I tossed my bag on the counter, slipped off my heels, and walked toward the kitchen, where my boyfriend was leaning against the counter and staring at me with the kind of blank expression one can only manage when one is truly without words. "You don't like it?" I asked. He attempted to run his fingers through my now-inch-long hair, opened his mouth to say something, decided against it, and then, for the first time in the two years we'd been together, looked at me without a single watt of sexual charge. It was in that moment I realized just how serious he'd been about this, that he'd actually meant it when he said he wasn't attracted to women with short hair.
"Not even Natalie Portman?" I'd ask.
"Not even Natalie Portman," he'd respond.
"You'd really rather I gained 20 pounds?" I'd ask.
"All in your ass," he'd reply.
I probably shouldn't have expected to walk in the door and have him admire the cavalier spirit it took that morning to download a photo of a young, punk-pixied Swedish model posted on TheSartorialist.com and four hours later hand it to a stylist with the instructions: "Take me short. Take me this-girl short."
Liberating my bangs from his lingering hand, I asked him a more pointed question: "Are you less attracted to me now?"
He took a few seconds, looked at me with the same love he had for me the day before when my hair was 10 inches longer, and said, "I feel bad, Johanna, but yeah, I am."
He no doubt felt that if I had the nerve to walk around looking like the Karate Kid, so too did I have the nerve to listen to the truth. And frankly, he was right. Having recently published my first scholarly article, completed my second marathon, and written my fashion blog's 1,000th post, I felt more in control of my future than ever. I lived with a brilliant man who adored me, I had parents I spoke to every day, plus—and I owe this as much to my birth-control-stabilized complexion as I do to the long-distance running—I looked better than ever, too.
That boyfriend and I ultimately parted romantic ways, but we remain good friends. After all, it was his brutal honesty that prepared me for the next two years, when I would experience what it feels like to be consistently passed over by a majority of men simply because they, like him, believed they could never be attracted to a woman with supershort hair. "When I see awoman with short hair, it's off-putting," a male journalist in his late thirties tells me. "She's making the statement that she doesn't have to do what everyone else is doing." A self-righteous attitude, as opposed to my body language or sense of style, was now the first impression I made on most men. As a result—and it was immediate—the nice guy, the skeevy married man, even the construction worker left me alone.
This reaction doesn't surprise Tamás Bereczkei, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Pécs in Hungary, who performed a study in which images of female faces were given varying lengths of hair and then evaluated by men on their attractiveness. "Longer hair had a significant positive effect on the ratings of a woman's attractiveness; shorter styles did not," says Bereczkei, who notes that long hair increases the perception of good genes. "Hair is a track record of your health," Jena Pincott, author of Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes? (Delacorte), affirms. "It takes years to grow long, thick hair."
The good news is, what I lost in perceived attractiveness and good health among most men, I more than made up for in admiration among women and the style set. And frankly, at this point, when I was doing everything I could to transition, professionally, out of the defense industry and into the world of fashion, to have a gay man in a perfectly tailored Thom Browne jacket matter- of-factly say, "Chic hair, girl," meant far more to me than even the most charming come-on. But it wasn't always this way.
From ninth grade to my final semester of graduate school, to air-dry my mid-back hair took an entire afternoon, and to blowdry it meant paddle-brushing to the point of wrist cramps. Like a pendulum set to its slowest pace, my ponytail swung far and wide, and I loved it. I also enjoyed a relatively rejection-free existence when it came to the opposite sex. I was not the prettiest girl in the room, nor was I the smartest, but for whatever reason, during my formative dating years, whenever I showed interest in someone, the momentum always seemed in my favor. Now, I've taken enough statistics courses to know how careless it would be to assume a causal relationship between my hair length and my success with men. Still, it can't be dismissed that every boyfriend, even every male friend with whom I raised the issue of pursuing an asymmetric Selma Blair chop, has responded with heavy, humorless resistance. Over the past decade and a half, I've dated and fallen in love with a strikingly wide variety of men. I've lost my heart to athletes, professors, surfer bio-physicists, the next Bill Clinton, older men, much older men, even an Australian paramilitary officer living in China whose mental faculties, much like his titanium leg, had taken an irreparable hit after "the jump." All had varied backgrounds and different standards of beauty, yet they all shared a high level of intelligence and an impressive mastery of the English language. (Some women go for the body or sense of humor—I've always gone for the hyper- articulate.) But when asked to explain why I shouldn't cut my hair, even if the suggestion was hypothetical, none of these articulators could present me with a sound, convincing argument. What's more, not a single one cupped my face in his hands and said, "Go for it. Cut it off. Long hair, short hair— you're beautiful, no matter what." Instead, all I got were nervous stammers and "I'm just not into it" vagueness.
Someone who has day-to-day familiarity with short-hair prejudice is Patti Stanger, L.A.'s resident cupidess for the wealthy and the host of Bravo's The Millionaire Matchmaker. "Men want what they want in a woman because of what they learned when they were little boys," she says. "Think about it: Who did they grow up wanting to rescue? Cinderella and Rapunzel didn't have edgy bobs."
At 29 years old, writing for ELLE and happily dating a man who likes—but doesn't love—my short hair, I'm in as good a place as I've ever been. Fewer men hit on me, but of those who do, most know what Lanvin is. Does it bother me that men tend to reject all short hair as "less attractive"? A little, but I have to say, I revel in the challenge of diminished male attention. Will I always look back and be able to laugh, as I do now, at the moment when a man I was in love with told me he found me less attractive because of my haircut? To be honest, I really don't know. And I'd rather not think about it.
