Short Cut to Criticism: Felicia Day's Haircut

TREND OR TRAVESTY? THE TALE OF FELICIA DAY'S HAIR 
By Emily Towsley

Felicia Day, the popular vlogger, and creator of the Geek & Sundry, cut her hair off. Did you know? Or better yet, did you care?

The male blogging world was set ablaze with the news that the geek-girl extraordinaire had chopped off her long ginger locks. “Love your videos, will be back when you grow your hair out” became a hurtful refrain that Day has finally decided to speak out against. 

Though Ms. Day is on the record as stating that “We are gamers first, and female incidentally.” The attacks she was facing over her recent hairstyle choice got her to take a stand for feminism, and against misogynistic trolls.  

In the vein of the blog post “Why Patriarchy fears the Scissors”, Felicia Day posted on her tumblr

her thoughts and opinions on being a woman with a newly chopped coif. 

“My hair doesn’t affect what words come out of my mouth dude? But he can’t see me as anything else I guess. Guys like him tune in because I’m attractive to them. Without long hair, I’m no longer attractive to them. Ergo…goodbye.” 

However Day doesn’t mourn for the loss of these particular fans, “It makes me sad for THEM actually…they might be missing out on meeting an awesome girl/woman for themselves” 

For as Felicia points out, we are still living in a society that treats women as inhuman dolls, whose only real purpose is to be attractive to men. 

This idea that women must be attractive to men, and that long hair is the only attractive option, categorizes women with short hair as destroying their femininity to 'punish' men. To distil the argument even further, “men like long hair, and what sane woman would ever want to do anything that decreases her capacity to please men?” 

When the argument is brought down to its brass tacks like that, it’s easy to understand why criticising women for cutting their hair is uncomfortable, and inherently misogynistic. 

To take it one step further the manosphere decided to protest her new chopped ‘do by placing before and after pictures of Felicia Day side by side, with captions like “What boyfriend allowed this type of self-harm?”  

The kicker? The before picture was not even a picture of Ms. Day. These fans had reduced her traits to her hair, and did not even know what her face looked like behind the ginger locks. 

Felicia’s conclusion; “Think I’ll be keeping my hair short for a long time”

I think we can look forward to witty and on-point contributions from Felicia Day in the future, no matter the length of her hair. 

Emily Towsley, can be found either teasing her cat, or philosophizing with a customer over coffee in her second-life as a barista. Messages of support regarding her addiction to Netflix, and news of vintage teacup sales can be left on her twitter.  Her spare time is spent reading copious amounts of books,  or working on her latest blog.