want to have a beard, you gotta, you gotta fucking. And then the Taliban of Afghanistan in the 1990s did the opposite. They required beards. And then in 2014, a foreign - foreign policy article by Jake Scobey-Thal, “The Secret History of Social Control Through Haircuts,” in 2013, the North Korean government and detailed at 28 acceptable haircuts, 10 for men and 18 for women. That's all you get. That's and then you've got gendered haircuts and that's a lot to unpack, I don’t know if we're going to go into unpacking all of that tonight, but these are some very specific, pretty high stakes examples of exerting dominance through enforcing haircuts.  Imagine you got to get this very specific kind of under penalty of death.

Krista:  Well, it's getting, you know, your head shaved before you're electrocuted. I mean, I know they do that for technical reasons, but it's also…

Becca: It's part of the process. 

Carrie Anne:  I won't feel so bad if you kill me now because I'm bald and I feel horrible being bald. So go ahead and pull the, pull the plug on me.

Becca:  It’ll take a fucking long time to grow all this hair back. I don't want to live through that. There's that weird, awkward or nothing looks good. It's two years long and it sucks. 

Carrie Anne:  Can't do anything with it. Go ahead.

Becca:  Yep, going to the chair. Fuck it. 

Krista: And then there's also the religious part of hair too that a lot of people seem to right now. And I'm not, I'm not saying that's a bad thing that people are bringing attention to the cultural meanings of certain hairstyles. There's nothing wrong with that.  I, no matter what, someone's going to have something to say, but like, I just don't feel like it's wrong because if we're going to culturally appropriate hair, then we need to look at tattoos. We need to look at piercings. We need to look at clothing choices. We need to look at everything.

Becca:  We’ve got to look at food.

Krista: Then you know what? Put everybody in their little box and see how well that goes. 

Becca:  Well, and I think like if you're gonna police someone's appearance in call it activism, you're full of shit. 

Krista: Exactly.

Carrie Anne:  Let's talk about the anthropological viewpoints on these things. At one point we all wore feathers in our hair.  It doesn't matter what continent you were on, where you were at one point as a human, you put feathers in your hair. We've got people wearing feathers in their hair for thousands of years on rock art all over the world.  We've got the Venus of Willendorf. If you look at the top of her head, if you look at the braids, it's a map. They think it's a map or it's instructions on how to, to make a specific basket or she's wearing a basket on her head that has specific knot braids.  So they're specific, knot braids that people utilize that one's what, 27,000 years old.  Then we've got stuff that's in Africa that I'm sure it goes way back. We've got runners braids. So you braid it a certain way. All of it, put it down into a water pouch so that when you're running through the rain, it will stream the water into your running pouch and you have free water.

Becca:  Oh, that's so cool. 

Carrie Anne:  Lots of different ways. They used hair as a unit of use.  Krista pointed out when we were talking about doing the show, people would put seeds in their hair.  Put a whole bunch of onion in my hair. The stuff that you're keeping track of.  People kept track of time. When you were the head leader or whatever, you had a whole set of braid on one side of your head, that was just probably for when you guys did this, that, and this and the other, you know, and it, it goes back 10 years.

Krista:  That's what [00:10:00] cornrows are for. They would put the corn seeds in their hair and braid it tightly. And then when they got where they were moving or whatever, they would just shake their hairs out and boom, there you go. So it was useful. And I mean, people still, I mean, I don't know, he can probably hide like joints and stuff in there now. People do.  They hide some, I know at some concerts they will check people's hair if they have braids, just because he can sneak things in, you can, pop a nice little capsule of whatever you're up in there. 

Carrie Anne:  My mom had a bouffant that she kept razorblades in.  So if you grabbed her hair to pull her hair, get cut up.

Krista:  There's that, there are, strategic reasons for here. There's also royal reasons for certain hairstyles too.  The Egyptians had it, even the British had, if you were real, you wore your hair different than the people on the street. You were only awarded that privilege.

Becca:  There’s the wigs. Oh!  The judicial wigs. 

Krista:  There's those too as a, you know, so sense of power with their powder and whatever the hell else they put on their head.   No wonder why people had so much lice back then they're just, oh hey, that looks good. Put it up on there. 

Carrie Anne:  Those weird wigs to hide syphilis marks. 

Krista:  Well, yeah, that was a little ramped.  

