By David Futrelle
“Red Pill” dudes are forever baffled by women with short hair. Since these dudes consider short hair on women inherently unattractive — I guess it’s not traditionally feminine enough for their tastes? — they don’t believe anyone could ever prefer short hair over long hair on women, and can’t understand why any women other than man-haters, lazy moms or grannies would ever sport a short do.
One befuddled and somewhat angry Red Pill dude went to the Ask The Red Pill subreddit to get an answer to this strange puzzler from those best equipped to speak the truth on this matter — other befuddled and somewhat angry Red Pill dudes like himself.
“So, why do women cut their hair short?” rubenbrasilIs wondered.
Is it rooted in feminism? Are they falling for Buzzfeed articles about how women feel strong when they finally cut their hair? That they dont need the approval of men?
Apparently no woman ever cut her hair short before Buzzfeed.
Why would they purposely lower their SMV [Sexual Marketplace Value]? How is that ’empowering?’ That sounds like some hamster shit. Do they think theyre a special snowflake 1 in 1 million who can actually rock the short cut? I always see pictures of girls with short hair and they always look sad that they cut their hair. Sad that theyre not desired by higher SMV men.
Yes, that’s right. Every single woman with short hair literally spends every second of her day moping about how her short haircut has ruined her chances with the kind of dudes who give number ratings to every person’s Sexual Marketplace Value.
I really believe people do things that they perceive would benefit them. I dont see why someone would lower their SMV on purpose, especially women. I have never met 1 woman who has cut their hair short and didnt regret it.
Er, how many women have you met?
Exception: Theres some girls who cut their hair because its damaged from straightening it and dying it and they want to restart – I GET THAT. So Im not talking about this type. Its a rough 1 or 2 year journey for them – you can see it in their face. But once they look and feel feminine again they are happy again.
Yes, every woman who cuts her hair short spends every moment feeling miserable until her hair is long again.
Men need to feel masculine to hit their happy potential, women need to feel feminine. We understand this polarity and this is deeply rooted in why TRP is successful.
Yes, your theory is perfect. That’s why you guys spend so much of your time getting mad about people who don’t fit your theories and assuming they’re all secretly miserable and that you can see it in their eyes.
A Red Pill Redditor called RedSkeller (say that three times fast!) gave rubenbrasilIs the answer he wanted. And it had to do with Facebook likes. From women who don’t like competition in the Sexual Marketplace.
“As a man with a couple ex’s who cut it, and were nexted because of it, they do it for validation,” RedSkeller explained.
Every time a woman cuts her hair and then posts it on Facespace, she’ll get hundreds of likes, women mostly telling her how ‘brave’, ‘courageous’ and ‘elegant’ she looks.
Oh, but these sneaky ladies don’t actually think their short-haired ladyfriends look good. Because how could they, when Red Pillers know that short-hair on women is objectively ugly?
Meanwhile the women who liked and commented would never do such a thing because they realize it is apart of their SMV and are congratulating the woman for essentially stepping down her SMV and creating less competition.
Those dirty little sneaks!
Not to mention women who cut their hair short are impulsive, attention seeking or downright in bad taste. It doesn’t look good compared to a woman with long hair, plain and simple. They either look like a mom, makes their face look fat or both. It’s a drop in SMV for no reason other than attention.
And this is how the Red Pillers defend their absurd theories against evidence that throws them into doubt — by coming up with even more absurd reasons why the evidence isn’t evidence after all.
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Linda Evangelista famously had a ton of different short hair looks
What an uggo! She also famously once said that she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day. So obviously she was making bank from looking gorgeous with short hair
Not to mention Twiggy, Alek Wek, Agnes Deyn and lots and lots of other models who got rich specifically because of their good looks while having short hair.
Why would anyone intentionally lower their “SMV”? Maybe to get a little bit less unwelcome attention from douchey creeps who evaluate people by their SMV? I realize that still makes douchey creeps the main characters in the story (as opposed to the person whose hair it is doing whatever they damn well like), but I’ve known a couple of way prettier than me girls who cut and/or dyed their hair precisely because they were sick of getting attention from shitheads.
I await with bated breath their treatise on long haired men. According to this theory all gay men should have super long hair to increase their femininity and therefore their SMV? Or something?
(I’m a nonbinary trans person born in a male body with long wavy hair)
I got a pixie cut when I was sixteen and I never wanted to have long hair again. I just feel good with short hair. People should just get the haircut that makes them happy, that’s all.
This sort of ridiculousness almost makes me want to chop my hair off to spite these wankers. But I have a lot of fine and wavy hair so when it’s short it requires a lot of effort to look like anything other than a puffball and I’m fundamentally lazy, so halfway down my back it remains.
@epitome of incomprehensibility
I’d never considered this before, but now I want to see some statistics about how close the emergence of this trope was to the Manson murders.
The current mrs latsot has had short hair all the time I’ve known her (~25 years!). Not having to fuck about with her hair so much means she can do several more interesting things a day than she would otherwise (her words).
Call me superficial, but I have a thing for people who are inclined to be interesting.
She was bald for a while for reasons that might occur to you. I think she looked amazing while bald but it turns out she arrays her hair for her own reasons rather than for mine and she is not remotely interested in my opinion.
That is attractive.
I can’t be the only one who sees the irony in the “anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ+” far-right using an idea that was co-created by a transgender women, right?
@wwth – The first time Linda Evangelista cut her hair short, she lost 16 modelling gigs. It almost blew her career before it had begun. So there is that.
Pardon me for stating the obvious, but could I please take a moment to break down why Sexual Market Value doesn’t make sense?
If you have a product to sell to acquire money, the following applies
* You want to sell to as many people as possible, so mass appeal is important.
