Charmed actor Rose McGowan has revealed that she was told to grow her hair longer or else it would cost her acting jobs and make her less desirable to men.
Imagine how tired we are of this casual misogyny.
The 46-year-old, who spearheaded the campaign against justice against disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, spoke candidly to Hunger Magazine about the “gender illusion”.
Shaving her head weeks after the unfolding scandal shook Hollywood, McGowan, who is non-binary, gave the lowdown on why the maintained her long locks for so long; to be more desirable to men.
Rose McGowan: ‘The longer my hair is, the less powerful I feel.’
“I always had short hair growing up,” she explained, “then when I was in Hollywood, they told me I had to have long hair otherwise the men wouldn’t want to f**k me.
If they didn’t want to f**k me, they wouldn’t hire me.
“A woman told me that.”
Now rocking a shaved head, McGowan explained: “The longer my hair is, the less powerful I feel.
“The side-effect I noticed when I shaved my head is that men could hear the words coming out of my mouth for the first time. They couldn’t hear me before.
“I had not expected that.”
Standing at the forefront of the Me Too movement, McGowan was a pioneer for woman after she spoke publicly about a 1997 hotel room encounter with Weinstein.
Through lawyers, she alleged that the director offered her one million dollars in his money. It was the apex of her activism at the time, having emerged as a fiery feminist and staunch LGBT+ campaigner over the years.
Decades of alleged sexual assault, aggression and misconduct towards women were raised to the public eye by accusers. Weinstein, his accusers say, has built a lengthy history gambling on women’s silence on such a sensitive matter.
Weinstein has continued to deny these allegations.
‘My heart breaks for boys when I see them being moulded into men,’ says Scream star.
In the interview, McGowan later added that she finds it “really stupid” when asked how “men know if they’re allowed to flirt anymore”.
McGowan wished for that question to no longer be asked: “It makes me want to bang my head against the ground. If you’re not grabbing people against their will, you should be OK.”
“If you’re not punishing them for not going out with you, you should be okay. If you’re not seeking revenge because this girl doesn’t like you, you should be OK.
“It’s fine to flirt but it’s another thing when someone buys you a drink and thinks they own your hour or that night.”
Moreover, meting her views on masculinity, she said that the expression means men are “trapped […] in a really unfair way by an unfair system.
“My heart breaks for boys when I see them being moulded into men.
“If we could get back to understanding that we’re human before we’re a gender, then we could solve a lot of problems.”