Life

Anton Savage: In the midlands, men’s mullets are many and magnificent

The very existence (and resurgence) of the 1980s haircut proves that young men are programmed to do risky, stupid and downright ugly things while their elders look on in disbelief

The mullet: why do young men choose to shoulder such a burden?

I spent the bank holiday in the midlands and was amazed by what I saw. It was not the beauty of Clonmacnoise that took my breath away, nor the eerie calm of the medieval ghost town at Rindoon, nor the multitude of swallows snatching insects from the sparkling waters of the Shannon.

What stunned me were the mullets. Dozens of them. Nineteen eighties full-on Billy-Ray Cyrus/Patrick Swayze “work in the front – party in the back” mullets. Hoards of young men sporting the haircut that even Michael Bolton abandoned during the Clinton administration.

For decades, the mullet has not been seen in the wild. A few captive examples survived thanks to the heroic efforts of their owners, notably ex-Irish Rugby International Shane Byrne, who went to great lengths and huge personal sacrifice to keep his alive. But mullets like Byrne’s have been the exception that proved the rule; the species was dying out.

In that context, what I saw in the midlands was astonishing. Mullets everywhere. The first one I spotted was atop an otherwise sensible-looking young man, so I made the assumption anyone would make – he had either recently lost a bet or was being ironic. But several minutes of observation revealed him to neither be embarrassed nor attention-seeking. This was clearly a hairstyle he had chosen of his own free will.

Soon he passed another young man sporting a similar bonce (think Andre Agassi in 1992) and they greeted each other with no apparent acknowledgment of their matching hairdos. I had expected it to be like when two DeLoreans end up in the same car park; people stare and the owners approach each other to discuss costs and maintenance. But no, the two young men acted like nothing was unusual or worthy of comment. The abnormal had clearly become normal.

Once I got my eye in, I began to see them everywhere. Some were even worn by men who appeared to be in relationships, which proves that love can truly overcome even the most apparently insurmountable of obstacles.

On its own, the haircut is visually challenging. But when combined with the young male fashion trends of the moment – tracksuit pants that go in at the ankles like jodhpurs and an unwillingness to wear socks – the result is an aesthetic not unlike a sheep that escaped mid-sheering.

It prompts the question why young men would choose to shoulder such a burden. The answer is; that’s their job. It is the job of the adolescent male to make poor choices and take risks the rest of us avoid. I say this as someone who once was an adolescent male who made every poor choice available (including a haircut that was a crew-cut all over with a 7 inch fringe. It looked like my head had curtains).

Science proves that young males of all species are honour bound to do stupid stuff. Young male sea otters will deliberately swim in shark-infested kelp forests for an adrenaline rush. Adults don’t, females don’t. But the young lads think it’s mad craic. Young male Thomson’s gazelles will approach predators and track them, despite knowing the predator they are approaching sees them as lunch.

Most extreme of all is the stickleback fish; when a predator approaches a school of sticklebacks the fish form a dense ball, knowing protection comes from being buried among hundreds of their peers. From within this ball, one or two adolescent males often emerge and swim towards the predator, goading it and dodging it, essentially treating it like a matador treats a bull. The motivation seems to be that if these males survive, they return to the school like Fonzie in Happy Days, all leather jackets, motorcycles and swooning female sticklebacks.

I’m not sure the choice to sport a mullet shares such an immediate cause-and-effect as stickleback predator inspection (I saw no swooning during my period of observation in the midlands), but it is rooted in the same animalistic drive – the young male need to make choices and take risks that cause men of their parents’ generation to shake their heads, mutter “mother of divine” and reflect on the equally stupid stuff they did at that age.

But these behaviours are useful. For the Thomson’s gazelles, the herd is protected because the predator can’t stalk and ambush if it is being monitored, for the sticklebacks, they learn the strength and threat level of the attacker by seeing it chase the young lads.

We don’t yet know how humanity will benefit from the return of the mullet, only time will reveal that. But in the meantime we can just thank these young men for their service. And hope they mostly stay indoors, because dear God it’s a woeful haircut.

ANTON IS . . .

Reading: Influence: the psychology of persuasion by Dr Robert Cialdini. A very enjoyable breakdown of what makes us act the way we do.

Streaming: Conversations with a Killer, the John Wayne Gacy tapes. The story of and interviews with one of humanity’s most awful serial killers.

Following: @_astroErika purely for a recent tweet in which the Canadian astronomer calculated the diameter of the sphere that would result if you put all humanity in a blender, then made a ball out of us: it’s 1km.

@antonsavageshow