In 1999, I interviewed John and Catherine Walter, a brother and sister team who designed and marketed something called the True Mirror®, which they accompanied with an elaborate "Hair Part Theory". The True Mirror is a strange but simple contraption composed of two mirrors placed at 90 degrees to each other, so that the image one receives back is a true image of oneself, rather than a reversal of the image.
The purpose of the true mirror is to provide an opportunity to view data about ourselves that we don't regularly have access to by way of a direct, high-fidelity, non-inverted gaze at our own image in real time. The effect is sometimes shocking: masculine looks look suddenly feminine, feminine, masculine. Crazy, sane, sane crazy. Overall, the image you have created for yourself seems suddenly a random, asymmetrical, biological affair. The superego is overthrown. Most interestingly, though, the biggest selling point for this technology revolves around a particular anxiety about male hair: the hair part. It seems that the "acceptability" of certain parts is related to how each eye--and the side of the brain associated with it--lines up with the part during any act of communication. The problem is that, when one looks in the mirror, one sees the reverse of what others see. Accordingly, men who have left parts (according to the Walters, the part most associated with culturally conditioned traditional masculinity) daily see themselves as right parters and vice-versa. The Walter's press release is clear as to the repercussions of this misperception for men: "When the person parts their hair on the side that is not culturally associated with their gender--i.e. men with right parts and women with left parts, it appears to be generally acceptable for women, but it can have deleterious results for men."