Why does society dislike men having long hair?

[JeremyM]

Long (right):

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Short (third from left):

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I now have short hair but am happy to have it either way - I have no preference.

As long as it's properly kept (e.g. split ends cut out), it looks fine to me.

I know many guys who've even gone as far as to getting perms, which looks even better IMO.

 

"I don't care what other people think. I care what I think." - Charlie Sheen

You're almost wearing the same outfit!

 

I've had long hair since grade 6. Well, not thaaaat long. Shoulder length at the max. My hair curls at the end though so I'm sure if I straightened it, it would be a bit longer than shoulder length. I used to part it down the middle but since grade 8 I've had bangs (in 2nd year of University now). I sure hope I'm not one of the men you are all speaking of that look greasy. I think I take care of it - shampoo everyday and run a brush through it. I don't condition though because I don't like the way it makes my hair feel. It makes it feel too soft. I usually wear a baseball hat backwards when I go out so a lot of the time you can't even see how much hair I really have!

[Zierro]

Because, more often than not, it is for the sake of being a rebel. What else can we expect?

[Faux]

because it's hard to pull off and most people are ugly. bad combo.

[Bier]

I think this explains it.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tDs0YuuDOk

[Alg]

because it's hard to pull off and most people are ugly. bad combo.

Got to agree here. Most long-haired men can't pull it off :uhh:

[Jonanananas]

Because it looks bad.

 

But wait! you say, My hair looks good, it-

 

No. You're wrong. It looks bad. Nobody wanted to tell you because it might hurt your feelings. I too had long hair once. I thought it looked good. I was wrong.

 

Cut your hair, you won't regret it.

 

And what gives you the right to universally judge whether long hair looks good or bad? If you haven't noticed yet, tastes differ. I like my hair. I think that a lot of men look better with long hair(if it's not greasy or stuff). I won't be claiming that it looks better than short hair for others. It probably doesn't. But I'm wearing my hair how I prefer it, not some other guy.

[JeremyM]

Because it looks bad.

 

But wait! you say, My hair looks good, it-

 

No. You're wrong. It looks bad. Nobody wanted to tell you because it might hurt your feelings. I too had long hair once. I thought it looked good. I was wrong.

 

Cut your hair, you won't regret it.

Just because your long hair looked bad doesn't mean every other man with long hair looks bad. :wink:

[quitthegame]

A lot of answers having to do with what looks good, how each gender takes care of the hair, etc. None of those answers address the original question, which is why is male long hair looked down upon today, when throughout history it was often not only allowed, but encouraged? Any answer that adequately addresses that question must discuss what changed between prior centuries and the past 100 years.

 

In the US, at least, we have a military-positive culture, in the which the default military hairstyle was settled upon as extremely short about 100 years ago (as part of the industrialization of the military at that time--short hair is the most efficient). Military hairstyles as a unifying mark have a long history, although the "no hair" look is actually not historically common. Long hair was actually allowed in the US military 200 years ago, and US culture was also less military-positive 200 years ago. So inevitably in the past century, long hair on men quickly became identified as a mark of the counter-culture, and unacceptable for mainstream purposes. If you read books from the 40's and 50's, right after WWII mobilized pretty much the entire country in the war and war-related businesses, you'll see proud references to other counterculture members as 'longhairs'. Though that social category still exists, it is obviously less strongly demarcated now than it was then, as it now functions as an associated modifier, and not a basic identifier.

[Skull]

Because it looks bad.

 

But wait! you say, My hair looks good, it-

 

No. You're wrong. It looks bad. Nobody wanted to tell you because it might hurt your feelings. I too had long hair once. I thought it looked good. I was wrong.

 

Cut your hair, you won't regret it.

Hopping on the bandwagon, I get compliments on my hair all the time. My family gives me shit about it but other that that I've found that most people actually think my hair looks good. Or they lie to me about it. That's just as likely now that I think of it.

 

Granted, I did get a haircut today :lol:

[obfuscator]

Because it looks bad.

