The war of short-haired women against dudes and their pants feelings continues. Indeed, it’s gotten so bad that pickup artist/rape legalization proponent Roosh V is calling for state intervention.
In a blog post today, Mr. V cites a passage in an Evo Psych textbook suggesting that men tend to prefer long hair on women because healthy hair is an indication of good health and diet, and therefore of “higher reproductive value” in women.
And if cutting off this hair is displeasing to the boners of dudes like Roosh, well, it must mean that women who wear their hair short are, quite literally, mentally ill. No, really; that’s what he thinks. (Emphasis mine.)
If a woman cuts her hair to a short length, or shaves it outright in a Skrillex haircut, we can now confidently say that she is making herself appear less fertile, less beautiful, and less healthy. A woman cutting off healthy hair is one step away from literal cutting of her skin with a sharp object, because both behaviors denote a likely mental illness where the woman presents herself to society as more damaged than her genetic condition would indicate, suggesting that she has suffered environmental damage that has reduced her overall fitness.
Or maybe she prefers short hair because it’s easier to manage? Or because she thinks short hair looks cute? Nah, couldn’t be. She’s clearly a danger , not only to Roosh’s boner but to herself!
She must be monitored by state authorities so she doesn’t continue to hurt herself.
Roosh posts pictures of women he thinks have committed “self-harm” by cutting their hair short, thus transforming themselves from sexy ladies to hideous short-haired monsters.
Really? I’m pretty sure that all this proves is that Roosh has such a hard-on for long hair that he’s unable to see straight. To my eyes, and I suspect a lot of others, these two women — actresses Ginnifer Goodwin and Keira Knightly — look fine with long hair, and fine with short hair. (I actually prefer their short-haired looks, but, you know what? It’s really none of my business.)
But Roosh not only sees short-haired women as an affront to his manhood; he also sees them as a threat to Western Civilization itself.
What should we think when deluded women are actively encouraged by society to harm themselves by cutting their hair instead of growing it out and looking beautiful? One that doesn’t care about the fertility of its women and, in turn, the needs of men who want to mate with fertile women. Unless there is something within a society that promotes beauty in the form of long hair, we have little choice but to conclude that it is sick, grotesque, and sterile.
Roosh goes on to argue that art should reject such cultural sickness and celebrate the fertility of young women.
Oh, wait, that was Hitler.
Setting aside Roosh’s creepy, quasi-fascist obsession with female fertility, I do have a couple of questions for Roosh and the Evo Psych crowd in general:
What about infertile women with long hair? There are lots of women, cis and trans, who can’t do that whole pregnancy thing; many of them have long hair. Would Roosh lock them up for false advertising? (Actually, never mind; I’m sure he would, though probably not without hitting on them first.)
And what about short-haired men? Like Roosh and his pals, many evolutionary psychologists find it difficult to think beyond conventional gender stereotypes. All the studies listed in the Evo Psych textbook Roosh sites revolve around women and their hair, never men and their hair, even though the same reproductive logic would apply to them as well. Poor diet can reduce sperm count and cause infertility.
So why isn’t long hair on men “preferred across cultures” the way that long hair on women tends to be? Why isn’t Roosh calling for short-haired men (like himself) to be confined to the psych ward?
Could it be — possibly, maybe, sort of? — that there’s more to love and lust than what’s in our genes, or in Roosh’s jeans?
@Shalimar
Ehhh, Roosh means every word he says but he never actually draws up a plan to make it happen. Like AVFM and their blathering about making the world a better place for men. Roosh wants his ideas to be so but can’t be asked to do anything about it.
I wear my hair short, but then I don’t shave my pits or legs or get bikini waxed, so I think it evens out.
Hmph my husband may like long hair, but right now he’d loooove me to chop it off. Hair gets everywhere (food, clothing etc) and he hates waking up to a mouthful of the stuff when he rolls over the wrong way. I’ll probably cut it sound as the “visit to the hairdresser for a nice new cut fund” gets full. In the meantime, it’s ponytails for me.
Wow. I do say that a lot when reading this stuff. One thing – When Roosh goes off on women cutting their hair being one step away from cutting themselves he does realize that a large number of people have their hair cut for them? They aren’t doing it themselves. What does he think that you’re having your hair cut and then later you come back and say “Oh just a trim but could you stab me in arm with your scissors a few times while you’re at i
Once an evo psych dude I was talking to was arguing that current Western standards of beauty are what men naturally prefer. So of course, I brought up various artwork across culture and time that depicted several different kinds of female shapes. He actually tried to argue that old statues and paintings don’t count because mass media knows how to show what men want to see but pre-mass media artists did not.
