J. Drew
Barber Shop
“Lean back,” she said, massaging her fingers into his neck.
Her fingertips turned in thick, intentional circles, finding all the spots on his neck that hadn’t felt a touch in months.
After his transition, he learned that it was not appropriate to ask for touch as a man. (Very few people offered.) Before his voice had dropped, and all the other aspects of masculinity appeared, he remembered other’s touch, effortless embraces, a hand on his back or arm for reassurance, compassion or friendship.
Now, several years after testosterone, Dylan was in a new, strangely isolated, and touchless world. He slowly learned something that had never occurred to him in the past. Men weren’t touched.
“What are we doing today?” the stylist had asked when he first walked into the store, hands on her hips, her body forming into a question.
“Zero to mid-fade, finger length on top.” He responded with the words he had learned to start the process. Her hands touched Dylan’s head again to move the clippers. He felt embarrassed as her hands on his head reminded him that he hadn’t been touched in a month, but it was true; he, in fact, hadn’t been. He had wanted masculinity. What he had not known was that it would be so isolating. At the expense of strength and virility came an ocean of separation, where the original quarantine occurred without tactile togetherness.
For so many men, this is one of the few times they are touched. What is lost when men aren’t touched? Would touching men increase their compassion and empathy? Would it mean men understand touch in a healthier way? To use touch for positive, productive moments, touching women (and other men) in generous, thoughtful ways - instead of the violent ones so many women (and men) had come to know.
Clearly, men were not touched for so many reasons – because men were dangerous, because men interpreted touch the wrong ways that then made them more dangerous, because touching a man meant getting close to him and getting close to a man meant getting touched. He remembered what it had been like to touch a man (as a woman); it had been a dangerous, fraught territory. He didn’t have resentment against others for not wanting to touch men. And, still, he longed for touch.
The stylist came up behind him with a mirror, her voice jolting Dylan out of his trance.
“Will this work for ya?” Her hands had left his neck and were back on her hips, asking for an answer.
He peered into the mirror and saw his reflection looking back at him. He grazed the back of his neck with his hand, feeling now his touch there instead of another’s.
“It’s perfect”, he said. She brushed against him to remove the barber’s cloth.
“Great hon, we’ll see ya next month. Don’t get up to too much fun until then.”
He nodded, paid at the register, and rejoined the other men walking the street in their collective isolation.
Santa Barbara, June 2, 2024
J. Drew, who writes under a pen name, is a transgender man from the American Southwest. Contact: https://jdrewbooks.wordpress.com/