* You don’t want to turn anybody away who could be a potential customer.
* You don’t care about your own preferences for the product, because you aren’t the customer.
If you want to market yourself as a potential dating partner:
* You probably don’t want to appeal to as many people as possible. Most people want to appeal to just one. If you’re polyamorous, you still probably only want to appeal to a handful of people.
* There are certain types of people who you specifically don’t want to appeal to, because you would like to avoid those types.
* You have your own preferences for how you look and behave, and you do not want to sacrifice those in order to obtain a partner.
Most people are looking for a partner they can be themselves around, so changing how they look for mass appeal would run counter to their goals.
My (hetero) son had waist length hair for years and it was absolutely beautiful. Men’s hair has no business being short if it is thick and gorgeous! (jk)
The ‘women’s hair long, men’s hair short’ thing is purely fashion and has nothing to do with masculinity and femininity or attractiveness. And I think we can all acknowledge that long hair has rarely been something that gay men have chosen. But why let reality get in the way of Red Pill theory?!
@Dan Saravnich
Two trans women
I wonder how those conversations went.
Redpiller approaches a short-haired woman.
– Hey, why did you cut your hair so short?
– Umm, do I know you?
– I mean, since it makes you look so ugly, why do it?
– What? Get away from me, creep.
– See, I bet you’re regretting it, right?
– I’m calling 911!
– I knew it all along.
Redpiller walks away with smug satisfaction.
@ Dan & Dalillama
Isn’t the red pill (in the film) meant to represent spiro?
@Mish, I was only reading this thread thinking of noted short-haired ugly person Audrey Hepburn, who totally doesn’t still get voted Most Beautiful Woman, Like, Evar over a quarter century after her death or anything like that. ?
(A story, possibly apocryphal, I once heard about her was when she was having her photo taken not long before she died and the photographer asked her, ever so tactfully of course, if she’d like him to airbrush out some of her wrinkles, she is supposed to have replied in her most imperious tones, “young man, I earned these wrinkles!” Having seen so many friends & family perish young in WWII & its aftermath, she knew growing old was a privilege some never got to enjoy ☹️)
Since I was a teenager I have been totally in love with Nana Visitor’s character Major Kira Nerys from Star Trek DS9. She is still by and far my favourite female character on TV. I was thrilled to bits to finally meet her and get a photo with her this year, I cosplay as Odo and wore my tuxedo for the event. She is 61 now, and has very short cropped GREY hair. But she is incredibly beautiful. Anyone who has to shame women because of their age, grey hair etc has serious problems.
@latsot:
Which reinforces something that I’ve seen: a lot of the signifiers for femininity in any given epoch (and the things that the MRA types can be most relied on to make the biggest fuss about) are explicitly signifiers for wealth and privilege. Like how 2, 3 centuries ago when food was far more scarce, a voluptuous figure was seen as desirable; now that cheap food is plentiful, fat-shaming is the order of the day and the kind of body only a gym membership or a personal trainer can obtain is held up as the ideal. Or having long, painted nails are basically a signal for, “it is unnecessary for me in my station to perform manual labour” than it is any innate signal of femininity whatever specious evo-psych arguments MRAs might muster to justify it…
(Presumably this is covered in any Feminism 101 class but I am a dumb IT dude who no nothign)
It’s the same with hair. A long or elaborate hairstyle can be impractical and requires a lot more time in which to maintain it. It’s a way of announcing to the world, “I’m part of the idle rich; I’ve so many empty hours that the only way I can think of filling them is to have my hair sculpted by my servants into ever more grandiloquent shapes”. But even today, after most of us have lost the servants, women can expect (and are expected) to spend a far greater proportion of their income on maintaining their hair than men, even if they wear theirs short.
Rambling here…
@Rabbid I thought that trope was more recent than the Manson family at least in the US, coming instead from the rising popularity of J-horror using versions of the mythic onryō.
@Dalillama Sorry, I didn’t see the section below on Lilly’s transition. I just realized how ironic it is that the far-right memes The Matrix at all since the film is literally the opposite of what their movement stands for. The film is about a straight white male (Neo) who is told to fight against enslavement by a black male (Morpheus) and a white female (Trinity), and the main antagonist have an army of white male “NPCs” (Agent Smiths). The Matrix is a good movie, it’s too bad it inspired such terrible things.
@Alan Robertshaw Do you mean a Blue box? That’s the only thing I could find that was tangentially related to The Matrix.
“Exception: Theres some girls who cut their hair because its damaged from straightening it and dying it and they want to restart – I GET THAT. So Im not talking about this type. Its a rough 1 or 2 year journey for them – you can see it in their face.”
/Users/bettywarner/Desktop/Marilyn_Monroe_in_Some_Like_it_Hot_trailer_cropped.jpg
Now we know why Marilyn took so many pills
My hair is currently down to the top of my ass, but it has very prominent silver streaks down the sides that deter the vast majority of men. I like the way it looks and I hate getting haircuts so that’s how I’ll keep it until it starts to thin. Then maybe I’ll just start shaving my head and wearing those turban-like thingies old-time movie stars used to wear.
I didn’t tell my friend she should shave her head when when she asked (on Facebook even!) out of jealousy. I was pretty damn sure she could pull it off, and she did. Looked like Annie Lennox.
It’s ad-hoc reasoning all the way down.
“My entire life revolves around my boner and so does everything else in the entire world.”
The manosphere, in a nutshell
Got my hair cut into a chin length bob a few months ago, and I couldn’t be happier! Short hair looks better on me (long hair makes my face look very long and narrow, I don’t like it) and since I hate the feeling of hair against or around my neck I only really wore it pulled back in a ponytail anyway. Plus, my hair looks fuller this now! 10/10 definitely do not regret this haircut.