Becca:  There’s bartender in Atlanta. His name is Russell Frederick and he uses a hair shaming as punishment for children. He told the Washington Post, “When you go to discipline kids these days, they can't necessarily use physical punishment the way parents did in the past, and your kids end up doing something crazy. Everyone's going to say the problem started at home.” This is how he justified giving his 12-year-old son and male pattern baldness haircut as punishment for acting out in class.  He called it the Benjamin Button haircut. He says he gives these to kids like three times a week. Parents come in three times a week and he gives them a male pattern baldness haircut. He said it worked and his kid’s grades went through…

Krista: But at what cost? 

Becca:  At what. Yeah. It's a way of taking, it takes away their autonomy over their physical body.  It's psychological control. And you know, at the stage of life  when kids are preteens teenagers, this can be super damaging because this is when their identities are developing. And there's also so much social pressure at school. So this is a really high stakes punishment. The kids are going to be living with this for months.

Krista:  Yeah, no, probably that's a trauma. Like I don’t, that that is a full on trauma to have your parent humiliate you that much.  That’s a trauma, that's going to last, that's a childhood trauma that will stick with you forever. Whether your parents tell you, no, you can't do this with your hair. And it's different for everybody.  It, the level of that trauma is different for everybody, but that is a full-on trauma. 

Becca:  Yeah, there was another story that I saw where this woman, she had split custody of her, her teenage daughter with her ex-husband and when she was with her mom, her mom took her to get like highlights for her birthday.  She had this long hair and then at her dad's house, the girl got in trouble and he gave her like such a short haircut and she was like, devastated. That was a way of, I think it through shade on both the kid and the mom, like cutting your daughter's hair. And I don't know, there were, there were a lot, you know, you start researching this like hair shaming is punishment and yeah.  You know, parents are, I can't beat my kid, I’m a give him male pattern baldness.  Dammit!

Krista:  It's just wrong. I think it's wrong. I don't like, I let my kids do whatever they want with their hair. I dyed my four-year-old’s hair purple.  

Becca:  I'm all for freeing the hair. Cause when you're having a good hair day, you were unstoppable.  Carrie, do you want to talk about a bit about the Apache trackers and the psychic abilities of hair?

Carrie Anne:  For Vietnam, also World War I is where we started it. World War II, a little bit was more kind of enhanced. We went to a lot of different Native American reservation. It wasn't just the Apache. It wasn't just the Hotona Odom. It was all of them. They went to the Navajo, all of them. And it turned out that all of the guys that they recruited for tracker duty had long hair. When they tested them before we hired them for the military, they did amazing work.  As soon as we get them in the military, we shaved their heads off and they can't do anything. Their powers are gone. The military is wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Then they decide to do a test. They get the guys that they'd shaved the heads off. They get another group, a pair.  One, they leave their heads alone and one, they shaved their heads and they tested it that way.  And of course the ones that kept their hair did way better than the partner that got his head shaved. They know there's something to it. There was a psychic ability. They could find anything, anybody anywhere at any time. They didn't even have to track them. It was almost like they were doing lucid dreaming and remote viewing before they left. They knew where these people were at or whatever that they were trying to find were. They would just go the right direction. Anytime they were tested, they passed. Just incredible. But if you cut their hair off, they couldn't do it. Same people, the same people. Doesn't matter. They cut the hair off, they couldn't do it. 

Krista:  But what about when their hair grew back? 

Carrie Anne:  I don't know if they got any data on that that I could find, because I did ask that question myself. What happens when they got their hair back? What happened problem was, was the boys that did get recruited had to stay in the military and kept their hair short.The only ones that got to be keep their hair were in that one unit. They were the only ones who were allowed to keep their hair.  So when the other guys got out of the military, I'm sure they just took off and they were we don't want, I don't want to do any more experiment information with you.  Screw you. Bye. Bye. I wouldn't.

Krista:  Yeah, I wouldn't want to be a part of that. I mean, it's, it's a cool thing though, to have found out. 

Becca:  Yeah. Well, you know, shaving your head after breakup, shaving your head after, you know, making a life change. You know, it's said that there's a lot of emotion and memory tied up in here and cutting it and releasing it releases that as well.

Krista:  Yes. Well, there's some religious stuff too. There's a Sam Mullet Jr. Who was, is an Amish man who was exiled from his group for having extremely, extremely Amish views. I don't know…

Becca:  To Amish for us, get out!

