Let me tell you a story I randomly stumbled upon on Reddit, of all places. A tenth grader has been wearing her hair in a ‘fro. This is where I tell you that her hair is 4C. For my non-Black or male readers, 4C hair is the tightest of the coils.
We’ll call this girl Kamsi. (I had this name in mind for her before knowing her identity or ethnicity. All I knew was that she was Black. But the name Kamsi came to mind anyway).
Kamsi loves her hair “so much,” but here’s the kicker: Her boyfriend “hates it.” Kamsi’s boyfriend told her he’s embarrassed when they’re out together, and that her hair looks “crazy” and she needs to get it “done.” When Kamsi told her friends about the situation, they told her to either straighten it or keep it in braids. And that since she loves him, it’s a small sacrifice to make.
She told her boyfriend that’s just how her natural hair is, but he refused to listen. She says that because they’re from different cultures—she’s Nigerian, and he’s half white, half Filipino—it’s hard for him to understand. She also knows in her heart that if he wanted to express himself any which way, she’d readily support him. So, she asks, what should she do?
Kamsi, there is an audacity to patriarchy and the way it seeps into your life, even when you’re so decidedly looking to avoid it. We are all conditioned to cater to men. From the minute a girl is born, she is being prepared for a man. If patriarchy weren’t so audacious, so desperate, what business would a tenth grader have thinking about, much less actually making a sacrifice for, a boy? In what world are these boys and men worthy of such sacrifices?
Christiana Idowu, a twenty-one-year-old student at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta in Nigeria, was abducted and murdered last August by a male friend. Thirty-three-year-old Ugandan Olympian Rebecca Cheptegei died last September after suffering severe burns over most of her body. Her ex-boyfriend had doused her in gasoline and set her on fire outside her own home in northwestern Kenya. Moumita Debnath, a thirty-one-year-old trainee medical doctor, was brutally raped and murdered while at work in a hospital in India last August. Thirty-six-year-old Sonya Massey was shot and killed last July in Illinois by a police officer who responded to Massey’s own 911 call. Augusta Osedion was only twenty-one when her mutilated body was found in southwestern Nigeria in 2023. Her boyfriend confessed on social media and fled the country. Kenyan-born Bahraini runner Damaris Muthee Mutua, twenty-eight, was found dead in 2022 after allegedly being murdered by her Ethiopian boyfriend.
These women were killed by friends, romantic partners, and law enforcement officers. In France, Gisèle Pelicot’s husband drugged her for years and got other men from their community to rape her while she was unconscious. She was raped more than ninety times in the past decade.
All over the world, women’s lives are in perpetual danger of abuse, rape, and murder at the hands of men. The common thread here is men. And yet, when we speak up against the kind of inequality that relegates women to being seen as nothing more than a tool for men’s sexual escapades and power, it’s trivialized and called a “gender war.” This is not a war. This is a massacre, and only one side is dying.
Yet, here is this tenth grader considering making a sacrifice (an infuriating phrase) for a boy at such a young age—because that’s what we are taught. It’s what we are shown. It’s how we are molded. Placate his ego, do what he wants, cater to his excesses, submit to him, make yourself smaller, agree with him, stand by him, listen to him, cook for him, clean up after him, make excuses for him. Because that’s how he stays with you.
The condition of partnership is that you bend to his whims and caprices. When we muster courage and champion the necessity of feminism, men are threatened. Because equality looks like oppression to the oppressor.
The saddest part is that women, for centuries, have fought tirelessly so that women can be free: free to drive, free to vote, free to get an education, free to marry or to not marry, free to make reproductive choices, and free to work.
So, I ask, what kind of boy is worthy of you eradicating yourself within a system in which boys and men get everything anyway? What kind of boy is so worthy of you that you would alter the hair you were born with? What could he possibly have to offer you if he can’t accept you as you are?
Our hair, our big, bold, beautiful, dynamic hair. The same hair we are constantly told is not “good hair.” Because, of course, the further anything is from European beauty standards, the more society seeks to hide it and ridicule it. And 4C hair, subversive as it is, wants nothing to do with the limp standards some white colonizers and enslavers created centuries ago. So it runs as far away from it as fast as it can. But as hard as 4C hair tries to shine, society never lets it.
As I pondered Kamsi’s conundrum, it occurred to me that I couldn’t think of any mainstream television shows where the main character has natural 4C hair. I don’t mean spring curls, wigs, or weaves. I don’t even mean braids. I mean kinky, coily 4C hair, in all its glory. The only exception to this is Insecure’s Issa Dee (played by Issa Rae), whose hair will forever be a beautiful exception. We have a long way to go, as in so many ways, we’re still being told that our hair isn’t “good.”
I’ve had natural hair for most of my life, and even I can’t sit here and say to Kamsi that defying societal standards of beauty is an easy thing to do. There are days when I, too, look at my hair and wonder why combing it is such an arm exercise. There are times when I don’t want to deal with it. There’ve been times when I’ve even thought, ugh, if it weren’t so coarse, so hard, so tough, so thick, so this, so that. There’ve also been times when I wanted nothing to do with it. But, Kamsi, I’m madly in love with my hair. I just had to learn not to take my cues about beauty from people who look nothing like me.
I’ve been a feminist for most of my life, yet I can’t tell Kamsi that defying societal dictates of who a woman should be, especially in proximity to a man, is an easy thing to do. At times, I’ve asked myself if I’m too much, too opinionated, too feminist, or too strong-willed, and what the implications of these traits are for a straight woman in the 2020s. But in the words of X user @Hlubikazii__, “What a waste of a life to spend it auditioning to be chosen by a man.” What a waste.
So what if he doesn’t like your hair? Today it’s your hair, tomorrow it will be your big lips, or your thick thighs, or your too-tiny body, or your too-big body. It will always be something, Kamsi. It’s why you have to find yourself outside of a man, outside of your friends, outside of this crazy world, and instead look within yourself and to your creator for who you are. Then run with that.
Do you like wearing a ‘fro? Wear it. Do you like straight hair? Get a flat iron now, or better yet, get a weave or a wig. Do you like braids? Get braids. Do what you like, Kamsi.
So, to answer your question about what you should do: Dump him, Kamsi. Dump his racist, ignorant little self.