Tresses and Taboos 2: Depilation = depletion

Baldness is not necessarily a taboo in itself when it occurs naturally, as in most men, or voluntarily: the monks’ tonsure and the barber’s blade. Enforced baldness, however, remains an enduring social taboo. Let's look at each in turn.

Men go bald naturally, on the whole. In the case of male baldness, most men are ambivalent – they’d prefer to have rich, velvety locks as a sign of youth and fertility, but most will eventually, albeit reluctantly, embrace their glabreity. Big hair for men is like big breasts for women: they’d rather have it, until they’re reassured they don’t need it. For personal peace of mind in both cases, attractiveness must be acknowledged not to exist exclusively in that body part, as the subject often mistakenly believes.

If the French woman’s femininity is to be found in her hair, can masculinity to be found in a man’s hair? Is the femininely-coiffured man (who will be examined in the next post on hair and power) a paradigm of masculinity, or a hijacker of femininity?

It seems hard to agree to either claim. Biologically speaking, it is now known that contrary to the folk-belief that power and virility are found in hair, hair loss in men signals an abundance of testosterone. So masculinity, naturally more elusive then femininity (as it is owned by those who coin the terms ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’: men: perhaps male intellectuals find their masculinity in their tablette de chocolat), seems to fall somewhere between the stools of glabrous and hirsute, being found both in the big-balled baldy, and the eroticism of male vanity.

Baldness in men is hardly a taboo, partly because it is so common, and partly because it happens naturally. Voluntary baldness is also not necessarily seen as taboo. In some cases it is a question of power, as with the skinhead, which will be looked at in the next post. I mentioned female tonsure in the previous post with some examples that do not invoke a national backlash, as does female hair covering. But for fashion things are different: a woman shaving her head for fashion is still newsworthy, if not shocking.

My (female, Japanese) hairdresser shaved all her hair off when she was 24 (more than 10 years ago). She told me her father was furious. Perhaps it is shocking to people that a woman might claim power and full ownership over her own hair. If this is true, perhaps the French state claims some kind of ownership of women’s hair in the same way the state ‘owns’ your passport. If you are male, think how you would feel if your sister/daughter/mother/girlfriend shaved her hair off. Would the shock come from the loss of femininity? If you are female, why might you do it? I shaved my head once, I just looked like a bollock. But with my male-pattern baldness spreading like twilight, its time will come again.

Hair acts simultaneously as a teacosy and a carrycase for our pate. Those who have shaved their head down to the bone must have experienced the disarming sense of exposed nakedness and unprotectedness that it causes. Our most important organ, our most human organ, the brain, is located balanced on top of our bodies, like a coconut waiting to be knocked of its shy. It is cased within just a centimetre of bone, and cushioned in water. Hair is not armour: its thin covering offers no additional protection to the skull. It offers only token defense, it is an impersonation of resistance. Its contribution is psychological: it serves to disguise the vulnerability of our crania. Baldness does not increase the skull’s fragility, it is fragile in any case. Instead baldness is the unmasking of poor design, it is a smokescreen to the trade-off between brain size and birth canal. The skull is exposed to be our Achilles heel.

Involuntarily imposed baldness, on the other hand, retains all the power and strength of the taboos of primitive man. One of the continuing taboos of illness is the loss of hair. This may be from the illness itself, or from a major invasive treatment like chemotherapy. Cancer is by far the biggest killer in the West, and yet the side-effects of its most effective treatment is strong enough to make a pariah of the patient. Would a French intellectual openly demand that a cancer-suffering French woman must wear a wig, because otherwise she lacked femininity, and was therefore un-French, un-Western?

Perhaps the French intellectuals (when they spoke out against the lack of visible hair of the Muslims) were familiar with an example of another shaving taboo: the ritual head-shaving of women imparted by the French resistance on collaborators. Certainly performed as an act of humiliation, the shame can be ascribed to the belief held by both perpetrator and victim that her femininity, and hence her identity, was found in her hair. Perhaps the act would not have been so damning had hair not had the powerful symbolic status it did.

Another well known ritual of shaving is entry into the army. At the end of the process, all the soldiers, until they become familiar with their new selves, look exactly the same: their identity has been shorn, along with their hair, instilling them into their new life as tiny meaningless cogs in a giant allegorical weapon. The army may claim that the shearing of locks is solely hygienic, but of course there is no such simplistic teleology. Ritual marine shaving, making man into monkey, is a purely symbolic act of self-negation. It is the equivalent of entering prison for the first time, handing over all your belongings, clothes, identification, and taking in return standard issue clothing: a person becoming a convict, as the soldiers walk into the barber’s hall civilians, and walk out tools. The removal of hair is the removal of self, an exchange of "I" for "Us". I remember hearing Germaine Greer once say that rapists should have their heads shaved and painted red. As well as ensuring they would look like giant walking cocks, they would also enter the shaven social subset – the non-civilian, the marked-out, the nonperson.

The loss of hair that is the only determining and sufficient characteristic of loss in all these cases, underlining just how strong a symbol of identity, selfhood and uniqueness it is. Loss of hair symbolises the loss of femininity, ejection from the social norm, the loss of (French) Western-ness, the loss of virility, the loss of social acceptability, the loss of individuality, the loss of health, the loss of sexuality.

Since depilation has such strong connotations of depletion, it is no wonder that hair ownership has such strong associations with power.