 

But wait! you say, My hair looks good, it-

 

No. You're wrong. It looks bad. Nobody wanted to tell you because it might hurt your feelings. I too had long hair once. I thought it looked good. I was wrong.

 

Cut your hair, you won't regret it.

Hopping on the bandwagon, I get compliments on my hair all the time. My family gives me shit about it but other that that I've found that most people actually think my hair looks good. Or they lie to me about it. That's just as likely now that I think of it.

 

Granted, I did get a haircut today :lol:

Yeah your hair looks pretty good as far as long hair on guys goes (no homo). But you're definitely in the minority.

[Tesset]

I think the real question is why bald on a female is so looked down on?

[quitthegame]

Because it looks bad.

 

But wait! you say, My hair looks good, it-

 

No. You're wrong. It looks bad. Nobody wanted to tell you because it might hurt your feelings. I too had long hair once. I thought it looked good. I was wrong.

 

Cut your hair, you won't regret it.

Just because your long hair looked bad doesn't mean every other man with long hair looks bad. :wink:

True, not every, but from my (obviously limited) experience in knowing men who have long hair, I would say that it looks bad on the vast majority (and the exceptions tend to be people who would look just as good with short hair anyway).

 

You keep saying that. Are you arguing that:

1. The fundamental laws of the universe cause men to look bad with long hair?

or

2. God makes men look bad with long hair?

or

3. You were socially conditioned to think men look bad with long hair, and are now circularly using the results of your social conditioning to explain the cause of your social conditioning?

 

Surely you understand that the question "why does society dislike men having long hair" is fundamentally inclusive of the question "why does any individual person think men look bad with small hair?", as society is nothing more than the aggregate of human learned behaviors, being a shorthand for describing the emergent properties of such? Obviously then, whether or not you find is unattractive doesn't answer the question, only you analyzing why that is so would be helpful. Currently, your answer to the original question equates to "because it does." That is not responsive.

[quitthegame]

Currently, your answer to the original question equates to "because it does." That is not responsive.

Well if you'd like me to rephrase it then the answer is association. The majority of people don't have long hair --> some of those who do "look bad" from an objective standpoint (greasy, unkempt, whatever) --> by association, long hair "looks bad"

 

Works for other things too - The majority of people don't wear this shirt --> famous person wearing the shirt "looks good" objectively --> by association, it is a good shirt / looks good

 

Most people just skip the association and go right to the conclusion, however. Some people who have long hair look bad --> long hair looks bad, or in other words long hair looks bad "because it does".

 

There are other reasons such as looking feminine in a masculine culture, etc. but those don't matter nearly as much as what has become the universal western perception of long hair i.e. that it looks bad.

 

"Well if you'd like me to rephrase it then the answer is association. The majority of people don't have long hair --> some of those who do "look bad" from an objective standpoint (greasy, unkempt, whatever) --> by association, long hair "looks bad""

 

That doesn't make sense. If we accept that chain of logic, then we can identically argue: "Some people with short hair look bad for the reason of (funny ears, dry, oddly shaped skull, whatever) --> by association, short hair 'looks bad' " Unless you think that every single person on this earth with short hair looks great, you're going to need a more refined argument. Or actually, your argument against long hair works equally well for women and men, as stated, so unless you mean to argue that women and men should all get buzzcuts, you're going to need to refine your argument in that respect as well. Really, if you're arguing that women should go Mr. Clean totally baldy look, then you aren't answering the question, but taking issue with the asker's assumptions, anyway.

 

Also, that argument doesn't address the fact that at times in the past, long hair has been accepted as "looking good" for men, but at other times it doesn't.', which again should be answered or your disagreement with that assumption stated.

 

Fundamentally, your argument is logically circular. Your concept of "association" and shortcuts doesn't erase the circularity. It is true that sometimes a positive feedback cycle occurs between a feature and the opinion of the feature over time, in fact it is almost certain that it occurred in this exact subject; but as we saw in your examples above, merely claiming "association" amounts to little more than handwaving. It is necessary to distinguish the operation of the feedback cycle, to render the results distinguishable between populations and times, thereby to provide any explanatory power in regards to causation. If you examine my post I made above beginning with "a lot of answers..." , you'll notice that my basic point was pretty much "association", except I was careful to distinguish why it affected men but not women, and in the past century and not before. When you skip crucial steps like that, then your shortcut is a foolish one.

