When Florence Pugh walked the red carpet at the 2024 Golden Globes, my flatmates and I drunkenly scrawled her name, thick in blue sharpie, to our fridge shopping list. The list — stuck to a magnet of a real estate agent whose smile never quite reaches their eyes — is entitled “Short-haired Women Theory” and includes the kind of household names you might find on an intersection billboard: Scarlett Johansson, Shailene Woodley, Jennifer Lawrence, and so on.
The premise is neat and tidy; simply put, Hollywood hates short-haired women. Or perhaps better put, society does. And by short, we mean short. No lobs, no bobs. We’re talking anything between pixies and buzzcuts, where a few mere inches can mark the distinction between perceivably carefree and calculating.
The phrase “cancel culture” gets thrown around too much for too little for my liking, although there’s undeniably an undercurrent here. These short-haired women don’t get cancelled, per se, they can still book movies or record albums or do whatever wealthy, attractive people yearn to do.
But they become just that little bit unlikable in the public eye. It’s that feeling you can’t quite pinpoint. That phrase you repeat over brunch with friends: “They haven’t done anything…they’re just a bit annoying.”
Zoë Kravitz is just a bit too much of a nepo baby. Brie Larson is just a bit too cringe. It’s a feeling that follows for as long as they maintain the short hair, ruminating under insufferable Twitter – sorry, X – threads.
Every little thing they do gets picked apart, scraps for digital vultures, feeding the content machine. Sparkling careers will falter, some never to fully recover. But sometimes they can climb back on top: Jennifer Lawrence is a beloved comedic actress once more; Miley Cyrus is lauded for her vocal performances. The public moves on, but my fridge magnets remember.
The most obvious example of Short-haired Women Theory is Britney Spears, à la 2007 – but that’s been done to death – so let’s move on to Katy Perry, who should be enjoying Swift-ian levels of success rather than languishing in the judge’s pit of reality television.
You might argue that Perry flopped because her Witness album was fairly dismal, not because of her ice-blonde pixie cut, but even the singer herself opened up, in a tear-filled 2017 interview, about the backlash she received for her haircut.
“You know, people talk about my hair right, and they don’t like it, or they wish that it was longer,” she says. “And like, I’m so badly trying to be Katheryn Hudson that I don’t even want to look like Katy Perry any more sometimes. That is a little bit of why I cut my hair, because I really want to be my authentic self.”
(For the record, Katy Perry was christened Katheryn Hudson.)
The singer kept the short do for almost 2 years as her career continued to flail, from public gaffes to James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke (a low point for many artists, with the exception of Harry Styles who genuinely just seemed to freakishly enjoy the whole thing).
Grazia’s senior entertainment writer, Bonnie McLaren, went so far as to write a piece entitled “As A Woman With Short Hair, I Understand Why Katy Perry Is Now Wearing Wigs All The Time”, and cited Perry’s comeback to long hair receiving more Instagram likes than her photo revealing she was marrying Orlando Bloom. Ouch. Perry’s 2019 single Never Really Over, debuting 70s-style hair that fell to her waist, was her best performing single since pre-cut Chained to the Rhythm.
Remember Hathahate? In 2013, actress Anne Hathaway received widespread hate and vitriol for being earnestly “annoying”. Her crime? A sweet, if not overly sincere, Oscar acceptance speech where she doe-eyedly whispered, “It came true!” Her haircut at the time was a spritely pixie cut, fresh from said Oscar-winning performance as Fantine in Les Misérables. Public ridicule soon followed.
“She always seems like she’s performing, and her favourite act is this overstated humility and graciousness,” said critic Richard Lawson. Shortly after the Oscars, Ann Friedman, on The Cut, asked “Why Do Women Hate Anne Hathaway (But Love Jennifer Lawrence)?”
“The biggest difference between them is their interview and red-carpet persona. Hathaway doesn’t have the same down-to-earth delivery,” Friedman writes. “She’s charming, but not funny. Meanwhile, Lawrence manages to exude a best-friend vibe, even at a behind-the-curtain Oscar press conference.”
