How did it become the norm that most men have shorter hair while women have longer hair? Have men (in general) always been more attracted to females with longer hair and females to men with shorter hair, or is it something we’ve grown to prefer because the opposite gender usually had that hairstyle?

Before the Norman Conquest of 1066, the fashion in Anglo-Saxon England was for men to have long, groomed hair. Various accounts of the Battle of Hastings record, and alternately mock, the varying standards of what passed as masculine fashions between the long-haired and tunic-ed English and the close-cropped and trousered Normans.

In his Gesta Guillelmi, William of Poitiers jested that Harold's English army 'yielded nothing to the beauty of girls' with their luxuriantly long hair, combined with the Anglo-Saxon fashion to wear knee-length tunics often decorated with ornate brooches and other ornate jewellery. In his Carmen de Hastingae, Guy of Amiens is somewhat more cutting, calling the English outright 'nancy boys' for what he deems their feminine hair and clothing.

In contrast, the Norman style at the time was what they deemed hyper-masculine and militarily disciplined, with clean-shaven faces and close-cropped hair, often leaving just a distinctive tuft along the hairline. To the English at the time, these ideas of masculinity were equally as ridiculous as the Normans found the English, with William of Malmesbury recording how the first English scouts to spot William's army in 1066 joked that they must be an army of priests, since no warriors would go so hairless and in such clothing.