Facepalm. If all men’s boners were genitically programmed to only be pleased by super thin white women with long hair, why would so many artists have had a different aesthetic in the first place. How was any of that boner killing art well regarded enough to get preserved for centuries if their cultures didn’t find them beautiful?
The lengths men will go to univeralize their own sexual preferences is just astounding. Why do they even care? What’s so terrible about thinking of your own preferences as your own? Why do people need them to be the result of biology or God?
@quiet wolf
Patriarchal science/engineering can make the world way more dangerous for women. Crash test dummies are male by default, so seatbelts were designed for men, which unfotunately has lead to them being less safe for women :/
@WWTH
Same reason the name of God or biology gets attached to all sorts of things – they want their wishes to come true, that they get more of what they want and prefer. Harder for women to argue with a force greater than themselves instead of if the dude says “this is what I like in women, give it to me in greater quantity.” He’d be laughed out of the room.
Seems to fit today’s topic:
When I was a kid, a girl who won the State Fair competition for having the longest hair got her hair caught in a sod-cutter and was killed. Just sayin’.
Lordcrowstaff;
That was awesome. “Da hell?” Lol. Love it.
@Xanith:
Hee, this!
I have long, lush locks and my hair grows quickly. When others tell me how lucky I am, I like to remind them that when the hair on your head grows fast, it grows fast everywhere else, too. Like, I can’t wax my legs because the hairs start growing back in a week and a half, and then there are lots of ingrown ones, itchy!
I’m not tempted to cut my hair off, though. First, I’m too lazy to maintain a short style. Second, I’m gray in the front and top of my head and it’s almost a perfect fade to the rest of my still-brown hair and I think that look kind of neat-o. Also, I don’t have to worry about being attractive to Dooshie and his ilk; not for nothin’ I changed my handle to Hambeast (a word that still makes me snortle!)
@Weirwoodtreehugger: What, so this dude thought that if there’s no mass media, everyone will be utterly clueless as to what people in general find beautiful? Like, they have no idea whether men tend to like fat or thin women, just because there are no TV shows and no ads on billboards? That is… SO weird.
But yeah, it’s interesting just walking through an art gallery with art from the centuries. Sixteenth century – short, fairly thin women with chubby tummies. Seventeenth century – fat women. And so on, it really varies. And interestingly enough, for hundreds of years the western beauty standard included small-to-medium-sized boobs – even the fatties of the seventeenth century have boobs that are quite small, particularly in relation to their amount of body fat. Then in the twentieth century big boobs eventually become equated with sexiness.
A woman cutting off healthy hair is one step away from literal cutting of her skin with a sharp object
Waaaait a minute…
So if “things in close proximity to your body” is “literal” harming yourself, then I guess Roosh doesn’t want a woman to make him food, as she would have a knife in her hand and would be “one step away from literal cutting of her skin with a sharp object”. No shaving, of course, that’s closer than a scissors gets when cutting hair. She can’t have barrettes, combs, or bobby pins (not sharp, but if you’ve ever accidentally stabbed your scalp with one…). No stiletto heels, those are sharp. No pencils. No curling irons.
Because cutting hair isn’t dangerous or anything and he’s being really over-dramatic about women cutting their hair short. The only way that this makes sense is if he’s talking about Real Dolls or something of that nature, maybe just the generic blow-up dolls. I mean, you’d puncture them trying to “cut” their hair. Maybe if you want your doll to be healthy, you just leave it be. The hair won’t grow back if you cut it and your doll will go from an HB10 to a HB4 unless you buy a wig for it.
Or maybe Roosh is thinking of this:
I can well understand how a woman with long hair who was getting RooshVibes from one of the men in her daily habitat might consider cutting the stuff off. I can also understand why she might not just consider it but do it. Roosh, to his great disadvantage, is deprived of the same degree of perspective.
“She must be monitored by state authorities so she doesn’t continue to hurt herself.”
Plus, what’s up with this thinking more government is always the cure for everything? What happened to the conviction that the state can never do anything right? It seems to me that the solution in this case would be to contract out the surveillance of women to private entities, because the free market would ensure that they performed the job up to specifications (please bear in mind that we’re talking theory here, not practice). Of course, the downside in that event would be that Roosh would have to pay the bill himself.
The chief failing of Evo-Psych is that so many of its proponents (even the actual researchers) seem to fail to understand that yes, our psychology evolved, but it specifically evolved along the same lines as other herd animals, but with the addition of a high degree of brain plasticity.
