What every woman with 'man hair' knows

I was amused, but not massively surprised, about the Miss France fury

Short hair is helpful when you want everyone to see your nice earrings.

Remember that brief moment, in 2020, when we were so cabin fevered out of our minds that we all got excited about really stupid things? Like the ‘gender swap’ app? It did this to me, which was rude.

Joe and Jo Elvin

According to this app, female me is the identical twin of male me. I’m convinced the AI simply reads short hair as ‘man hair’, which brings me nicely to the below, which I was commissioned to write for The Independent this week….

Years ago, over a lovely family dinner in an Italian restaurant, my then eight-year-old daughter, Evie, turned to me and said, ‘Mum, some of my friends say you have man hair.’ My husband nearly choked laughing at the table.

Well, it appears that little children are not alone in having a very rigid view of what constitutes  ‘woman hair’, as evidenced by the outrage caused at the Miss France beauty pageant this week. 

It’s hilarious, really - the spittle-flecked rage being directed at a woman who has had the gall to win the title, when she has man - sorry I mean short - hair. People are angry because the new Miss France, Eve Gilles, 20, is wearing her crown atop a gamine crop. Every other hopeful contestant has the same cookie cutter, long, straight,  ‘proper lady’ bonce.   

It’s as though decades of short haired fabulousness have never happened. Angel-faced Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday anyone? Brigitte Nielsen’s 1980s platinum Bond villain? What about Jean Seberg’s iconic 60s gamine crop in Breathless and Bonjour Tristesse? In fact, is this beautiful, chic look not quintessentially French? ‘Claire, it’s FRENCH!’ yells Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag when trying to reassure her sister about her severe new crop.

How is Eve Gilles hair ‘woke androgyny’ - as the mob are complaining - when it’s channelling the decidedly unwoke ‘90s, whose sex symbols were supermodel Linda Evangelista, sporting a sharp crop in George Michael’s Freedom video,  and Demi Moore, whose tomboy-ish mop in Ghost had every woman I know rushing to the salon. 

Still, I’m not entirely surprised. We all know that plenty of folk secretly think short hair on women is uglier than long hair. Come on, we do, don’t we? Yes, yes,since the heyday of 1920s flappers, short hair has marked a woman out as cutting edge (no pun intended) and fashion forward. And forgive the immodesty, but it’s just a fact that I regularly have strangers stop me in the street to compliment my short style. I love my hair’s wash and go low maintenance, and my hairdresser, George Northwood - who first gave me this wispy pixie cut in 2008 -  agrees that I look dreadful the minute it nears my chin. 

But even my own husband pulls a face when it’s freshly cropped (‘Why do you have to get it THAT short?’) and often teases me by calling me LLoyd Christmas - the name of Jim Carrey’s bowl cut-sporting moron in Dumb and Dumber. He loves me, I’m sure, but I know he (not so) secretly wishes my hair was longer, a bit more ‘feminine’. 

My daughter, now 18, is still trolling me, with comments like, ‘Your hair is giving big Justin Bieber energy.’ 

‘Yeah well, you look like Jesus,’ I clap back. Because interestingly, she and all her friends have the same poker straight, waist-length hair. She shoots me daggers if I ever dare suggest she should cut it off. For all their Generation Z protestations about freedom to be exactly who they want to be, they all seem rather attached to this particular marker of feminine identity.  

Many, many women tell me they’d never be ‘brave’ enough to have hair as short as mine. I’ll never forget the handsome young man, a Hollywood hairdresser, who told me my haircut was lovely and then immediately followed up by saying what he really loved about it was that it was ‘so age appropriate.’ I laughed/groaned, but he persisted; ‘Seriously, I see so many women in LA trying to look younger than they are with long hair, it’s so refreshing to see a woman really owning her middle age.’ It remains the most spectacularly backhanded compliment I have ever received, and all thanks to my age-appropriate pixie hair. 

But it speaks volumes about where we are, as a people. Short hair on women is tolerated, and sometimes revered, provided it stays in one of its designated lanes. So it’s fine for older women who have no more need of a flirty, long ‘man magnet’ mane. Thumbs up too for women like me, of any age really, who identify as ‘serious career women’ . Lesbians. (Once, when I was out walking the dog, a gang of teenage boys passed me in the street and one of them said, ‘Look, that cool lesbian has a really cute dog.’ ‘It’s your hair,’ chuckled my husband.) Athletes, if they must - although it feels as though the Anna Kournikovas of the world, with their traditional long and lovely blonde locks, get more of the big sponsorship bucks. 

This beauty pageant furore? It’s because short hair has jumped into the wrong lane. It exposes that actually, great swathes of the public think that only standardised ‘lady hair’, Disney princess hair, marks a woman as truly ‘pretty’. 

If there’s anything short-haired women have in common, it’s that we know all of this and we really don’t care. If in the year 2023, we’re still going to pit women against each other in such a backwards concept as a beauty pageant, can we really be at all angry or surprised that it elicits such backward opinions? 

It takes a particular kind of confidence to rock a haircut that is a singular, signature look. Mine has been my go-to look for nearly 20 years and I can’t see me changing that any time soon. So let me say:  Vive la Eve! I stand with you in ‘man hair’ solidarity.