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."