The result is that culture (ie, the overall opinion of the herd, at this point in time) has far more to do with individual psychology than whatever was advantageous for survival on the plains of the Serengeti. So you see different preferences across cultures and time, but within a given culture, there’s usually a dominant standard of “conventional beauty”. As the culture changes, so do the standards.
But no, it’s all ‘pink berries were prized by female gathererers’ bullshit.
Yeah, it gets used to prop up the status quo all the time.
People forget that if we *decide* to do something, we can force evolution’s hand. It’s how we fucking got here in the first place. Sexual dimorphism? We can select that away, and in surprisingly few generations.
Also, yeah, idiots don’t know history. Big boobs have actually almost never been considered attractive, since for most women having big boobs is just a sign that you’ve had kids already.
I’m actually relieved to be reading about Ginnifer Goodwin’s unfeminine short hair, rather than yet again enduring some jerk’s whining about how she hasn’t immediately lost all her baby weight, and how it looks weird in flashbacks, and WAAAAAAAH. Looks like Roosh isn’t a secret OUAT fan. Thank god for small miracles.
Anyway, for those of you who neither have preteen daughters, or a high tolerance for campy plotholes, Goodwin plays Snow White/Mary Margaret on the ABC series Once Upon A Time. Mary Margaret is the real world version of Snow White that was brought here by the Evil Queen Regina’s curse. And yeah, the character herself has short hair, which is why Ginnifer Goodwin has short hair, and gets paid a rumored $11,000.00 USD a day , or $4,000,000.00 USD a year, to do so.
Yup, Ginnifer Goodwin sure is *crazy* to rock that do and make all that money. Unlike the totally mentally stable Roosh, who spends his nights broke on his friend’s and family’s couches. We better go lock that Ginnifer Goodwin up!
For an extra, extra, ironic twist, not only did her short haircut *not* repel men, but she managed to attract the attention of the actor who played *Prince Charming* of all characters, they fell in love on the set, and now they’re married and have a son. I swear, you couldn’t even make this shit up!
So how the hell is Roosh always so spectacularly wrong? It’s like he’s an unintentional Poe or something. The truth is stranger than fiction.
I just remembered something about my mother. By the time I was a wee sprout, she had gotten tired of cutting and styling her hair. Being a trained cosmetologist, she got a number of styrofoam wig heads, a number of wigs in different colors and lengths, and styled them in ways that pleased her. Her own hair she cut in a short bob. Each day, she would decide which head of hair suited her.
My father had no objections.
This is hilarious. If the study actually exists, that makes it even more hilarious.
@sunnysombrera
It also conflates the man with God, providing justification for the man demanding that the woman worship him (in addition to providing the things he wants). Very convenient. If a man and God both want the same things, then by golly, they must be interchangeable!
@WWTH
Wait, you mean the savannahs weren’t full of Britney Spears clones?
mrex: Sadly, I fell off of Once Upon A Time by the beginning of the second season. The desire to see everyone in town line up to kick Prince Charming in the crotch became too strong to really enjoy the show.
Here is a thing for evolutionary psychology, though alas it has nothing to do with hair (apologies!)
Apparently, the white, white teeth that the current western world admires are an an example of evolutionary psychology at work, so are also a Thing Wot Is Of The Ages, (of course they are! If we do it in the west, right now, it must have been so forever!) And yet, here is a completely different thing, teeth *blackening*, which has been a thing in many other places for over a thousand years.
Which is the one, true, evo psych way?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohaguro
(Could not find one true link to teeth whitening, sorry, but it is mentioned many times in passing if you google ‘evolutionary psychology and white teeth’)
Or, theory, I should say. Reading comprehension is apparently one of the first things to go when I’m sleep deprived!
@AbsintheDexterous: You post that video, and then I go and download a game from GameJolt I’ve been following for a few months, and it’s just like that, only less funny and more Oh-dear-Gods-above-why-am-I-still-watching-this?!?
It’s called The Tender Cut, if anyone’s interested, and I’m going to upload a video of my play-through in a while to my YouTube channel if anyone wants to watch that instead. :U [/shameless self plug]
Though, I would like to say that if you’re bothered by body horror or things like live operations, don’t go near it. I squicked the hell out of myself during the play-through.
The whole teeth-blackening thing blew me away a year or two ago when I finally understood it–it’s totally true that traditional Japanese makeup is much more aesthetically pleasing with black teeth than with white (or yellow) teeth.
http://malformalady.tumblr.com/post/51605054529/ohaguro-is-black-tooth-wax-used-by-maiko-for-that
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/310748443012014441/
Also it was explained to me that teeth are bones, and it’s just gross to see someone’s bones all hanging out there naked like that.