Ironically in the year to follow, Jennifer Lawrence did the following: got a pixie cut, fell (again) at the Oscars and became hated by the internet. J-Law’s crime? Now ironically trying too hard to be funny, so much so that the actress fell into the category of ingenuine. Her hair? Short and fabulous, like a smoking gun.
The list goes on: Jada Smith, Emma Watson, Emma Stone, Demi Lovato, Kayley Cuoco, Cara Delevingne, Natalie Portman and Shailene Woodley.
This is not to say that short hair is the only reason these women faced public disapproval. Like most things in life, it’s mixed with an assortment of other factors that touch on racism, politics, and ageism. But why does this sudden phenomenon seem to occur? Why can’t these talented, hot women catch a break?
Often when women cut their hair short, it’s physically and emotionally liberating. It can mark a new era of one’s life, hence why the post-breakup haircut is a time-honoured tradition, alongside the “I’m moving overseas” fringe.
You’re very notably shedding societal expectations of “traditional” feminine beauty, daring to be different among a sea of long locks. For some, it’s often the first time they’ve gone from catering to the male gaze to their own inner gaze.
In a time when femininity is being weaponised, short hair stands out like a sore thumb as a perceived act of going against the grain of those conservative values.
“Longer hair connotes femininity with its associations of passivity and eagerness to please,” says Dr Alexander Edmonds, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Shorter hair, on the other hand, “could signal a willingness and ability to compete with male peers and superiors at work”.
No wonder we suddenly think these women are too much – too try-hard, too stubborn, too insufferable; they are no longer working to simply ‘please’ the patriarchy in all forms and therefore suffer the inevitable tidal wave of backlash.
But if short hair signals liberation and independence in a round-about semiotics way, it’s no coincidence that these haircuts also coincide with an artistic metamorphosis of sorts. Hathaway went from doe-eyed heroine of romantic comedies to the tragic figure of Fantine in Les Misérables, her eyes open to the transgressions of men. Cyrus and Perry went from pop princesses, singing about high-school parties and crushes to R&B, electropop and psychedelic rock that dealt with darker themes and imagery.
These are women making choices that mark them away from the Disney pipeline of perpetual girlhood, one of soft innocence and bubblegum blandness, to becoming women in all its divine and divisive messiness. The choices that they make can no longer be marketable to the general, patriarchal-inclined public that prefers their women docile and Lolita-like.
Cyrus discovered weed, Perry got a divorce, Stone became a feminist, Portman and Woodley preached environmentalist values and Lovato discovered…extraterrestrials? Arguably it wasn’t just their hair that changed, it was their ideas, their values, their experiences. They changed and grew into women in a society that idolises the girl.
But yet, there’s a strong, cynical part of me that thinks that even if they changed nothing but their hair, we would still turn against them. Think of Jennifer Lawrence, consistent in her dad-jokes and Tumblr humour, turned against as if in her own Hunger Games arena. It’s true that women can never win, that even the long-haired ones are cursed by the passage of time and changing tides of public perception, but perhaps the cruelty we show each other is exacerbated by a few inches of hair. It’s not a nice thought, but then again, society isn’t exactly the nicest.
All of this is not to say that you shouldn’t cut your hair short. Short hair is gorgeous and sexy, fierce and playful, and above all, not anyone’s business. So, when you suddenly find yourself thinking, “Urgh, there’s just something about her…”, stop and ask yourself: do they have short hair? If the answer is yes, add a name to your fridge, a little forgiveness to your heart and let’s move on.
Caroline Moratti is the deputy editor of Your Home and Garden magazine. She’s the former editor of Massey University’s student magazine Massive and culture editor of Otago University’s Critic Te Arohi, covering everything from overworked RA’s to booze reviews. Her hair is a short lob, thanks to a surprisingly not-too-shabby bathroom trim by The Listener’s editorial assistant.
