Until then, it had been short my whole life. Short hair was as much a part of my personality as being smart, or having a dopey sense of humor, or reading a lot, or liking to draw. In high school, I took so much flak from the jocks and the girls we called bops because of all these things, but mostly because of the haircut. I was called a freak every day, and a fucking dyke bitch most days. High school was horrible. Absolutely horrible. Obviously, I don't blame all of that on my haircut, but it really made me stand out; it attracted attention of the negative kind.

All that time, even though I had short-hair pride, I had this long-hair complex. Long-haired women are the most visible sex symbols in our society, and women are constantly being told "men hate short hair!" Most models of the beautiful variety, rather than just the strange-looking-clothes-hanger variety, have long, flowing hair. Long hair equals femininity in a very real sense. I'd hear songs like "Five O'Clock World"--"there's a long-haired girl who waits, I know, to ease my troubled mind"--and feel so left out.

So I grew it out. It got so long that it was mermaid-length, or riding-a-horse-topless-through-the-town length. I became a long-haired girl. The strange thing is, I still thought of myself as a short-haired girl. I read the missed connections for short-haired brunettes without remembering that I had, in fact, very long hair. There's a sorority of sorts of short-haired girls, and I felt as though I belonged to it, even while they must have viewed me as just another long-hair.

I started thinking a lot about cutting it off again. And finally I did it. It was a hard decision. But I realized that short hair is just more me, and I missed it. As much as I'd love to be a '60s French pop star, I'm not. When the spring semester started, one of my classmates had cut her mid-back-length hair to a chin-length, swingy bob, and she looked fantastic. It gave me the push I needed, and in January I went to Mane Attraction (I love salons with puns in their names) in San Francisco's Cole Valley, where Lesley cut a foot off of it.

The first people who saw my haircut scared me with their reactions. Pizza Pants' own Eric Wilinski happened to run into me literally two minutes after I left the salon. I pointed out to him that I had cut my hair, and he said, "You sure did" and sidled away. The first person to see me at school post-haircut was Oran, who just looked at me with his mouth agape, saying nothing, looking alarmed. But right after that, Piper yelled "I love it!" before she even said hello, and people at work gushed over how great I looked, and all my doubts were gone.

Long-haired women often say they wish they could cut their hair off. They say it must be so much easier, it has so much more of a real style, it's so cute . . . but men don't like it, right? Let's examine this misconception.

Next: irrefutable proof that men like short hair.