Real Men Have Short Hair

Welcome to the 1950s, gents. These are the haircuts you can choose from.

A male character has hair that is longer than is typical among individuals of his gender. Another character doesn't like this. He or she will lash out at the long-haired individual, mocking him, putting him down, perhaps comparing him to a girl, and likely telling him to cut his hair, possibly using an injunction like "Get a haircut, you darn hippie!" Or, said critic will be talking behind the character's back disparaging him or similar men in general, possibly ranting about how longhairs and hippies will be the end of decent society as we know it. Whether a longhair will cave in to the pressure and get a more conventional haircut or stick by his style choice will depend on the story. In some cases, the character will be shown undergoing the Important Haircut that brings his appearance into line with society's expectations. In certain cases, the haircut will be coerced, resulting in a Traumatic Haircut that may engender further plot-driving consequences.

Hair style and length have been gender markers since time immemorial. With certain exceptions, short hair has traditionally been seen as masculine and long hair as feminine in the West. By The '50s, a clean, professional haircut was the expected 'do for a put-together man. However, this is nowadays a mostly Discredited Trope, as long-haired men have become more socially accepted since the late 20th century. And of course, the Long-Haired Pretty Boy has always scoffed at the notion that long hair is unmanly.

This is a sister trope to Facial Scruff, where someone dislikes the idea of a man sporting facial hair. Compare Bald Head of Toughness, which can be considered a more extreme version of this trope; Boyish Short Hair, where a female character's haircut marks her out as mannish or tomboyish, and Long Hair Is Feminine, where long hair is considered a hallmark of womanhood. Likewise, this is a Sub-Trope of Men Are Tough, as short hair is usually more practical and less "delicate" than long hair. Contrast Barbarian Long Hair, where long hair is a marker of a member of a primeval warrior society.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Yu-Gi-Oh!, a gym coach sees Bakura and pulls his hair while saying it's against the rules for a boy to have hair that long. He then tells Bakura to get a crew cut by the next day; this leads to the coach being Yami Bakura's first on-screen victim.
• Horimiya: Miyamura cuts his hair after his relationship with Hori goes public, not wanting Hori to be ostracized for dating "the weirdo with the long hair". Hori, who liked him better with long hair, is less than pleased at this development.

Films — Live-Action

• In the 1964 comedy Good Neighbor Sam, there is a scene where the titular character is talking contemptuously about Howard, his neighbor's estranged husband. Howard's hair is well-groomed and full, but still within the bounds of what would be considered short. Sam, however, voices a suspicion that he wears a toupee; when told that it's his own hair, he retorts: "Well, then he must go to a hairstylist or something. He wouldn't go to a regular barber. Anybody with a head of hair like that's gotta go to a hairstylist. He's just vain, huh?"
• In Alice's Restaurant, the protagonist gets assaulted in a restaurant and pushed out through the windowpane due to his long hair. The police arrest him instead of the perpetrators. He keeps his hair under his hat when hitching a ride in a truck. On entering, he lets his hair out, and the driver gives him a look of surprise and possibly also of regret that he had picked him up.
• In Coming to America, Akeem already has short hair but also sports a braid at the back of his head that he has been growing for years. On coming to America, it crosses his mind that he could get rid of it. He eventually goes to the barbershop, where he only tells the barber to just make his hair look nice and neat; the barber cuts the braid off and asks for $8 for the job. Likewise, Akeem's long-lost son Lavelle in Coming 2 America only begins maturing after he first gets a hairstyle proper for his Zamundan heritage, and then getting the resulting braid cut off when he decides to do things in his own way rather than Akeem's way.
• In Goodbye Christopher Robin, CR is immediately bullied by other boys on being left at the boarding school. One of them mocks him for his longer hair, saying he looks like a girl.
• Implied in the film If, in which the boys in a strict boarding school are frequently berated for having long hair.
• The eponymous protagonist of the indie film Clipping Adam is made fun of by the other boys in his neighbourhood for his long hair, at one point being held down when they try and cut it off. In this case however, the long hair has a Freudian Excuse; his mother used to cut it for him and he hasn't cut it since she died. The ending shows him getting an Important Haircut from his father as a moment of character growth (though we never see the end result, so we don't know how short it gets).
• The film version of Fahrenheit 451 has a brief propaganda video that depicts a long-haired man being tackled by police and having it forcibly cut off, the narration declaring him a Know-Nothing Know-It-All.
• In Remember the Titans, long-haired Ronnie "Sunshine" Bass shows up to try out for the football team. After seeing how far he can throw the ball, Coach Yoast lets him join — on one condition. Cut to Sunshine in front of a mirror, slightly annoyed at his shorter (barely shoulder-length) hair. Unclear whether it's an issue with his masculinity or simply avoiding giving opposing players something to grab.