Krista:  You know, I guess, you know, kinda took like the fire-brimstone.  Mr. Mullet, oh, it's Mr. Mullet, Sr.  Samuel Mullet, Sr. - him and 16 other people were sentenced for a crime against other Amish community members. They would break in to, they broke into a total of nine victims’ homes and pulled the men out of bed and forcibly shaved their beards. Now for the Amish community, once you get married, you never shave your beard again. And it holds, a hierarchy elder type of situation, and to shave another man's beard is saying that they are an idolar or they did something shameful or something along those lines. And so they, it was a hard thing to like charge anybody with 'cause it, you know, the Amish communities really removed kind of from that.  But they did get sentenced to 15 years in prison for hate crimes, religious hate crimes because of the form of the attack and shame that they performed on these nine victims. 

Becca:  Forcible, forcible haircuts and head shavings is a total power move.

Krista:  It really is. And so yeah, he was saying that they were pretty much not Amish enough. 

Becca:  We're taking you beard.  We’re taking your beard. 

Krista:  And other, other Amish people, other witnesses that did actually come to court, like people did testify against him in court pretty much said that he's running a cult. He was like an Amish cult leader. 

Carrie Anne:  He's got a cult within the Amish? 

Krista:  Yeah. But yeah.

Becca:  He took our beards, we got to stop him.

Krista:  There were other things that were, you know, not necessarily they nicest or greatest.  Just he was, I said, he was extremely extreme and very shame, he was just into shaming people and manipulating the people that chose to follow him into believing that, you know, that was right. You know, he's just not, he doesn't seem like a very nice person by any means.  When everybody always already thinks that the Amish is a weird cult to begin with, let's just add an offshoot of that and they're considered extreme. 

Becca:  Yeah. He's like, you're fucking it up for all of us Amish, Mullet.  Or is that just his name? 

Krista:  Samuel Mullet, Sr.

Becca:  Does he have a mullet or is that just his name? 

Krista:  That's his name.

Becca:  Oh, shit.  Huh. 

Krista:  Maybe I’m pronouncing it wrong. Maybe I'm pronouncing it wrong. You know, they have something. It could be, I think it's Millay.  It’s mullet.

Carrie Anne: Lord have mercy on us. It's a hair topic. He's a hair murderer. His middle name is now Mullet. 

Krista:  That's his last name is his last name. 

Carrie Anne: Okay. Whatever. It's great. I think it's great. Thank you universe. 

Becca:  Thanks to the universe for that. 

Krista:  Yeah. Thank you. 

Becca:  Yeah, she was talking about the Vril bitches? Cause I've got a whole thing, well, I guess it's just a couple paragraphs on the Holocaust and hair.

Carrie Anne: Let's do it. I love the Vril. I don't know why I'm fascinated by these bitches. 

Becca:  They're so interested because it's like, you've got like [00:20:00] Nazi mysticism and it's like, wait, what is going on? 

Carrie Anne: There was these three girls, they had long hair and they had this bell that they were going to, okay. Where are they going to put the doctor in the bell and with their hair, get him to the other planet with him?

Becca:  Was there a crystal involved?  I feel like there was a galactic crystal involved. 

Carrie Anne: There’s a galactic crystal involved.  And after all this happened, the unit is still there.  The round unit, I believe is still there that held the bell-shaped you UFO. Correct? Still in Germany and then, but the girls disappeared, right after it all happened. 

Becca:  What I remember you telling me about this all these years ago when we were drunk, was that basically these like three really attractive women convinced Hitler and the Nazis to build them a spaceship and then they fucking stole it.

Carrie Anne:  Pretty much is what happened.  They're out of here. But the spaceship is still there. We could go check that out if we'd like for another show, but.

Becca:   But the juice has gone and the Vril bitches are gone too. 

Carrie Anne:  They left, they went to another planet or another universe or, you know, they, we don't know if they took the doctor that they convinced with or just left him because, you know, they were killing, you know, it was just a mess.  But you know, they got, they got out there. We never found them again. 

Becca:  They're, we thought it would be a good idea to work with these people, but it just got weird and methy and genocidey, so we left. 

Krista:  They got a little, little odd.

Carrie Anne:  I think that was a good choice.  I mean, they probably didn't realize how bad it was going to be at the, no one realized how bad it was going to be at the beginning. 

