My Dad threw a fish slice at me the first time I dyed my hair. He found the packet in the bin, and lost it then and there. This was perhaps the weirdest incident that happened in all of my teenage years.
I was about 15 at the time I think, 14 possibly, and I've still got questions around it twenty years on. My Dad didn't cook much. Why did he have a fish slice in his hand? Why, having been expressly told several times I was not allowed to dye my hair, would I have done so, and then left the packet in the kitchen bin, where my Dad would be likely to find it? And if he needed to find the packet in order to realise I'd dyed it, why did I even bother dying it at all?
As an act of rebellion, it wasn't the most outrageous - I chose a colour pretty much identical to my own - but it tripped a switch alright. My father I think, was always slightly irrational when it came to my hair. He cried when I came home with it short the first time. Considering the state of the hair-cut-a layered job that made me look like a 70s football coach-this was an appropriate response. But hair was always sacred to him.
By the time I hit my teens, requests to colour it were met with an purple face and a bellowed 'no'. That's why I did it, obviously. Teenage girls exist for the simple expedient of pissing their fathers off. For me it was hair dye. It could just as easily have been a piercing, a knee-high boot, a short skirt, or a tattoo.
The fish slice missed, and the colour washed out eventually, but I remembered that incident last week, in the midst of the latest moral panic, which has, miserably, predictably, given rise to the same old, tired lame-brain arguments over what a woman should and shouldn't wear.