 

I'm going to copy your logical structure again in an exaggerated fashion, to poke a little fun :P

 

*shows you a picture, with the ugliest person in the world, wearing a shirt*

 

One person wearing a shirt instead of being fully nude is the ugliest person in the world --> Wearing a shirt instead of being fully nude makes you the ugliest person in the world , or in other words because it does.

 

Does that argument persuade you to go to work or school wearing no clothes, like the emperor from the fable? Let me know if it does, I'm staying home that day.

 

p.s.--personally I had long hair for a few years in high school as part of a "rebellious" period, and have had extremely short hair ever since. So we clearly share the same social conditioning, and we both acknowledge that we do, but your explication of how that social conditioning came about has some logical flaws, as above.

Edited December 26, 2011 by delapaz

[Randox]

Reductio ad absurdum can be a nice way of proving a point, as long as you acknowledge what your doing. I think I might have lost you though.

 

I think part of it is accepted norms. Most guys have short hair, at least in this Continent, so that is the accepted norm. To our minds, a normal male has short hair. So anyone with long hair is automatically abnormal. This is why guys grow long hair to rebel. Assuming that most people are healthy to the casual observer, then being healthy is also an accepted norm. Accepted norms can become lumped together, so in a very roundabout way, short hair is equated with things like being healthy, and not being a rebellious prick. Since what we are attracted too is our minds way of guiding us to whatever it thinks is an acceptable or desirable mate, abnormal traits are a problem. While short hair =/= healthy, and even your mind isn't going to see the issue as that black and white, abnormal can mean undesirable, unless the abnormal trait provides an observable advantage.

 

Now lets consider that most guys, objectively, take really bad care of their long hair, in that it is either messy, or greasy, or it smells bad, or a combination. Your brain is going to equate this with things like lazy and dirty, which translate into poor provider and sick. By association, this leads to long hair being categorized as an undesirable trait. Because it is outside of the accepted norm, then baring any other distinguishing feature, long hair is going to become linked to all the things you notice about people who have long hair. That the grease and stink are actually in the hair is a fluke. It would work just the same as if 90% of the people you ever met smelled like they just shit themselves. Your brain would eventually learn that people with long hair shit themselves.

 

Also, we are much more likely to pick up on the negative than the positive. This is useful in a survival setting because it means we don't have to eat the poisonous berries that look and smell and taste the same as the delicious berries 30 times to figure out that berries that look and taste and smell like that might make us sick. even if we got the good ones the first 100 times, if we got the bad ones, and that was all we ate all day, and it made us sick, we would stop eating both kinds. Likewise, the sabre-toothed tiger only has to attack you once for you to avoid it. It also means that or minds are extremly discriminating, which is part of why you end up with sexist and racist people. Some guy has a really bad experience with one girl, and his mind ends up projecting that onto every other girl on the planet. My point here is that you don't even need a majority of guys with long hair to be objectively repulsive. If its bad enough, it would only take one.

 

Since the chances are that you are going to run into some gross, long man (head) hair before you hit puberty, it is very possible for these undesirable traits to map themselves onto the part of the brain that tells you who is a desirable mate. In other words, it will become part of what you consider to be attractive or unattractive. The reverse (*really* positive experiences) are thought to be how people might form a fetish.

 

A little tired, so I hope that was all largely coherent, and didn't jump around to much.

[quitthegame]

Reductio ad absurdum can be a nice way of proving a point, as long as you acknowledge what your doing. I think I might have lost you though.

 

The reductio ad absurdum was amusing. The fact that his argument in that post about why guys with long hair look bad never even mentioned guys was sufficient to prove him wrong :P But yes, reductio ad absurdum is useful here mainly because it illustrates with an entire sheaf of examples why the argument is flawed, to show that the logical structure is underdetermined.