Becca:  Yeah, no, gosh, well, speaking of how bad it got: so Holocaust.  Concentration camps prisons, concentration camps using haircutting as a form of identity breaking. Haircutting is one of the very first things that happened to people when they entered the concentration camps along with being split from their families, their possessions being taken, and getting a number tattooed on them.  They lost the things from which they derive their identity. They lost control of their body. If you Google images of Auschwitz hair room, it is alarming like shocking. Currently at the Auschwitz Museum, there is a wall-length photographic mural of nearly two tons of human hair on display. They did not know the fuck does do with all this hair guys. They were cutting off all this hair. In fact, a Jewish man named Ben the Barber. He survived Auschwitz by being the barber. He you know, haircutting was such an essential part of the dehumanization process that like Jews survived by cutting other Jews’ hair. I was looking up, you know, just about this and there's this man, Chris Thomas, he's a University of Virginia graduate.  He answered a question on Quora and the way he describes this is it turns out that it's extremely difficult and I quote, okay, I'm quoting him right now. “It turns out that it's extremely difficult to get even hardened soldiers to execute unarmed civilians. It was a slow, deliberate and methodical process of indoctrination and dehumanization.

The Nazis shaved their victims’ heads to make them look the same. Thin, uniformed, wretched figures into shuffling line into the gas chamber by stripping away their humanity -” It made them easy. “- it made it easier to kill them.” So, you know, haircutting as a form of dehumanization to like an extreme extent, and you see this in all kinds of extreme prison imprisonment situations where haircutting is - haircutting of prisoners as a part of the process.  And also haircut requirements of the guards is also part of the process.  There's a lot of control exerted through hair control in these like high-control situations where people are required to do disgusting things.

Carrie Anne: The Native American schools, the first thing they did was they took their clothes and burnt them, and then they cut their hair off so that they were more malleable and, the administration didn't have to deal with this wild kid or whatever, that had some confidence still in him. And they did that to all of the kids, and they dehumanized them.  It made them easier to molest, made it easier to kill them, them pack them and ship them.

Krista:  Make them white. 

Carrie Anne: They were just trying to make them, you know, they weren't trying to make them white, you guys, you know what they wanted. They want us all to Animal Cross. They don't care what color we are. They just want us all to be slaves. They taught him how to do laundry. They taught them how to sew. They taught them shit that, that that you weren't going to do it that way on the reservation when they went home.  Every skill they taught them was a skill for the machine.  Teaching them, teaching how to fix machines, teaching them out of, they didn't give them, history lessons. 

Becca: Speaking of training. So on July 2nd, 2020 AP reported that US Customs and Border Protection officials in New York seized 13 tons of weaves and other hair projects, products, excuse me, products made with hair suspected to be taken from prisoners at Chinese internment camps in the Xinjiang province.  These internment camps have been called vocational and education training centers.  Graduates either go back home under strict surveillance, or they get sent to labor camps for which they've been vocationally trained. They've also been called you know, other education, oh, thought transformation camps.  Ethnic minorities are held in these camps. They're subject to ideological discipline, forced to denounce their religion and language and physically abused. 13 tons of hair taken from these prisoners was seized. And it was by the Lop County. I god, I'm going to butcher this word: Meixin Hair Product Co. Limited.  The exporter’s based in the Xinjiang region, where the Chinese government has detained over 1 million ethnic Turkic minorities, primarily Uyghurs and Kazak Muslims.  They're officially called thought transformation camps by the Chinese government. The purpose is to prevent quote unquote extremism. One woman interviewed who was released from one of these camps and went back to Kazakstan said that she was interned for having WhatsApp on her phone. So extremism.  The way a Chinese government spokesperson explained it to the BBC in an interview was quote, “Some people, before they commit murder, already show they are capable of it. Should we wait for them to commit a crime or should we prevent it from happening? Taking a person from the edge of crime and returning them to normal society.”  So she's got WhatsApp on her phone.

She's definitely going to kill someone. We got to stop her and take her hair and make it into a weave and send it to New York.   And then I went down the Chinese internment camp rabbit hole.  The BBC has produced so much content on it that the BBC has been banned in China. Y'all should check it out.  Human Rights Watch recently actually had a video that they produced about the reeducation centers and the Xinjiang province pulled from YouTube because they were quote unquote cyber bullying China. Yeah. Yeah. For real.

Carrie Anne:  We got cyber bullied by someone from China saying that our song was their's one time, member?

Becca:  Oh yeah, I member.  We got to get fucking South Park on the line again, because if China wants to bitch about cyber bullying. 

Carrie Anne:  Yeah, bitch about it all you want, you guys have fucked with us personally.

