I'm going to start this piece by saying upfront that I'm neither judging YOU nor telling you how to wear your hair. This post is about my experiences with my hair and my life and hypotheses about society that grow out of that.
Hypothesis means it's an unproven theory. If you're a social scientist and reading my blog for some damn reason, feel free to try to get DATA that casts light on whether or not there's anything to these ideas or if I'm just some scarred, neurotic twit who STILL has boatloads of baggage while imagining I got better.
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Looking back on it, I came from a surprisingly enlightened, pro women's lib family. It only dawned on me well into adulthood that some of my friction and frustrations in life were rooted in me expecting to be treated like my opinions mattered and I had a right to speak my mind etc. and that this flew in the face of the expectations of most people in supposedly developed, enlightened places, like The Third World Country of Merika.
I have mostly had short hair for a woman my entire life. I have fond memories of my father towel drying my short hair so I didn't have to sit under a hair dryer and I still enjoy doing that.
As a child, I often had a pixie haircut. I only once had hair halfway down my back and then cut it extremely short after something traumatic happened.
Even though it's common for women to cut their hair following trauma to their sexual identity, I didn't cut it short specifically because I was traumatized. Instead, my mother finally enrolled me in gymnastics as kind of a consolation prize or to help distract me or something.
My mother was party to the traumatic decision that denied me agency over my own dating life but I'm certain she had good intentions and I eventually got over being upset with her. I'm still not entirely sure what to think about the history related to me wanting to take ballet or gymnastics and it not happening before this.
When I was four, I wanted to take ballet and nothing came of it. When I was eleven, I sat in the splits on the floor watching Nadia Commenici and Olga Korbut in the Olympics and wanted to take gymnastics.
Nothing was ever done about me simply wanting this and I really don't know why. Maybe I didn't really make myself clear or something, but my "lifelong" desire to do something like ballet or gymnastics was finally granted and I cut my long hair shortly thereafter because I got tired of stepping on my hair.
My brother who had raped me two years prior didn't like my short haircut and quit speaking to me for three days. I was so thrilled that my rapist was sexually rejecting me, my hair has never again been past shoulder length.
I have "difficult" hair that doesn't play well with heated appliances or chemicals of various sorts, so I quit drying my hair decades ago. It was already policy to rarely or never dry my hair in my mid to late twenties.
I know this because I was living in Kansas and where I lived in Kansas, winters were colder than where I had lived in Germany. My hair was shoulder length and it was a hardship to plan my life around having long, wet hair for several hours a day in winter.
I was able to make it work precisely because I was a homemaker and most days I didn't need to leave the house until a time of my choosing later in the day. It would have been a bigger problem if I had been working a paid job.
Because of my firsthand experiences and my general awareness that most men strongly prefer long hair on a woman, a remark made by an online acquaintance really hit a nerve for me.
He talked with contempt about his experience with dating a woman with very long hair and what a negative experience it has been because everything in her life revolved around dealing with her hair, so either she wouldn't go swimming at all or it could only be preplanned.
Basically, he had no life while dating her. Her hair substantially interfered with them engaging in ACTIVITIES together, something he resented at the time and eventually felt like "I wasn't dating a woman. I was dating a head of hair."
I was thrilled to pieces to hear a man say something like that and have actively looked for MALE role models or examples of MEN expressing a fondness for short hair. It was one reason I read the webcomic Questionable Content for years (which I quit reading when some joke about something horribly germy was simply beyond the pale for me).
By the time I got a corporate job while getting divorced, I had cut my hair quite short for medical reasons. This coincidentally made my hair low maintenance and I had long ago stopped wearing make-up entirely and never wore much makeup to begin with.
At times, it occurred to me that having low maintenance, short hair and wearing no makeup helped me work so much overtime while deathly ill it impressed my workaholic sister. And I desperately needed the money.
I also had my sons take over the lion's share of the women's work, much to the shock of most women at BigCo who learned of this. Only one woman was completely oblivious to this being a big deal, a senior manager who never learned to cook because she was too busy furthering her career to support her kids while she was a single mom for many years.
Somewhere along the way, I wondered if long hair on women and the cultural expectation that women have long hair and wear hairstyles and makeup that are high maintenance and cause them to typically need more time to get ready for work than men is a burden holding back career women but I haven't talked about it much because my experience is that such observations don't make other women THINK or help free them up. Instead, it just gets me hated on.
I have more recently begun to wonder if men preferring long hair in women is, at least in some men, a proxy for preferring subservient women who will put his career first and happily play the role of his personal servant by spending her time doing the women's work instead of pursuing a paid career herself.
In many cultures today, it's not socially acceptable to state baldly that a man wants and expects a subservient woman but it's perfectly socially acceptable to prefer long hair in your lover. I really don't see anyone discussing this angle of how long hair is a burden that may interfere with pursuing a career and that long hair for women may be a cultural expectation that helps hold women back financially and keep them deferential to men by keeping them in a position of needing his paycheck and thus needing his approval and so forth.
Footnote
See also: Hair