 

Now lets consider that most guys, objectively, take really bad care of their long hair, in that it is either messy, or greasy, or it smells bad, or a combination.

 

 

Yes, he said the same thing as well. This argument suffers from several defects. First, it doesn't explain why at some historical times, long hair on men was ok. Second, it is a proximate cause, that argues from statistical evidence based on what people have observed in men and women. This carries both the risk of confusing correlation with causation, and the risk that the ultimate cause is more explanatory and general. In this case, the ultimate cause would probably give the benefit of answering the historical question, as well as negate the correlation/causation uncertainty. Also, we have the questions left, even assuming that your statistics are 100% true, "why do guys with long hair not take care of it?", and "why do men and women take different care of their hair?" I'm not really able to explain perfectly how to distinguish at what level of precision a question should be answered with any generality, English isn't that precise of a language, but I can offer an example. If I asked you "why is the sky blue", and you answered "the human eye perceives light waves between the wavelengths of x and y as blue, and that's what the sky is usually dominated by," I've answered your question with a reasonable of accuracy and precision, (not being very precise on how mixed spectra are perceived by the nervous system) but if my question had been "why is our sky blue except at sunset and sunrise", then the above answer is still accurate but no longer precise, as you've omitted some of the causative factors. The answer you guys are giving to this question is more analogous to a situation where I'm asking "why is the sky blue", and you're answering "because it's 2 pm, and not cloudy". No [kale], Sherlock. As we can see, truth and direct responsiveness is not enough to make an answer a quality one. The answer must also operate at the proper level of abstraction.

[Randox]

Delapaz, you and I should debate more often. I know it would help me improve at least.

 

Something interesting I am finding trying to support the long hair being unattractive because most guys don't take care of it, is that I cant do it. It actually doesn't fit. I understand reasonably well how the mind associates experiences with traits, but its just not jiving here. At least not using the greasy hair argument. The problem is that the cause is to observable. Also, if it happened this way, you would think that al guys with long hair have greasy hair. That's how the link would form.

 

Whether it looks good or not is going to come down to accepted norms, and I don't really want to get into the concept of fashion because I am not qualified to speak on that subject. That is incredibly complicated and not entirely understood psychology, and also way beyond the original scope of this thread.

 

Instead, I am going to take society not liking long hair on guys not to mean that it looks bad, but that it would be a hindering feature when trying to get a job (for most jobs).

 

First off, the fact that most men don't have long hair now is very important. The more guys with long hair, who are outside the stereotypes that I am about to touch on there are, the less this can hold true (and the more society would accept them).

 

Second, the fact that long hair would appear to be linked to very specific personalities and phases of emotional development. Also note that the fact I can lump people up like this with ease is a sign of how ingrained these stereotypes are in my mind, which means you get to see my bias (I get to see it too, which is fun).

-Hippies (long hair, braided, they tend to smell bad/like pot)

-Stoner artists/musicians (long hair, not greying, tied in a pony tail)

-Professors in thought subjects like psychology and philosophy (long white or grey hair, tied in a pony tail) [the wise old man]

-Rebellious (long hair, teenager)

 

I haven't put long untied hair on the list because I have association for it. On a related note, if I were hiring people for a job people that fall into the first, second (unless its a music or art related job), and fourth categories would be more likely to get rejected by me. The third would be highly specific to the job, more so than I will explain here. So if you want to get a job from me and you have long hair, your best bet would be to wash it, and not tie of braid it, or long story short, I am going to assume your either lazy or have bad attitude. And its not going to be a concious thing.

 

As it related to my point, I can't do the same thing for most people with hair that is sub shoulder length, because its so common and the people who have that style are so varied, my mind cant find enough correlation to link a personality trait to it. The exception here would be what I am going to call the punk styles (mohawk, spikes, shaving part of your head, shaving letters into your hair etc). Lumped together those are the worst possible hairstyles you could have in a job interview with me, because I am flat out going to deny you the job.