Becca:  They did.  Well, so then I went down that rabbit hole and there's yeah, there's, there's a lot of - the BBC has put a lot of really telling information out there, but one of them they got a, a businessman from outside of China who was a Han Chinese man to go and have a hidden camera and strike up a business deal with the companies that are doing surveillance for the Xinjiang province.  And basically it's like a surveillance laboratory. They use like intense facial recognition software. All the houses have QR codes. People there are terrified cause like everyone's got a family member that's vanished and no one knew how they were being targeted. And then it came out in the documentary that they've got facial recognition software that the AI can tell if you're of a certain ethnicity, and if you look nervous, then you're suspect.  You're like logged as a dangerous person. You know? It's basically racist thought crime. It's a mess. It's a good rabbit hole to go down and on the topic. And then what we get as artifacts of this whole fucked up situation is this 13 tons of hair and actually go circling back around to the Holocaust, one of the biggest artifacts and proof that it happened, you know, this was in like the trials and all of that was like the massive amounts of human hair that were found in Auschwitz, at Bergen-Belsen like the other major camps. Like this is the artifact of what's happened here and it's very telling.

Carrie Anne:  And they got rid of most of the hair.  That was just what was left. 

Becca:  Cause burning hair smells terrible,

Krista:  But not as bad as burning bodies, either way. It's shitty. Like, and even, I don't know, hair is just so interesting. 

Becca:  Oh yeah. I was looking into here in prisons too. There's this really good, this, this man, Andre Lyons. He was a prison barber. He wrote about getting sent to the hole to cut hair and quoting him:  “when you enter the hole, it's a new world. One that smells of death and shit. Men are hollering at the top of their lungs to be let out.  Inmates in the hole getting haircuts only once a month and also on the day before court. So when I'm there, it's a special occasion. As soon as they hear the door to the unit pop open and [00:30:00] see me come in and with my supplies, everyone starts cheering.”

 He also says that this is an opportunity for him to let the men in the hole know what's going on in the world outside. If their favorite sports team won, if they've heard anything about their families, how the other men on their old unit are doing. He can act as a kind of an envoy into this like dark world.

The U S Federal Prisons Bureau says, the warden may not restrict hair length if the inmate keeps it neat and clean.  An inmate may have a shaved head or long hair. However, some states do have length and style rules to prevent concealing contraband. And if you're suspected, you could be asked to cut your hair.  That's also high-control situation, but actually many women's prisons do offer cosmetology as vocational training and some male prisons also offer barbershop vocational training.  And for prisons that have cosmetology programs, you can actually get - inmates can get appointments there instead of prison barbershops, and hair coloring and styling services and that sort of thing. 

Krista:  Yeah. Well, and there's also like new laws too, like about how workplaces can tell you how to do your hair too. It's kind of like with the coloring and the, like I said with me, I have been told, you know, that I should straighten my hair more because it looks more professional than when it's curly, even if it's done and curly.  I'm not saying that I don't ever do my hair cause I do. But yeah, it's, it's weird. And just like feeling shame because you're having a bad hair day.  Having a bad hair day sucks.

Becca: It does. And it's, it's something that's, it's sometimes out of your control when you have a bad hair day. 

Krista:  It’s like the one thing that you feel like you should be able to control has a mind of its own. Anyway.

Becca: And then, you know it, and then someone points it out.

Krista:  Yes. It makes you even more upset.  Me anyways.

Becca: Well, when you know you're having a bad hair day and someone's like, your hair looks terrible. It's like extra fuck you. 

Krista:  And it's like, yeah, I know I'm going back to bed. Yeah. Like that's, that's all, that's all that's, what's happening, stays at that time.

Becca:  And then back to your day, because you're at a Chinese internment camp, then you get fucking cattle prodded if you're on the toilet for more than two minutes. And you're that, that's just a terrible day.  

Krista:  Yeah, no, I'm I got a lumpy head. I couldn't have a bald head. I know that for a fact, my head is not meant to be bald either. No, no shame either. I got lumps and bumps.  And psoriasis and spots on my head too, which sucks. But you know, it is what it is.

Becca:  It is what it is.  And I wanted to - anyone got any other hair as social control things they want to share before…

Carrie Anne:  I like to bring up the polygamists and you know, I always like to bring them up. 

Becca:  Yeah. We love the polygamists.

Carrie Anne:  The girls have to wear, you know, the long skirts with the hiking boots and the long hair. If you don't have the long hair, you're not doing it right. 

Krista: And don't, they like have one type of bun and a half braid that they're allowed to do?

Becca:  That’s less than North Korea! 

Carrie Anne:  I've watched some YouTube videos where they have this poof that they can do. And the girl is polygamist and she's shown everybody how to do it perfect. Yeah, it was sorry. It was hilarious. 

Krista:  Yeah. Well, and there's the, you know, and the misogynistic part and religion, when it comes to hair for women, like only your husband can see it and things like that. 

