Are short-haired women less attractive?

By Marry Elizabeth Williams

It seems impossible — how could Marilyn Monroe be undesirable? Yet in a new interview with Elle, Michelle Williams, who plays the doomed blonde bombshell in “My Week With Marilyn,” admits that her real-life look has never won her too many fans. Speaking about her trademark short-cropped hair, Williams says that “I’ve really grown into it — I feel like myself with short hair. And it’s been a really long time since I had long hair, five years.” But Williams admits that her daughter Matilda “would love … her mum to grow out the cropped hair, though that’s unlikely to happen any time soon.” The only people who like it, she says, are gay men and my girlfriends. “Straight men across the board are not into this hair!” Well, one man was — in a reference to her ex-fiance, Heath Ledger, who died in 2008, she says, “I cut it for the one straight man who has ever liked short hair and I wear it in memorial of somebody who really loved it.”

Why do so many people – from 6-year-old girls to nearly every straight man on the planet – have a thing for long hair? True, the flowing mane has always had a powerful allure – Shakespeare wrote of his lady’s hair as “threads of beaten gold” and wavy-haired ladies milk that pre-Raphaelite thing to this day. But the iconic, much-imitated Dorothy Hamill and Princess Diana cuts trend only briefly, before giving way again to Paris Hilton and Tyra Banks-level super weaves. Gone are the days when you could even have a token Cynthia Nixon short-haired chick on your television ensemble — now it’s all Sofia Vergara and Whitney Cummings. The closest thing to a short-haired TV star is Judge Judy.

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