Quote:
Originally Posted by princessbelle
Not to get off topic, but it is off topic.
I was wondering when the whole "short hair for masculine, long hair for feminine" sort of ideals come from to begin with.
I found this...
For much of human history, both men and women had long hair, and men usually had long beards as well. In the 4th century BC Alexander the Great of Macedonia had his soldiers wear short hair and shave off their beards, so that their ememies couldn't grab their hair or beards in battle. The Romans were the first culture where all the men generally wore their hair short and shaved their beards, again for military reasons. After Rome conquered most of Europe and the Mediterranean, short hair came to be associated with what Rome stood for: civilization, "law and order", loyalty to the state, conservatism, military discipline, etc. Long hair was associated with barbarians, women, "effeminate" greek philosophers and wimpy romantics. The Roman senate took a dim view of emperors like Hadrian who "went Greek" by wearing a beard and longer hair.
At answer bag.com
For what it's worth.
I was just curious...didn't mean to derail really.
Personal note: Also, i can speak from my *me* space and say...i have long hair, always have and it has nothing to do with me being feminine. I just have a long neck and with short hair i look like a giraffe. And, well, i'd rather not.
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Very interesting. And Rome was extremely anti woman to the point we do not have one single thing written by a Roman woman. We only know about Roman women via the writings of Roman men and much of what they wrote was highly mysogynistic. We don't know what they thought, what they liked, what they hated, what they valued, or what they thought of Rome and Roman men. So the Roman empire effectively silenced millions of women for hundreds of years.
I wore my own hair very short for a few years (even spiky for a while). The nasty comments I got were downright rude and meant to shame me. Even my parents jumped on the bandwagon for a while and basically insulted me for short hair. Its just more gender role reinforcement from society that gets nervous at the thought of women not conforming.
Melissa