Carrie Anne:  Oh yeah, and Jewish girls could have to wear a wig, some of them, right Becca? 

Becca:  Orthodox, I believe. Once you're married, only your husband can see your hair and some. You know, I think, I think in some groups, I think it honestly depends on what community you're in, but yeah. There's this really interesting documentary.There was like an 11 minute episode, or it was an 11 minute video, but this woman who was a beauty journalist started looking into the deep dark world of hair trafficking, which was very interesting.  And she was saying until just recently, it was only black women and Orthodox Jewish women that like openly wore extensions and wigs and like other people's hair.  But now it's you know, it's transitioned to everyone does it, but it's really interesting. And I would highly recommend going down the rabbit hole of hair trafficking. It gets dark and fascinating. You learn like what kind of stuff hair gets cut with and fair trade hair. Kinda, I guess, hair-jacking, you know, when you're promised like X amount of money for hair, and then they just underpay you and take it.  Getting ripped off in the industry, how to spot whether your hair has been cut with plastic or animal hair.  It's it's interesting. Of course hair middle of that are the sketchiest fucks, you know?  

Krista:  Yeah, no hair is it's crazy. And a lot of hair besides being, you know, illegally taken also comes from India when the women do their sacrifices and they cut their hair and then that hair gets taken to, you know, places where they brush it and wash it and do all this stuff and turn it into wigs and weaves.  And then it's sold for thousands and thousands of dollars. People will drop a month of rent on hair.

Carrie Anne:  Also, we get it from dead bodies.

Krista:  Dead bodies yeah.

Becca:   Floors of hair salons.  It's true. 

Carrie Anne:  It could. Yeah. So they've got, have you heard the rumor that witches are bald?  Witches are bald? 

Krista:  Well, yeah, it depends on, you know, which story listened to. 

Carrie Anne:  I'm just throwing it out there. You know, old wives, tales, you know, the all witches are bald. 

Becca:   Yeah. The Witches by Roald Dahl, when they’re like, you may remove your hair, you may remove your shoes. Cause they got those block Feet. You may remove your voice.  

Carrie Anne:  That's right. I forgot…

Becca:   And then they like turn that kid into a mouse and it was horrifying. 

Carrie Anne:  Yes.

Krista: I love that movie. The original one, the new one. I mean the new one wasn't bad either. 

Carrie Anne:  I've seen the old one with what's her name? She was awesome. 

Krista: Angelica Houston.  

Carrie Anne:  Yes. Me too. Why did they even remake that? 

Krista: Because there’s no creative juices anywhere.So they just keep, keep remaking things and make them, you know time-appropriate, I guess.

Becca:   I'm not upset about Dune, but I'm upset about everything else.

Krista:  Dune, the original Dune. 

Carrie Anne:  I am so excited about Dune. Let's talk about the hair in that movie. Okay.

Becca:   Fremen hair, that good dry for fremen hair. 

Carrie Anne:  Yeah, we'll do a, do a whole episode on it. I can't wait. I can't wait for Jason Mamoa as Duncan Idaho, he has always been my favorite character in Dune. Let's be honest. Let's be real. 

Becca:   Duncan Idaho was Frank Herbert's favorite character in Dune, he keeps fucking bringing it back. He's like, you know what?  Dune needs another Duncan Idaho. 

Carrie Anne:  Another Duncan Idaho and someone else Duncan’s fucking.  Marbella, fucking everybody, everyone.  

Becca:   And then Duncan Idaho's going to teach everyone else how to fuck.

Krista:  It will be good.  

Carrie Anne:  Not that much, he won't be in it. The first book he's in that, not in that much. It's the later books that he's in more. So we're going to have Jason Mamoa around hopefully for a long time in that film. 

Krista:  Yeah, no, I mean, if it's like Hollywood today, they'll probably milk it for like seven films.

Carrie Anne:  They’ve got six books.  They could do it that are from the original, all the Kevin and Brian ones. And I love those just as much. 

Becca:   You think they’ll give us four hours of worm god?  Four hours of worm god in his card. 

Carrie Anne:  You know, they could give us that if they use Siona lot. I really like her as a character, you know?  I think she's great. She's like 4,000 years into the future though. So it's going to take a minute until we get to her. 

Becca:   And then Duncan Idaho shows back up. 

Carrie Anne:  He probably fucks her too. I think she's actually his descendant. I don't think they can fuck. I can't remember it. It gets to the point where, you know, with the genetic program, you have to check the database to see who you can fuck. 