Literature

• The Dursleys of Harry Potter are extremely conservative, and disapprove of Harry's Messy Hair, feeling it makes him look like a delinquent. There's mention of one incident where Aunt Petunia gets annoyed at how his haircuts never go short enough and cuts it all off herself (and is then even more annoyed when it magically grows back overnight).
• Matilda: The brutal headmistress Miss Trunchbull dislikes long hair on boys (as well as pigtails on girls). To show her dislike, she holds one long-haired boy in the air by his hair.
  Miss Trunchbull: I'll start jerking you up and down, and then your hair really will come out, and we'll have enough of it to stuff a sofa!
• Mop Top: This 1955 picture book by Don Freeman tells a story in which a boy is basically shamed into willingly accepting society's norms about male hair. The boy is nicknamed Moppy because he doesn't like having his hair cut. Just before his birthday, his mother gives him money and tells him to go to the barber's, where he has an appointment for a haircut. Moppy goes to town but avoids the barbershop; negative comments from other townspeople don't sway him in any way, but then he hides out in a store, where his head is mistaken for an actual mop. This causes Moppy to suddenly want a haircut; he goes straight to the barber and begs him to give him a haircut. Afterwards he is happy and only at the very end of the story is he referred to not as Moppy but by his actual name.
• Wizard and Glass: Eldred Jonas, leader of the Big Coffin Hunters, sports a head of long white hair. Some characters disparage it, saying he has a girl's hair, but notably no one will do it with Jonas in earshot.
• In The Beginning After the End, Arthur starts to keep his hair slightly long with a short ponytail when he becomes a teenager. When one of his future teachers at Xyrus Academy bumps into him, he’s quick to tell him that a real man must have his hair short and his muscles big (like himself). Arthur being Arthur, he offers a Death Glare for all response and casually walks away, leaving the teacher speechless and slightly frightened.

Live-Action TV

• Parks and Recreation: Played for laughs, Ron deeply manly character and believes that the only acceptable hairstyles a man or boy can wear are high and tight, crew cuts, and buzz cuts. When put in charge of a boy's basketball team, he makes them follow the "Ron Swanson Pyramid of Greatness" and gives all the boys short-length haircuts.
• Red Dwarf: In "Emohawk: Polymorph II", Rimmer genuinely believes that all the greatest military victories in history were gained by the sides with the shortest haircuts.
• The 2000s reality series That'll Teach Em was about modern teenagers staying in a 1950s style boarding school and being educated by those standards. The boys all had to get regulation haircuts into a short-back-and-sides, and those with longer hairstyles were indeed reprimanded for them. The headmaster even preceded the haircuts by announcing "at the moment, you are nothing more than boys. Our job is to turn you into young men."
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Inverted with Tommy, the team badass green (and later white) ranger, who had long hair and served as both The Big Guy and The Sixth Ranger, and Kimberly, the Valley Girl with short hair (by the midpoint of season 1 she'd evolved into the Class Princess) who were actually a couple until Zeo. Tommy's long hair never was mentioned in relation to his masculinity and Kimberly's short hair was never seen as a subversion of her femininity (the closest it came to even being acknowledged in any way is when she brushed her hair back a lot around Tommy, which is something short-haired girls tend to do to flirt).

