FASHION : The Long and Short of It : He says: “Think of Merle Oberon’s Cathy, wandering wind-swept among the heather.”

All across America, or so it seems, women are ready, willing and able to trim their hair to a manageable, sensible length, to snip it in a manner that looks both fashionably attractive and suitable to the demands of their current station in life. The only thing that stands in their way, apparently, is a race of primitive, doltish men who take a certain Neolithic delight in seeing it long.

As a dolt in good standing, I have been asked to expound on this subject, to explain, if you please, why my gender seeks to burden its opposite number with this most hellish of preferences.

This is a subject close to my heart in more ways than one, because I know from personal experience both the pleasures of long hair and how liberating it can be to finally cut it all off.

For more years than I want to remember, I wore my own dark, straight hair in a major ponytail that extended to the middle of my back. It was hard to deal with, took forever to dry, occasionally (no kidding) caught on fire and was a serious handicap on my job.

I was a sportswriter in those days, a frequent visitor to locker rooms where professional athletes dwelt in crew-cut majesty. One ballplayer, a 20-game winner named Denny McLain who pitched for the Detroit Tigers, once obsessively chased me around the room wielding scissors and screaming, “What’s the matter, your barber die?”

One day, the inconveniences finally got to me, and I can still remember what a sense of relief I felt when my hair was finally reduced to a manageable length. Hair had run my life for too long. It was time to get a grip on it, both literally and figuratively. At last I was in charge of the damn thing, not the other way around.

Yet, though I’ve never allowed my hair to get too out of hand again, I retain a certain fondness for the way I felt in those far-off days, and, frankly, the way I felt about myself in long hair is philosophically akin to why I am a partisan of it on women.

Bringing philosophical concepts into a discussion of the attractiveness of long hair may sound like saying you frequent mud-wrestling establishments only to do sociological research, and I would be the last to deny that simple and unanalyzable personal preference plays its part. But, the more I think about it, the more I know that there is another factor involved, a factor I’ll call the romantic.

I don’t mean romantic in the let’s-spend-the-night-together sense, but rather in terms of Romanticism, that durable 19th-Century school of thought that placed a premium on self-expression, imagination and the infinite variety of human potential. When I wore long hair myself, it was a short cut, if you will, to identifying myself with those who shared those sentiments.

Similarly, when I see long hair on a woman I sense not someone who is heedlessly impractical, a slave to the wishes of others or unwilling to face the daunting responsibilities of adulthood, but rather a person who connects with that timeless feeling that life still has adventures to offer, who believes that the future does not have to be cut, blow-dried and preordained. Long hair means possibilities to me, doing and experiencing things that my short-haired self might be too hidebound to come up with on its own.

It was the movies of Hollywood and elsewhere that ingrained this feeling in me when I was too young to resist. Though one of the most untamed of all cinema heroines was Jean Seberg’s short-haired Herald Tribune-selling hoyden in “Breathless,” most movie women who have a romantic soul had long hair to go along with it.

Think of Merle Oberon’s Cathy, wandering wind-swept among the heather and remembering Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights.” Of peek-a-boo vagabond Veronica Lake lighting a fire under director Joel McCrea in Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels.” Of Rita Hayworth shaking her head and singing “Put the Blame on Mame” in “Gilda.” Of Scarlett O’Hara remembering that tomorrow is another day. Not a short hair in the bunch.

Of course, the sensible side of me, the side that had my own hair cut when it got out of hand, knows that all this couldn’t be sillier, and personal experience has proved, more often than I care to remember, that hair length no more indicates a woman’s character and predilections than it does a man’s.

But I can’t seem to help myself. I still have a tendency to let my own hair get longer than anyone I know thinks I should, and I like to see women doing the same. I’ve been granted only one way to dream, and I have to make the best of it.