Becca:   Definitely the worm god knows and the worm god’s like, uh-uh-uh Duncan Idaho. You put your dick away. 

Carrie Anne:  He is technically Harkonen, but so is technically Paul and all of them. They're all fucking Atreides and Harkonens. Fucked everybody. 

Krista:  Fucked everybody on another planet.

Becca:   It's going to be so good.   We covered some you know, some personally awful topics, but not awful, but like, you know, we've all been made fun of for something it's probably your hair at some point.  Yeah, we've all had to police our own appearance to fit in under specific circumstances. Concentration camps. They're always hard to talk about.  But hair as a source of power.

Carrie Anne:  It’s powerful. Yeah. Let's talk about Britney. I mean, I think as her hair has grown back and she's whatever, trying to feel better. I mean, I remember looking at her hair about a year ago on Instagram thinking these people need to fucking do her hair. Okay. Okay. It's still bad, but it's not as bad as it was last year when she got on that plane, it was all gray sticking out and I'm like, who the fuck let her leave the house that way?  She's Britney goddamn Spears. If I was that agent or whatever.  Anyway, I think now someone else is helping her with her hair cause I've been watching it and I think that's why she's been doing the TIHDI videos, you know, with just your titties. Have you seen them?  She's not even wearing a bra no more. She's got little shorts on and she's holding her titties. There's there's three or four videos and everybody's saying she's free Britney now.  Go look at her Instagram. Anyway, I do, I follow her her thing, but I think as her hair's grown back in prettier it's I think she's also starting to feel her power.  I can, I can see it. I've been watching her for about a year now. I can tell. 

Becca:  Well, when she shaved your head, when, she was getting harassed nonstop by everyone in their mailman I think that was a really powerful.  I mean, I think that was really powerful. She was, I can do this.  I'm doing it. 

Carrie Anne:  Maybe they'll leave me alone if I'm ugly. I don't know what she was thinking. I mean, there's a lot that goes into, you know, she's not ugly.

Krista:  She had a perfectly round head.

Carrie Anne:  Her head was fine. It was even better than Sinead O’Connor’s head. [00:40:00] She looked alright as bald, but you know what I mean? Yeah. 

Becca: Or when, I mean, there's always that, get, you know, when you go through life change or have a breakup, does any you know, you get the urge, do something different with your hair, cut your hair, dye your hair, do something to change your hair. You know that I saw this meme going around where it's, I either need to get a piercing or dye my hair to make a sacrifice to the mental health gods.  And that's relatable. Get a piercing, tattoo, or dye my hair.

Carrie Anne:  It helps you reclaim your power. It helps you, you know, like Krista said, it doesn't hurt you to let your kid, you know, experiment with hair dye and kind of find out who they are a little bit. 

Krista: Yeah. Yeah. If they want a Mohawk give a Mohawk, if they want to let, don't not cut their hair, do whatever.  You don't want to brush it?  Okay. But just know that when you do brush it, it's not going to be pleasant. You know.

Becca: You’re just getting to know yourself.

Krista: It really is, it's a huge part of it. It'd be like me and you know, your parents don't let you do anything with your hair when it like, really doesn't matter too much because you're a kid and you bleach it and your hair gives itself a chemical cut.  You know, like, why not do that when you're a kid,you know? Like, but then that comes into the, you know, oh, my kid is an extension of me. You look nice. No, your kid isn't an extension of you. Yeah. You grew it. And yet share some of your DNA with it is its own goddamn person. That is hair. That is, you know, their own face. I understand, you're not wanting your 13 year old to look like a 30 year old woman or, you know, you're, I get that age appropriateness is, is a big thing. But if you want your hair to stand on end and be fucking purple and green and go for it.

Becca: Whatever makes you feel good in your body.

Krista: Buy your own hair products. Cause that shit's expensive.

Becca: And when you're having a good hair day and nothing can stop. Yeah, no, you'd be like a shit day. Tire gets flat. Like, I don't know. 

Krista: When you get that good hair day, hot guys are going to stop and help.

Becca: Because you feel good! 

Krista: Yeah. Do it. 

Becca: Everything goes wrong. Your computer breaks. But my hair looks great.

Krista: Yeah. And if something does go wrong with your hair, we have beautiful wigs, extensions, clip-in extensions, everything you can make yourself. And no, it's not cultural appropriation to wear a wig. If you want to wear a goddamn wig, wear goddamn wig.

Carrie Anne: Amen sister.

