Social Defiance Shows Contempt

Dear Miss Manners: In an effort to “teach the world one should appreciate a person for one’s inner self and not one’s worldly appearance,” my 23-year-old son, who is college educated and holds a responsible job in another state, has chosen to neither cut nor comb his hair for more than five years.

Needless to say his appearance has become a point of concern from both an aesthetic and hygienic sense. Other than his hair, he dresses appropriately for the occasion and his clothes are always clean.

My problem arises when he visits me, which he does several times a year. I naturally include him in all social situations that I host, but I do not know how to handle being invited to social situations hosted by others.

The people involved always say, “Bring him along, it will be no problem.” Yet when they see him, they are obviously uncomfortable and often express this in uncomplimentary comments or gestures.

I also do not know how to handle going to a restaurant, concert, play or other public gathering and sensing the discomfort of the people around us. My son senses this and lately has elected not to visit me unless I can assure him he will not be placed in a social situation where he is “treated like a freak.”

I try not to make this an issue, as he is a wonderful person, intelligent and a joy to be with. He certainly has a point when he states “one should be judged by one’s personality and not by one’s physical appearance.” However, I must be honest and agree with others that his appearance is offensive in our culture from a purely aesthetic sense.

Gentle Reader: Miss Manners is probably the only person in the world who wouldn’t automatically agree that people should be judged by their personalities alone and not by their physical appearances.

Or rather, she insists that those aspects of appearance in which there is some play for self-expression are fair game for social judgment. This does not include race, beauty or health, of course, nor monetary value of clothes, but only those other areas in which one has at least some choice.

Your son has chosen to keep his hair in a state that he knows gives people offense, and then assumes moral superiority over them for taking offense.

Even by his own reasoning he is wrong. This decision is very much an expression of his inner self, and others are correctly reading it as such.

He is neither a hairstylist seeking to expand the aesthetic range of acceptable styles, nor a reformer who believes that hair-combing is morally wrong. Nor is he too ill or too poor to do his hair. He is deliberately annoying people by trying to make them deny the obvious fact that how one voluntarily presents oneself in public symbolizes one’s attitude toward that public.

Defying the known standards of society when one is easily able to comply with them demonstrates contempt for these standards and for the people who hold them. This is a hostile act, and as hard as they may try to ignore that, they can’t help knowing how it is meant.

However intelligent your son may otherwise be, he should be learning a lesson here, not teaching one. As his parent, you might try to teach him that deliberately provoking people is - well, provoking. And mean.

Or you might decide that as he is a grown-up, you are going to let life teach him. Until then, however, you may want to protect your friends from his anti-social society.