So there was another one of those articles going around. I’m not going to link to it. It’s bullshit clickbait misogynistic trolling and you can find it via my tumblr if you desperately want to. But come on, you know how those articles go:
Women do a thing I personally do not find attractive! I am shocked that they do not care deeply about my opinions on how they look. In fact, the only possible reason for their not caring about this important topic is that they’re mentally unstable and unfeminine! I will now back it up with a series of bullshit anecdotes and call it a day! Knock it off, women, or no man will ever want to fuck you–and by no man I mean me, only I totally would if you’d just acknowledge I exist please please oh pretty please oh god I’m so alone there’s a literal layer of rust on my penis help me I’m going to die and get eaten by my pet reptiles one of these days and no one will even notice I’m gone–and the very idea of that should shake you to the very foundation of your being.
Yeah, yeah, whatever. It’s good for a game of name that logical fallacy, but that’s basically it. This kind of nonsense really just boils down to the supposition that everything women do should be with pleasing men in mind, and the very idea that we might be doing it for ourselves is too shocking to consider.
I’ve got my own anecdotes, and one thing I’d point out is that most of the women I know who wear makeup? Don’t do it for guys. They do it because they like how it looks and it makes them feel powerful. It’s like social war paint.
And me? My decision to have short hair has nothing to do with latent masculinity, psychological damage, or a desire to scare the shit out of insecure little boys on the internet. (Though god if I’d known short hair was going to make penises shrivel up and fall off with its mere existence, I would have shaved my head a decade ago.) I used to have hair down to almost my waist. Then I had to spend close to a month helping out on a drilling rig. In Wyoming. In the summer.
Do you know what kind of pain in the ass it is to try to wear a hard hat with hair that long? And how freaking dirty your hair gets? You bet your ass I cut that shit off, down to an A-line. And then I spent a summer in Houston, where I didn’t have a car. I biked everywhere. And I discovered that even chin length hair is just Too Damn Much Hair when you’re that sweaty (oh right, proof that I’m not an actual girl, because I sweat EW GROSS), so off the rest of it went.
At which point I discovered that I look pretty damn good with short hair, and that it’s actually faster and easier to get short hair to look cute to my satisfaction. Three minutes with a hair dryer, a teensy bit of product, and I am more than satisfied. I like how it looks. I like that it’s easy to maintain. I like that I can completely dye it in less than ten minutes and don’t spend time better used writing our sleeping out playing with my cats trying to pick tangles out of it. I like that my fucking hair doesn’t control my life.
Maybe that’s why this is so existentially threatening to people who are inclined to pen articles complaining about women and our personal beauty decisions. I didn’t cut my hair because I hate men, or because I needed an outward expression of my deep psychological issues, or because I want to destroy western civilization and replace it with a dystopian gynocracy. This isn’t about them and never has been. No matter how much time I might choose to spend with someone else, when it’s the middle of the night and the monsters are howling on the doorstep, I’m the one who faces them wearing my own skin and in that moment it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.
I cut my hair because it’s my hair, growing on my head, and I like it that way. And I really couldn’t give less of a shit about outside objections.
Guys, we like you, we really do. Or at least some of us do, whether in a sexual way or not. And this might be difficult to grasp, but try: even if we like you, you are not the center of our worlds. I know it’s a horrifying revelation, especially after most widely available media has spent your entire life telling you that you are totally the most important thing on the planet. But I think you’ll live a happier and more fulfilled life if you can manage to grasp the simple idea that we don’t care if you want to fuck us. In fact, if you’re going to write stupid shit like that, we’d really rather you didn’t.
Thank you.