Girls can have short hair too campaign

[TeenToTwenties]

Football club unites to support girls with short hair - BBC News

Wouldn't have been needed back in the day when loads of girls had short hair.

Also wouldn't have been needed before boys started identifying as girls and being allowed into girls spaces.

And ever younger women are having botox, fillers and surgical 'enhancements'.
Again, it comes down to consumer culture being extended to every aspect of life - accompanied by continual advertising ( and pornography, of course).

Lots of young women where I live look like porn stars or drag queens. Barely dressed, and with big fake eyelashes and fake everything else. I was shopping at a newly opened supermarket one day, and looked up from the salad section to be confronted, close up, by a young woman with a huge trout pout, a ton of make-up, and wearing a stretchy pink tracksuit thing.......Seriously, I got a shock. I was stunned for a moment.

I'm uncomfortable with any campaign that says "Some people are....... Get over it". I think it 1. doesn't help their case by being too aggressive 2. makes it sound like anyone with eyes and a curious mind is automatically a bigot/utter evil, and that any discussion Must Be Shut Down. In this case, they just don't want boys in girls sports.

Also, I don't think there's anything wrong with girls liking girly things. Many (most?) do. I don't think they should be pressured to shun girly things if they like them, just as much as I don't think I should be pressured to be girly. But, yes, I understand the extremes of girls to be what they are not.

The only female footballer who has short hair is Quinn. Give she role-models pretending not to be female, there’s no one to look up to.

Even the men in women’s football grow their hair out, like Barbra Banda, because otherwise how else would people think he’s actually a woman?🤨

This is incredibly sad.

I agree with that too. I don't like to see girls dismissed for being too "girly" either. I wish there was less pressure all round.

Absolutely this! Its not about hair, its about the fact that girls being guaranteed a fair competition has been destroyed by gender ideology. Its fucking outrageous that it has come to this. These people and all those who have supported them should hang their heads in shame that they have made little children have to question if the adults have allowed them a fair competition.

It makes me so glad to have grown up in the 80s. I had a flat top for years and dressed in jeans tee shirts and leather jacket. I was often mistaken for a boy. A girl once asked what school I went to, and when I told her she said "but that's a girls school?" I laughed and said I am a girl, and we laughed. These days I'd be told I'm male etc.

My friend's daughter got a short hair cut recently and my friend is terrified of the pressure that's coming with it. She's being told she's really a boy, but so far she's able to fend it off. It's awful.

I was actually surprised at how visceral I felt when I was misgendered. I know I'm not beautiful or girlie, but being called 'that man over there' (I wear a work uniform so it's not a clothing issue, we all wear the same) really got to me in a way I can't describe. It was like being called ugly but...with more of a spin? Bearing in mind I wear a (very female) name badge it's like being told you're not really a woman because you don't have long swishy hair. Yet none of the men who grow their hair long are being told that they can't be a man because they've got a pony tail, are they?

This is not entirely true. Most of the Japanese players that I see in the WSL have short hair. On the other hand I can only think off the top of my head one English player with short hair.

I can't believe we're still dealing with this sh*t.

My dd looks amazing with short hair and it's so much easier however she's a dancer and the exams are so strict on hairstyles that it does need to be a certain length to style it appropriately so long it is.

I disagree. If you read the article, the girls were not made fun of for looking like boys, or for not looking girly enough, the specific accusation thrown at them was that they were boys and the team was cheating for having them on the team. This absolutely is about girl's not feeling confident that their sport is being protected..

Unfortunately in the current climate where girls' sports are not protected, the ' 'girls can have short hair too' campaign will just shame girls into not raising concerns if they feel they are not playing against an all girls team.

Those campaigners would be better off campaigning to protect girls sports. Dealing with bullying girls for how they look would then be a clearly separate issue.

Shortshriftandlethal · I think the marketisation of 'pink' for girls really began in the 1980's..... Disney became a huge marketing machine...pushing gender stereotypes and imagery and all of that princess guff.

Great post, Shortshriftandlethal.

The rise of the pink/fluffy/princess/glitter/butterfly thing can also be linked to a backlash against feminism and the limited advances made by the women's movement in the 1970s. I think that's what was called 'Second Wave feminism' but TBH I'm a bit vague about all that wave business - anyway it was the time when equal rights for women were being mainstreamed, the first rape crisis centres and women's refuges, Our Bodies Ourselves published - really fundamental stuff that is now at risk.

The possibility of little girls growing up to believe that they could be and do anything they wanted and be the equal of their brothers was obviously very threatening, so along came the fluffy pink princess 'guff'.

It sounds fluffy and silly, but the influences on little children's early years are so important to their hopes and aspirations AND to their acquisition of motor skills and dexterity - running around, catching, kicking and throwing balls, handling construction toys, learning to use basic tools, etc. are not just playing, they are developing important skills.
Princesses don't run around and kick footballs, do they?