Music

• The 1965 Barbarians' song "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl" features a call and response between the lead and backup singers where men with long hair and tight pants are compared to girls and a jab is taken at The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. It's hard to say whether any of the criticism is sincerely meant, or whether the song simply mimics society's naysayers in the way that Yakety Yak mimics a parent telling a teenager what to do.
• The Five Man Electric Band from Canada released "Signs" as a single in 1971. The first stanza details a sign poster with a clear disdain for long hair: "The sign said, 'Long-haired, freaky people / Need not apply.' / So I tucked my hair up under my hat, / And I went in to ask him why."
• George Thorogood And The Destroyers recorded "Get a Haircut and Get a Real Job" as a single from their 1992 album Haircut. It details a beatnik son being harassed by his father to be more like his older brother, Bob: Marine haircut, clean-shaven, office drone.
• Wesley Willis' song "Cut the Mullet", though it seems to target the one particular hairstyle rather than long hair in general.
• Ray Stevens' "The Haircut Song" is about the terrible haircuts he has received from a range of psycho barbers. His description of 'The Macho Barber' and the haircut he gets is as follows:
  It was a macho barbershop. Hairdryers were mounted on a rifle rack. There were no mirrors. The barber chair was a Peterbilt...Barber walked in; he was huge, seven feet tall, three hundred pounds of spring steel and rawhide wearin' a hard hat, chewin' a cigar, had a t-shirt on said, "I hate musicians". Threw me in the chair, sneered and said, "What'll it be pal?" Now a lot of people would be intimidated in a situation like this...I was not. I am what I am, play my piano, and sing my little songs. I looked him right in the eye and I said, "I'm a logger - just up from Coos Bay, Oregon. Been toppin' trees - quite possibly the tough...(cough) toughest man in the entire world". He said, "All right!" he gave me a haircut and I walked out of there friends, my hair was gone! Made Kojak look like William Lee Golden. Yeah, had a tremendous craving to operate heavy equipment.
• Bob Seger, in "Turn the Page", remarks on hearing "all the same old clichés: 'Is that a woman or a man?'"

Myths & Religion

• Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians about hair length: in 1 Corinthians 11:14 "Doth not even nature itself teach you that, if a man hath long hair, it is a shame unto him?" This is followed by 1 Corinthians 11:15 "But if a woman hath long hair, it is a glory to her?" (However, some believe that by using the Greek word "KOME" for the ("long") hair rather than the more generic word for hair "THRIX", he is not primarily referring to the length of the hair but to the idea of long, ornately styled hair (the verb "KOMAO" means "I style the hair". If he really is referring to the long/short male/female hair dichotomy, Saint Paul is in fact contradicting his own holy books, for in the Old Testament story of Sampson, the titular hero derived superhuman strength from his hair. Then again, this is advice from the NEW Testament, not the Old, which has differing guidelines).
• Inverted with Samson, the manliest man in the Bible, who derived his strength from his long hair.

Theatre

• Tom of Tea And Sympathy is Mistaken for Gay by his peers for his sensitivity, and a symptom of this is his hair being longer than the crew cuts the other boys sport. His hair is still quite short by modern standards however. The film has his strict father taking him to a barber's, but Tom lucks out when the place closes. He later tells his roommate he tried to get a crewcut to fit in before but "I don't have that kind of head".

Video Games

• Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters: In Bass' ending, Wily shows him the plans for Zero. Bass is not impressed by its appearance.
  Bass: Ha! This girlie-looking, long-haired robot will be the strongest? Don't make me laugh!
• In Team Fortress 2, the Soldier has a crew cut beneath his helmet by default. He also speaks derisively of long hair in many of his voice lines, sometimes vowing to give his opponents haircuts. Ironically, a handful of his cosmetic items gift him a fuller head of hair.
  "Get a haircut, hippie."
  "Get a haircut, trashcans."
  "I am a robot! I am programmed to give you a sensible haircut!"
  "I have returned from the grave to give the living haircuts."

