Girls With Short Hair

I've been trying to do this sort of post for a while, but I haven't. I think, deep down, I have a lot to say about it, and a lot of it is reactionary. I've reacted to angry things being said about women and girls who have pixie cuts. That being said, this is partly going to be reactionary, and partly going to be Wild Card's Five Reasons Why Having Short Hair Is Awesome.

Let's start with the angry part of me. There's this article, which basically argues that 100% of people who identify as women would look much better with long hair, because "long hair's almost universally attractive to men." What the author fails to realize, however, is sometimes women don't want to be attractive to men. Earlier in that article, there's a dialogue box where he's speaking to a woman who had recently gone pixie. She said that she had about 90% fewer men hitting on her; he acted like this proved his point that she was not attractive. Though he included the rest of her sentence in the article, he seemed to brush it aside: she said that the reduced male attention is partially why she did the thing. (OMG! PEOPLE DON'T WANT MALE ATTENTION ALL THE TIME? WHAT A RADICAL CONCEPT!) This author seems to dislike short-haired women specifically because he has had negative experiences with them - the only short-haired woman he dated was into kinks that he found repulsive. (And somehow that applies to all of us? I can verify that is not the case). Apparently, I am also signaling that I am damaged beyond repair as I sit here with my super-short hair, but he doesn't say how. I'd like to know, because I'd like to see if I can fix myself: partly because I don't like being broken, and partly because I'd love the challenge.

On the whole, I don't think many men are as blatantly misogynistic as the writer seems to be (and, I might add, the rest of the website seems to be). There's a definite feminine factor to long hair; personally, that's just not for me. I know my boyfriend would prefer it if I had kept my hair longer, but he also knows that he doesn't have enough power over my body to make me grow it out. As personal preference, I like having short hair. Having had long hair, I felt like it was a big hassle to have hair everywhere, and I never really cared about making my hair look pretty, so it wasn't worth keeping it long.

But here's Wild Card's List of Reasons Short Hair Can Work For Women:

1. The right cut can frame your face really well.
The most striking example I thought of was this photo of Audrey Hepburn from the article I mentioned earlier:

LOOK AT HER JAWLINE. LOOK AT HER CHEEKBONES. SHE HAS A FACE. SHE IS PRETTY BECAUSE OF BONE STRUCTURE. THIS IS REVOLUTIONARY.

Sure, unflattering cuts happen all the time, but that's not exclusive to short hair.

2. If you're into makeup/ earrings/ jewelry/ etc, you can show it off better.
I mean, now that we can see your face, ears, and collarbone, you can better notice all the stuff you choose to do/ not do with those areas.

3.  It's fairly practical.
I'm fairly outdoorsy and I go running regularly. Though it's easy to pull my hair into a ponytail, it's easier to do absolutely nothing. Also, the right cut is versatile, just as long hair can be. You can tie long hair back, yes, but you can't spike long hair up, or anything like that. And it's just as easy to do absolutely nothing and still look fine. Not to mention that I can make a single bottle of shampoo last an entire semester; with anything longer than a pixie cut, a huge bottle could only last me two months or so.

4. SUMMER WEATHER.
Here meaning that, in the humid areas where I live, having hair to my waist was less of me saying "I'M A FEMININE MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENT" and more of me saying "MY HAIR IS SWEATY AND GROSS AND I WANT TO BRAID IT OR DO SOMETHING BUT I CAN'T BECAUSE IT'S STICKING TOGETHER AND I ALREADY SHOWERED TODAY AND THE REST OF ME FEELS FINE BUT MY HAIR IS NASTY." Also, it's an extra layer of heat, which is not fun when the weather approaches 100 degrees Fahrenheit, plus humidity.

5. 'Short' is a broad term that's easy to define personally.
As already stated, I had long hair in middle school - hair to my waist, to be precise. This is partly (well, mostly) because I didn't cut my hair through all of middle school. Then I donated 10 inches to Locks of Love. My hair was 'short,' and it just brushed my collarbone. The following summer, my hair was still 'short,' but it was shorter than my collarbone and layered a bit. Now, my hair is still 'short,' but that means the longest bits are at the top of my head; those bits are only an inch or two long. 'Short' can also mean bobs, or varying lengths of pixie cuts or pageboys or anything from the collarbone to the roots. It all depends on what works.


If a woman were to ask me whether she should cut her hair, I would say yes. Why? It's one of those things that should be tried once in one's life, like running some super-long distance or going somewhere you never though you could go. Short can easily be definable as "long-ish layers" or "longer bob;" it doesn't have to be a pixie cut or a fauxhawk or one of those styles with really long bangs and half the head shaved. And if you don't like it, be patient and grow it out. Learning to deal with not-fun things is an important part of life.