Buy this product here: Yoga Let That Shit Go poster
Home page: Beutee Store
This article originally appeared in the January 1991 issue of Esquire. You can find every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.
From far away she looks like a sprite stuck in a nimbus, a punk angel, a mod collaborator, a waif, a defrocked nun, or maybe a planetary alien. I could go on, but the truth is, Sinéad O’Connor’s head is a sucker trap. You can’t leave it out. It’s too hot a signifier. But let me say this: The first thing you notice when you get close enough to Sinéad O’Connor to study her stubbled scalp is that there are little nicks in it, little white punctuation marks where the hair doesn’t grow. The nicks are distracting and kind of cute, kind of endearing, marring the perfect solemn weirdness of her perfectly shaped skull.
She understands the kind of attention her shaved head gets. She has absolutely no coyness about it. “It’s different when you’re a woman,” she says in her very soft Irish lilt. “Let’s face it, if I had long blond hair and big tits and I wore stilettos, that’s what they’d be thinking about, they wouldn’t be thinking about what I said. They wouldn’t particularly give a shit, and I wouldn’t be saying what I was saying in the first place.”
O’Connor, photographed in 1989
Michel LinssenGetty Images
Yoga Let That Shit Go poster
The last time I saw her, when I felt I knew her well enough, I asked her if people often wanted to feel her head.
“Oh, all the time,” she said. “Constantly.”
“It’s tempting,” I said.
“Want to?” she asked. I put my fingers on her skull, which was frightening, partly because it was warm. One forgets that hair is insulation, literally protective. But, also, I was surprised by its texture: I had thought it was going to be soft, like a newborn’s. It was rough, even though she had just shaved it that morning.
“My goodness,” I said.
“It’s good if a man has stubble and you’re rubbing against the stubble; it’s the nicest thing in the world,” she said.
“The celebrity in me has an awful lot to be paranoid about.”
I suggested to her that she should see a current movie in which the lead actor displays a magnificent growth of stubble. Privately, I wondered if she mightn’t like to go out on a date with him, but didn’t suggest it. It would have seemed too stupidly maternal, a feeling I was doing my best to suppress or at least hide. And besides, she’d already told me she prefers black men. “Oh yeah, always. Since I was a kid. They just seem to be much more, I don’t know . . . I feel I have much more in common with black people culturally, maybe because I’m Irish and it’s a similar culture. But I appreciate black music far more than white music, so I always end up fancying Jimmy Reed or people like that instead of Phil Collins or something. I don’t know, they’re nicer, although that’s not necessarily the case all the time, I must stress. . . .” Later, she specified: “I don’t just like black men, I like dark-skinned men and men with dark hair and with dark features.” It was only recently, she told me, that she had begun to enjoy sex. She leaned over the tape recorder: “So if anyone is listening. . . .” Yoga Let That Shit Go poster
To tell you the truth, our conversations about men were our lighter moments, so I enjoyed them. “My persona intimidates them.” We’d soon agreed that this article would be an excellent opportunity for what she called an “advert.” The requirements are: over thirty, drug-free, with stubble.
Esquire, January 1991, original spread featuring O’Connor.
Esquire
The last time I saw her, I asked, “Is there anything about this hair question that I haven’t asked you?”
“I did what I did because I didn’t want to look like a woman,” said Sinéad with a straight face. Yoga Let That Shit Go poster
“Do people ask you that?”
Yoga Let That Shit Go poster
“Oh, yeah! Yeah! They don’t ask me, they tell me. Or they say it about me on TV. That I shave my head because I don’t want to be a woman and because I’m a fascist!”
“Doesn’t anyone suggest that it’s sexy?”
“No, they don’t,” said Sinéad. “I don’t know, most of the time you get negative comments. Very, very rarely do you get a positive comment from a male about your hair.”
“Of course, it’s so hard to get positive comments from males about anything,” I said.
“. . . That doesn’t have anything to do with their penises or their wallets,” she concluded.
She does it herself once a week, with a barber’s automatic clippers. It takes her about ten minutes in front of the mirror.
THE MIRROR
“I talk to the mirror like, you know, I imagine what I’m going to say to the record company when I go in there and I stand going . . . [she pounds on her chest]. That kind of thing, yeah. And I imagine the sort of arguments I’m going to have with people, you know. And I never end up saying to them any of the things I say to myself, which is just as well. I mean, I probably would if I didn’t say them to myself, you know. I’m a real dance-in-front-of-the-mirror kind of person. I also have fantasies of people I would have really affectionate or tender relationships with, but that’s different. When we meet, then I don’t have fantasies, no. Because I have too much to be frightened of. The girl in me does. But the celebrity in me has an awful lot to be paranoid about.”
O’Connor performing on SNL, September 29, 1990.
Visit our Social Network: Beutee Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and Our blog Beutee over-blog, beuteenet blogspot