Webcomics

• Ennui GO!: Invoked when Max goes to the music club, dropping into a Heart of Darkness-esque monologue.
  I felt like a man with long hair, facing a Cracker Barrel filled with old men. I was not welcome here.
• In El Goonish Shive, Tedd averts this intentionally to distract from his naturally feminine face.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons: In "Mother Simpson", there is a flashback to 1969 when Homer's parents have the TV on during the Super Bowl. Player Joe Namath appears with flowing, bushy sideburns that impress Mona and stoke in her a wish to take part in the rebelliousness of the era; Abe, on the other hand, whines: "Look at them sideburns! He looks like a girl!" He continues: "Now, Johnny Unitas - there's a haircut you could set your watch to!" (Closeup of Unitas with a crew cut/flattop-type style).
• King of the Hill: In "Reborn To Be Wild." When asked by a pastor of a religious group that mixes Christianity with rock music if Bobby being a good Christian was more important than having a proper haircut, Hank responds that he's not stopping until he has both.
  Pastor: Even Jesus had long hair.
  Hank: Only because I wasn't his father.
• American Dad!: In "Son of Stan", Stan and Francine challenge each other to see who's the better parent by cloning Steve. Stan believes Steve should be raised with discipline while Francine believes Steve only needs love and support. To tell the two apart, the clone is named "Steve-arino" and his head is shaved into a flat top hairstyle. At the end of the challenge, Steve-arino is shown to be clean, athletic, and intelligent, while Steve is shown to be an overweight, greasy slob with messy, overgrown hair. Comparing the two, Stan calls himself the victor until it's revealed that Stan's role as disciplinarian drove Steve-arino away and made him a psychopath out of envy towards Steve's freedom to do what he pleases.
• In the Family Guy episode "Who's Brian Now?'', Peter's barber dies and Peter responds by immaturely refusing to cut his hair. It gradually becomes shoulder-length, greasy, and unkempt as it emphasises his immaturity and he eventually becomes a redneck who makes moonshine. When Peter's hair is eventually cut after being caught in a garage door, Lois is relieved.

Real Life

• As stated above, in the Anglosphere and much of the rest of the world, long hair was pretty much socially unacceptable on men from somewhere during the first half of the 20th century through much of The '60s, only becoming sufficiently mainstream in The '70s. During the heyday of short hair in the 1950s, no "normal" man would have worn his hair over his ears or touching his collar. The trope was finally challenged in the 1960s, apparently first by certain young English men who called themselves beatniks, but were really a subculture of nomadic proto-hippies. Then came the Beatles with their mop-top hairstyles, which appears to have done a lot to popularize longer styles among those men who had not dropped out of mainstream society. By the end of the decade, long hair, while still controversial, was not a rare sight, becoming more common especially on teenagers and pop musicians. By the mid-1970s, longer styles for men were very much in fashion and very short hair was outmoded. Since that time, long hair on men has been in and out of fashion at different times.
• As recently as the 1960s, Disneyland would turn away long-haired men who attempted to enter the premises.
• Most militaries and many police and fire departments ban long hair on men^note Long hair, especially long, uneven hair, leads to improperly fitting helmets, and worse yet, CBRN equipment, and on a sidenote, requires more work to keep clean than a close crop. When women first entered the military, several allowances were made for gender norms of the time, starting with loosened hair restrictions and extending to allowing jewelry and other such impractical things..
• This trope is very much alive in certain Asian countries. Perhaps the most extreme example is the Orwellian North Korea, where men are highly encouraged or even flat-out required to have short, clean-cut haircuts no longer than 5 centimeters on top (7 centimeters being allowed for covering baldness in men over 50). A television program on this subject entitled Let's Trim Our Hair According to the Socialist Lifestyle, which outlined acceptable hairstyles for men and attempted to pressure and shame those who sport longer hair into cutting it, was aired in 2004-2005.
• The mullahs of Iran have decreed that men caught wearing a mullet may be put to death by beheading. Though there's nothing in Iranian law about this, the mullahs pretty much can invoke Screw the Rules, I Make Them!.
• For many trans men, cutting long hair short often marks a major step in transitioning.
• Despite its perception as being an Older Than Dirt trope with many claiming that it has to do with biology dating back to prehistoric times, in reality it's very much Newer Than They Think, only dating back 200 years in any form. Men doing away with long hair had nothing to with their masculinity but for practical reasons in The Industrial Revolution. Long hair would be far more often caught in the machinery and so men would cut their hair for safety reasons. Up through the early 19th century, long hair had associations with wild, untamed men, and was seen as more of a status symbol of belonging to a lower social class.

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