Krista: Or you want to, you know, if you want to put some extensions in it, put some extensions in it, accentuate the hair you've already got, I don't care.  But don't tell somebody that they're doing something wrong just because it makes you uncomfortable for what they're doing with their hair.   It's not your head, back the fuck off.

Carrie Anne: No, but for a long time, our institutionalized world demanded that our hair be, especially for black women, which was bullshit, a certain way. And it still is that way in a lot of areas, you still can't have your hair like that. And they'll use a bullshit excuse. It's none of their damn business and it never has quite frankly, but they that's what they determined.  

Becca:  She just did air quotes, listeners.

Krista:  Because we still don't know who we really they are…

Becca:   Sometimes they is the Taliban. Sometimes they is Peter the Great, sometimes they as corporate America, sometimes they, as the medical industrial complex, sometimes they use the military industrial complex or the prison industrial complex.

Carrie Anne: Anybody that’s sucking anybody else’s dick! 

Krista:  Schools, elementary schools, high schools, middle schools.

Becca:   Yeah. It's anywhere that demands conformity, demands I mean, circling back around to like, you must have this haircut under penalty of death. Like what the fuck? 

Carrie Anne: That's that's craziness. I mean, that's when you know we're getting into it. That's when it’s too close folks. 

Becca:   Oh my gosh, can you imagine like, there's no way they're going to enforce it.  Then they do.  The beard tax. Oh my God. Your tax cause they’re gonna make bank from it, they're, you know what we need?  We need beard tax. 

Krista:  You see all these damn beards around here?

Becca:    We got to take a cut. We want to make some money off these beards. 

Krista:  Well, I mean, was he, could he not grow a beard?

Becca:     I think Peter the Great could grow a beard.

Krista:  Maybe he was just jealous because everybody else’ is better than his or something. 

Becca:     He had like the patchy beard and kind of looked like pubes and everyone made fun of him that he was like, screw you guys. 

Krista:  We know a couple of those. 

Carrie Anne:  You know how we would braid our horses here. Make it pretty, that kind of stuff that, that kind of power is also kind of transferred from us to our horse.  That was our mode of transport for a long time. I like how we kind of transferred our braids to them.  It was cute. Cute. 

Krista:  Do you and your hair, if you feel like you want to shave your head, do it. If you want to put braids in your hair, do it. If you want to color it, do it, just, just do it. And if you know, like I said, cultural appropriation, yes, that is a thing, but it is just hair.  If you're going to be worried about your hair being cultural appropriated, then you need to address everything you do in your life, including the food you eat. If that's, if that's that big of an issue for you, take out all of your piercings, don't wear any form of color. Don't, you know, don't eat any other food other than the food that is specific to your ethnicity. If you want to get that extreme and tell someone that they're crazy about, their hair is culturally appropriated, check yourself. 

Becca: And then also, I think it deflects from actually addressing like bigger issues of actual oppression, you know? Cause it's hard to fucking fight giants and it's way more gratifying to go after people who give a fuck what you think about them.  But, you know, revolutionary energy is better spent fighting actual enemies and not fighting your friends. 

Carrie Anne:  Divided we fall and that's how they want to keep us. Okay. 

Becca: Right. And that's the, you know, here's always been about that kind of social control and, if y'all want to keep control and people socially check yourself.

Carrie Anne:  Yeah. We're not in Lord of the flies anymore. We're all grown up. Now. We don't have to keep doing the same mistakes. We can admit the mistakes. Yay. Don’t keep doing it. 

Becca: Yeah. And definitely, look into the hair trafficking rabbit hole. It's very interesting. 

Carrie Anne:  And let us know what you think. We'd like to hear it from you. 

Krista: Yeah. Your hair stories. 

Becca: Yeah. Tell us your hair stories. We want to know, I remember when my sister, one of those little electric toy cars stuck in her hair when we were like in daycare and we were, let's drive this over, over Ariel's head. And we did, and it like got stuck and we had to cut it out.  And then we were oh no, mom's going to kill us. When your kid you're like, maybe if we just like put a hat on it,  mom won't notice Ari’s hair is, like, cut.

Krista: It happens.

Becca:  Then she got a little cute too. She was such, she was so cute. She's still cute. 

Carrie Anne:  That's funny. That's funny. 

Becca:  Or like gum stuck in your hair or like that. Oh my gosh. The sticky hand.

Krista: You can just use cold to get that stuff out. Ooh, good. Old ice cube. I've had done my hair, had gum in my hair and didn't have to cut my hair out. That's good. Nice, a good time.

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