Worst of all, hair is needy. My hair has never been longer than a few inches, and yet, I’ve used approximately every product ever made in the entirety of history to attempt to wield power over it, a list that grows every year as they invent new ways to get me to spend my money on chemicals. In the nineties, there was just gel, mousse, or hairspray, and you put it on your frosted tips, and that was the end of it. But now, hell has expanded, and there are pastes, pomades, waxes, putties, glues, clays, creams and crèmes (difference unclear), lotions, oils, exfoliating scalp treatments, grooming serums, and, I’m not fucking around with you on this one, quicksand. And we haven’t even gotten to the endless varieties of conditioners—the function of which I still don’t entirely understand—and shampoos, which you can now apparently use in dry form, a luxury I refuse to believe actually works. And this is just the hair on your head! There are the creams, foams, and tonics you’re supposed to use before you shave, and the moisturizers, oils, and lotions you’re supposed to use after you shave, and of course, you have to get a shaver, or actually two shavers, unless you want to shave the hair around your mouth with the same instrument you use to shave the hair around your testicles. Oh, and also one of those weird-shaped shavers that go up your nostrils and inside your ears, and possibly one of those contraptions you can use to shave the hair on your back. And tweezers for everything in between. And despite all of this, my hair still looks like it belongs on the head of a politician who tries to solicit sex in an airport bathroom. (Oh, and don’t even get me started on the TSA’s crusade against hair products on airplanes. What havoc could I possibly wreak on an airplane with a bottle of ultra-firm holding spray? Answer me that, TSA people! You know who had awful hair? Osama bin Laden. By making me throw away my conditioner, you’re just playing into his master plan. This is what he wanted.)

In fairness, I am a man, and my struggle with hair is but a fraction of the battle that women are expected to wage daily. My haircuts cost less than a McDonald’s value meal, and theoretically, I could just decide to stop caring about it one day, and everybody would assume I was preparing for my breakout role as Guy Who Sniffs Paint Behind a Denny’s. And of course, as a white guy, my hair carries none of the cultural baggage that people of color reckon with every day. Nobody has tried to reach out and touch my hair on the train, and generally speaking, nobody has questioned how often I wash it. All things considered, I have it relatively easy.