Why men hate short hair The crop has always been entangled with politics

Long before she finds herself devouring raw meat in a pregnant fugue state, or tormented by bizarre dreams in which she’s doing the horizontal mambo with the devil, the titular protagonist of Rosemary’s Baby makes a dramatic entrance that telegraphs her impending transformation — from innocent, childlike newlywed to the mother of the Antichrist.

“I’ve been to Vidal Sassoon,” she says, running her hand through hair that has been freshly shorn into a skull-hugging pixie cut.

Her husband, practically gagging, says, “Don’t tell me you paid for that.”

Of course he does. There’s something about very short hair on a woman that feels like a slap in the face — to expectations, or the patriarchy, or even just to the husband who liked her hair long. This latter preference isn’t so hard to understand; long hair connotes not just femininity but youth, vitality. fertility. A woman with closely cropped hair has been stripped of something vital, even sacred. It’s why women condemned to the guillotine would have their hair cut off first, before their heads; it’s why women who slept with the Nazis during the Second World War were dragged into the public square and forcibly shaved.

As such, the most radical thing of all is a lady who has lopped off all her hair by choice, and they have long been objects of fascination in both fiction and in history, seen in their choice of hairstyle as representative of something greater: spiritual purity, sacrifice, empowerment. The short-haired woman is Joan of Arc, or the wife from The Gift of the Magi, or Fantine from Les Misérables; she’s Gwyneth Paltrow debuting a chic blonde chop to mark the end of her relationship with a cheating bastard in Sliding Doors; she’s the child star who marks the end of her Disney era with a punk-rock fauxhawk.

Whatever the circumstances, it’s understood that a woman who cuts her hair short must have a reason for doing it, and that the reason can never be “because it looks good” — which a howling chorus of male commentators invariably squirm out of the woodwork to announce that it certainly does not. The news cycle surrounding every celebrity pixie cut follows this same pattern: there is the debut of the haircut itself, followed by the wave of backlash from men demanding to know why this woman, and women in general, insist on ruining their (that is the men’s) lives by getting haircuts that they (that is, the men) find less than desirable. If feminists have done much to push the notion that short hair represents an explicit rejection of the male gaze, certain men have no doubt helped it along by treating these haircuts as something women inflict on them. When Emma Stone flaunted a pixie cut on the red carpet in January of this year, the most viral response was from a man on X who wrote, “Women, I can’t stress this enough, gay hairdressers love this and women that are competing with you love it because it knocks you down multiple pegs. Men hate it.”

That said, women’s hair has also always been at least somewhat entangled with politics. In the Twenties, they bobbed their hair in a conspicuous act of rebellion against traditional norms; in the wartime Forties, short hair was a practical necessity reflecting women’s entry into military service or factory work; and since the sexual revolution, the crop has served as a signpost for everything from liberal politics to alternative sexualities, revealing not just the contours of a woman’s scalp but also her disdain for gender norms and male-centered beauty standards.

And even as there’s little left today that western women need to be liberated from, a dramatic haircut still registers as symbolic, rebellious, and hence worthy of notice — particularly when a bunch of women in one political space do it all at once, which brings us to the phenomenon known as the Power Bob.

The latest iteration of the Power Bob comes from Britain’s Labour Party, in which several women have lately been observed sporting the same hairstyle: chin-length or so, blunt, and usually (not always) with bangs. It is a haircut that practically begs to be (and often is) accompanied by the modifier “no nonsense” — although this has always struck me as a bit of a canard, all things considered. Spending two hours and a few hundred dollars so a stranger can give you the artisanal version of something you could replicate yourself, albeit crudely, with about 10 minutes and a decent pair of scissors: if this does not meet the definition of “nonsense”, what does? That these haircuts also require regular professional upkeep — a pixie, allegedly the hallmark of a low-maintenance woman, requires its wearer to return to the salon every four weeks lest she start looking like Anton Chigurh — represents more nonsense still.

But of course, that’s not the kind of nonsense we’re talking about. The Power Bob is not about eschewing frivolous expense or silly wastes of time, but the intrusion of male desire into one’s personal and professional life. And in this, it succeeds wonderfully at projecting the desired vibe. The shortness, the bluntness, and the generic unflattering-ness of this haircut signals a total lack of interest in male attention; however, and crucially, it is not so butch that it suggests you might be open to come-ons from members of the same sex, which would be nonsense of a different color but nonsense nonetheless. The Power Bob wearer is like the archetypal Pam of whom the late Victoria Wood so memorably sang, a woman who doesn’t hate men or sex — it’s just she finds the entire endeavor to be simply uninteresting. Not me, not my scene, I prefer a game of Rummy and an Ovaltine!

In this, the Power Bob suggests something interesting about the archetypal girlboss, particularly as compared with her male counterpart. It has always been understood that for men, the allure of power — and one of its benefits — is that having it makes you more attractive to women. For women, on the other hand, the greatest hallmark of power is to be so utterly uninterested in men that you intentionally adopt an aesthetic that excludes you from the sexual marketplace. It’s also a notable shift from the moment in which women were expected to demonstrate leadership by mimicking men, even aesthetically; consider the power suits of the Eighties, whose structured fit and massive shoulder pads gave the female wearer the same inverted triangle silhouette as your average Marvel superhero.

Outside of the long-running adventure comic Prince Valiant, the Power Bob haircut is most decidedly not a man’s haircut. Instead, the power comes from the fact that it is a haircut men do not like — and that the wearer knows this, and doesn’t care.

And yet, if the association between short hair and female empowerment is easy enough to understand in historical context, it also seems clear that the contemporary link really only persists because we want it to. The Power Bob isn’t a new phenomenon, nor is the notion that women with political aspirations must cut their hair to achieve them; a cursory internet search reveals a trove of articles about the “political bob”, most centered explicitly on Hillary Clinton’s signature hairstyle during her run for US President in 2016. It’s enough to make you wonder if the notion that women can’t be sexually attractive and also be taken seriously in politics is less a sad fact than a self-fulfilling prophecy, a holdover from a brand of feminism that has long since faded from relevance.

Surely it is significant that peak Political Bob discourse not only occurred during a failed campaign 10 years ago, but centered on a female candidate whose biggest claim to fame was losing to a boorish, leering, reality TV playboy who was formerly an owner of the Miss Universe beauty pageant. Certainly, it’s hard not to notice that the second Trump administration is a veritable buffet of women in high-level positions — some of whom look the part of the short-haired asexual girlboss, but many of whom have tresses befitting a Disney mermaid, as well as eyelash extensions, contouring, and faces visibly lifted and plumped by injectables. And while some might say this merely signals the President’s preference for a certain aesthetic, the sheer physical diversity of women in politics at present — in the US and around the world — suggests that we’ve actually arrived at last at a moment in which if you are a woman in politics, it simply doesn’t matter what you look like. For every Angela Merkel there’s a Sanna Marin; for every Nancy Pelosi, a Giorgia Meloni.

And when it comes to the Power Bob, the greatest irony might be that this hairstyle — once a hallmark of women’s liberation — is on the cusp of becoming as dated and traditional as the pantsuit with linebacker shoulder pads paired with sensible low heels. A hairstyle preferred by dinosaurs who don’t realize that times have changed, that femininity is no longer a political liability, and that if a woman still faces certain unique concerns when it comes to seeking political power, the length of her ponytail is no longer one of them.

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