 

As to the history point, when long hair was the norm, it would be like generic short hair is now. It was normal, and your brain wouldn't be able to link it to personality traits. It takes a lot of people doing something different to make something new an accepted norm, and long hair on guys hasn't reached that point yet.

[quitthegame]

 

 

Something interesting I am finding trying to support the long hair being unattractive because most guys don't take care of it, is that I cant do it. It actually doesn't fit. I understand reasonably well how the mind associates experiences with traits, but its just not jiving here. At least not using the greasy hair argument. The problem is that the cause is to observable. Also, if it happened this way, you would think that al guys with long hair have greasy hair. That's how the link would form.

 

Not exactly...you can prove sometimes prove causation even with a correlation below one. The problem is that correlation is not always causation in the desired direction, or even either direction, even if the correlation is 1 to 1. I.e., long greasy hair on a man, society's dislike of men with long hair, which is the chicken and which is the egg? The rest of your post is basically working out that the causation goes both ways, which points us in the direction of thinking that perhaps we're looking at a proximate cause here, and looking for a deeper cause that explains the two-way causation.

 

Correlation/causation: Every person taking anti-baldness medication is bald. Therefore, taking anti-baldness medication causes baldness. -- example of correlation of 1, but causation goes one way only.

 

The first ship headed to a particular island sinks, the only ship that sinks in the world that day. Being on a ship headed to Island A, and being on a ship that sunk on Date B, have a correlation of 1. Yet, causation doesn't go either way. It's just a coincidence, despite being perfectly correlated.

 

Men are generally taller than women. This is a correlation much less than 1, and yet being a man rather than a woman does have some causative factor on your height.

 

Again, the point is that the argument above is not strictly false, just that it doesn't capture the whole picture.

[Randox]

Ha, if I wanted to capture the whole picture I'd probably need to take a couple extra courses, and I'd be writing a book :P

 

Human dynamics are very tricky. I just feel that argument I presented is the most likely scenario for the majority of cases.

 

Also, there is something to be said about the society not liking men with long hair because society doesn't like men with long hair argument (a circular argument). The problem here is that at the end of the day, none of us can be entirely certain where our biases come from, or why we like or dislike certain things so much. It might not be the real reason, but it is the reason as far as we know, because we cant know the underlying cause. We are not privy to our own learning process, in that we can't observe it in ourself, and there are limits in what you can observe in others. This makes it a very difficult point to argue. On a side note, I would love for there to be a way to hook you concious mind into your unconscious mind so that you can observe how it thinks. I figure dreams are about as close as we will ever get, and if dreams are anything to go by, we would probably never be able to make sense of it anyway.

[quitthegame]

the thing is ring_world, if you posted that only pretending you'd tldr'd the entire thread as a troll, it'd be even funnier than if unintentionally. How rare is that?

[Duff]

'tldr'ing happens all the time. Why point it out?

[quitthegame]

'tldr'ing happens all the time. Why point it out?

 

pointing out tldr'ing happens all the time. Why point it out? :-o

[Duff]

Pointing out that someone else probably didn't read the whole thread? Not at all. :s

[Ouchy]

I see nothing wrong with not reading the whole thread first and contributing. In fact, I'm going to do it right now.

 

 

Personally, I dislike men that have long hair because it just looks dirty. It almost seems lazy, they can't be bothered getting it cut.

[quitthegame]

I see nothing wrong with not reading the whole thread first and contributing. In fact, I'm going to do it right now.

 

 

Personally, I dislike men that have long hair because it just looks dirty. It almost seems lazy, they can't be bothered getting it cut.

 

It has a spammy effect, as 80% of the people who don't read the thread post the same thing. Whatever floats your long-haired boat.

[Duff]

I'll make sure to call you out on every post you make in a thread with more than 20 pages then, cause I can be sure you didn't read through all those pages and post some new idea.

 

Ouchy put it nicely. And if you've been here long enough, most of this entire forum is 'spammy'. That's what makes it fun.