You also mention the 'skin care regimes' being pushed - including wall-to-wall ads on MN - for little girls from as young as 8 or 9. This has been criticised for all sorts of reasons, including on FWR, and by me, amongst others. There are so many things wrong with it, from damaging self esteem to financial to dermatological (children's skin shouldn't be subjected to this kind of treatment), but is another one of those daft, expensive and potentially damaging fads that girls get subjected to at regular intervals😠

One thing I do not see mentioned is the time and behaviour involved in maintaining long hair. Schoolgirls I see at the end of the day have smooth hair which has obviously been straightened before school, and they must have done very little active during the day to keep it that way.What do they do with it at night? When I had mine long - it never grew that long - it tangled. When I had it cut off the difference in weight was amazing. I think the long hair thing must be like other fashions in the past, corsets, hobble skirts, not wearing trousers, stiletto heels, foot binding in China, ways of limiting women's movement.

I remember thinking when I was watching the women's football a couple years ago, why do nearly all of them have long, poker straight, highlighted hair in a high ponytail?
When you look at the variation in male footballer's haircuts, it seems a bit weird.
Surely short hair is practical and at least some of them would choose it?

I always had short hair from aged 8 to 28. It didn't seem remotely strange back then?! Not that I play football. 🤷

There was also the Purdy cut - Joanna Lumley in the Avengers

Hair is one of those cultural signals isn't it? So a bit of a barometer for change.
Many of us grew up in a time when being female was less aggressively coded and the gender policing was very different.
I've had short hair, long hair, permed hair, bleached hair, etc, and never thought twice about anything more than how I wanted it to look.
My DD had short hair at high school and was judged for it, her sexuality presumed and comments made to her about it.
It's a less free choice for young women now, which is a regression from a feminist point of view. She's thought hard about growing it as she's annoyed by the implications of that choice too.
I think the point about the mental/financial/time load of maintaining the 'beauty standard ' is insane too. So much time and effort and money to fit a uniform vision of feminity.
I don't know how successful this campaign will be, but I am happy to see a push back and sadly these battles are never won.

Agree totally @Shortshriftandlethal . I grew up in the 70s/early 80s when we played in mixed groups, most of my (girl) friends had short hair and several of the boys had long hair. Toys were toys. When I had my eldest in 2001 I was horrified walking into Toys r Us for the first time and saw all those aisles of mostly pink and blue plastic tat. My favourite toys as a young girl were lego, meccano, my train set, scalextric and board games. In the 2000s most of those were very clearly in 'boy' aisles. There was a tiny 'wooden toys' section so that and board games was about all we bought from there. As an aside, I'm not at all surprised that gender ideology became a thing amongst young people because that's what they were being shown from a young age.

It's not in the same bracket but I've noticed a marked resistance from my hairdresser to cut more than a couple of cm off my hair, even when I've gone in and asked for a decent chop. It feels as if there's an expectation that if you don't already have long hair, you're 'trying to grow it longer'. I've never seen anyone in her salon with a shorter-than-shoulder-length style. Eventually I went to a different salon (birthday present from DC) where a stylist happily cut quite a lot off and I think it suits me a lot better shorter; my usual stylist's horrified reaction was, 'Why why why, you spent so long growing it to a good length!'

And she's a stylist with 30+ years experience, so it's not as if she hasn't been taught some decent bobs and what not.

I agree. Certainly long hair is the choice of the vast majority but off the top of my head I can think of several female footballers with short hair. Lina Hurtig, Maike Hamano, Ashleigh Neville, Elisa de Almeida, Yamashita, Fujino... I'm not disagreeing with the pp's overall point, but one per squad of 20-25 players is more like it.

My DD is super athletic, very slim, and for years had short hair. She has thick flyaway hair and she finds grooming a pain in the arse. Around 2021 the ‘but are you actually a girl?’ questioning started and then she had a student teacher who kept referring to her as ‘he’ even after being corrected. She got shoved out of the girl’s toilets and she was outraged they did it even after she’d showed them the bow on her vest lol. In the end she just grew it really long and it hangs all over the place and drowns her little face. But she’s ‘identifiably female’ and nobody bothers her. Maybe when she gets breasts she can have it all cut off again. We are indeed going backwards.

At my very strict RC girls' school in the 1980s where make up was totally banned we actually had a couple of beauticians and hairdressers come in. This was optional and after school and only for a couple of weeks.

I think the main reason was because conjunctivitis was running through the school with girls sharing mascara wands.

I found this interesting, the trends of Olympic gymnasts hair.

https://thegymter.net/2016/04/06/gymnastics-hair-a-retrospective/

Exactly! I have short hair and have always had it.
DD and her friends all have hair below shoulders.

That's interesting. Where is she, I need her number 😁I have long hair and they always seem to want to chop a load off.
Some people can be a bit weird about 'older women' having long hair. You only have to look at the Style&Beauty board on MN to realise that. I always say I'll keep it at boob length, the trouble is as they get lower my hair gets longer 😂
Hair is a feminist issue.

Yup, I agree. I thought it was getting better and that no one gave a damn how girls wore their hair anymore. But here we are.

I lay the blame, at least partially, with the TRA movement. They are pushing these stereotypes so hard that it almost forces girls (and women) to conform to gender expectations again lest they want to be lumped in with that crowd.

I effing hate it!