An Inquirer article a long time back focused on the so-called “man bun,” which means, essentially, a man who does his hair up in a bun. 

While this hairstyle is fairly common today, it still registers as strange. Not because a man or woman doesn’t have the right to wear their hair anyway they want to wear it, but because of what the average hair bun has come to symbolize for many. 

Let’s consider famous female buns in history. 

There’s the ballerina bun, Emily Dickinson’s schoolmarm bun, the Princess Leia French roll bun, and the messy hair bun with chopstick antennae.

Then there is the notorious — and very ugly — top knot bun, or a bun that sits directly on top of the woman’s head like a corn muffin or an apple. 

On most women, buns have a severe and restrained look because the hair is pulled back very tightly on the head. This “pulled back” look exposes the bun wearer’s face to undue scrutiny. Everything is accented, like big noses or large ears, but especially big noses because noses always look bigger when the face is not framed by free flowing hair. Free flowing hair often acts as an aesthetic distraction or enhancement, and can beautify even the humblest of faces. 

Regarding noses, I’m reminded of what writer/novelist Muriel Spark once wrote. Noses, she said, “Is our tether between spirit and substance.” She quotes Genesis: “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” then adds, “The first thing that happened to Adam happened to his nose. Therefore the nose is an emblem at once of our dusty origin and our divine.” 

Getting back to buns: A bun that sits on the very top of a woman’s head has a buffoonish look, recalling the Judy Collins song, Send in the Clowns, whereas a bun that rests behind the head (like a pony tail) has a more refined and cultivated look. 

The majority of women, it seems, wear buns when they don’t have time to “do” their hair: the bun as the end result of a hair emergency. Sometimes a bun can be a work-related necessity. Ballerinas, for instance, do their hair up in buns to avoid getting hair in their faces during performances. Yet this does not mean that they have to keep the bun look while traveling home on Amtrak or SEPTA.

The advent of the “man bun,” however, is proof positive that western civilization has not only “ended” but is now in that anarchic post apocalyptic phase known as the Theater of the Absurd. 

Why a man would want to put his hair up in a bun is one of those questions that cannot be answered simply. Is it because he wants lots of eye contact in the street? Or does he want to be known as the instigator of a new hair style? 

No, he wants to be noticed. 

Most of the “man buns” I’ve seen have been on male model types who have little to lose by going ugly. In other words, because these men tend to be extremely attractive, they can afford to take gross liberties with their looks.

A balding man with bifocals who struggles with his weight might be advised to stay away from the “man bun,” because, as is the case with women with top knot muffin buns, it will only showcase his physical imperfections. 

“Why sir, are you wearing a little Tower of Babel on the top of your head?” (No answer.) 

So, what kind of man (besides models) wears the “man bun?” Perhaps he’s a sensitive, artistic type, a musician, band promoter, artist or a (music) sound control engineer who wishes that he were a musician…. 

To understand the perversity of the “man bun,” let’s quickly recap the recent history of male hair.

When long hair first came on the scene, public reaction was not good. In the late 60s, high school students were expelled from school for refusing to cut their hair. Newspaper articles showcased debates on the “ethics” and “morality” of long hair on boys and men. 

Long hair was associated with the Beatles and then with radical politics. It was a badge showing sympathy or identification with anti-war demonstrations and the 1960s counterculture. Animosity against long hair was intense; it bordered on outright hatred and the pathological. Suburban home dwellers, truck drivers, World War II vets, policemen, and businessmen of every stripe heaped scorn and ridicule on long hairs. Longhaired hitchhikers were sideswiped off the road; fired from jobs or not hired in the first place; or called fags or chicks. Intolerance ruled the airwaves. 

Then, suddenly, long hair on men stopped being about politics. Yale educated political conservatives with long locks began appearing on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. Those same truck drivers who used to run hippies off the road were now sporting hippie hairstyles themselves. The same was true for those motorcycle gangs who used to castigate “peacenik” hippies. In the meantime, “dangerous” political radical types contented themselves with the retro-beatnik goatee. 

Ira Einhorn, Philadelphia’s Earth Day co-founder and self-styled New Age guru, copied the long hair and beard styles of Abbie Hoffman and poet Allen Ginsberg. Einhorn, of course, was charged with the murder of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, in 1979 and became the target of a massive FBI hunt after he fled to France to escape prosecution. 

Charles Manson certainly denigrated the long hair and beard look with his nefarious deeds. 

“The culture of hair is most obvious in the United States,” writes French journalist Hadrien Laroche in his book, The Last Genet, about the famous playwright and novelist Jean Genet, who had a completely bald head. Laroche quotes Genet on hippie hair: “Any style would do, apparently: long; medium length; with a fringe; straight; black and greasy; flowing; all over the place, brown and frizzy; blonde and curly…This fashion, carried to extremes and even beyond in England, was born in California and grew out of the American army’s reverses in Vietnam…”

One of the most interesting “hair” things that Laroche says in his book is the development of the Afro at that time.

Laroche mention’s Ralph Ellison’s book, Invisible Man, and then elaborates on the slogan of those times, Black is beautiful, stating that “men who had been hidden now became visible…by provocation by hair and outrageous hair styles.” 

The contemporary “man bun” is basically ideology-free although chances are the wearer is a progressive Democrat rather than a Trump supporter. Yet even this is changing. If one were to reduce the “man bun” to politics it would probably be the politics of personal narcissism. The “man bun” is a kind of cosmetic provocation, something that proclaims, “I’m different,” when in fact “man bun” men are more likely to be far more ordinary and conventional than guys walking around with hair styles you don’t notice. 

It may be going out on a limb to suggest that when a person — in this case a man — has nothing internal to rebel against — he’s a super “normal” type totally in step with the status quo — he still may clamor to “rebel” against something and so in chooses to deviate cosmetically. 

The man with the Iroquois haircut who hates the anonymity that working as a bank teller brings; or the man who tattoos his neck or forehead because he never made it as a live sketch artist and wants to be noticed — by any means possible — for something. 

One interesting thing about the “man bun” is that it toys with notions of androgyny, although in a contrived, unattractive French maid kind of way. 

After all, if most women don’t look good in buns, the numbers quadruple and multiply exponentially with men.

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest, “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest” was released in May 2023.