BY Lisa Whittington-Hill
Photography by David Appleby
When V for Vendetta was released, the film generated some controversy. Can a terrorist really be a hero? Can thoughtful political commentary on life in a post 9-11, Orwellian state really sell at the box office or would moviegoers rather see Rumor Has It? Most importantly, did you hear A-list actress Natalie Portman shaved her head for the movie?
For some reason Portman’s bad hair day was all the media could talk about. She did countless interviews promoting the film and the questions inevitably returned to her hair. Did she know she was going to have to cut it when she took the role? Will it ever grow back? She likes being bald? Really?
Unfortunately, the sight of a woman’s bare scalp still makes society’s hair stand on end. Despite how far we’ve come, beauty and sexuality remain tied to a woman’s hair. “Some people will think I’m a neo-Nazi or that I have cancer or I’m a lesbian,” Portman said post V haircut. Why when we see a bald woman do we assume she’s a lesbian, radical feminist, political extremist or understudy for the role of Lieutenant Ilia in Star Trek?
Like me, Portman doesn’t seem to get the big bald deal. She’s quoted as saying she “was excited to have the opportunity to throw vanity away for a little while and go around with no hair.” She admits she even wanted to, gasp, keep her bald ’do.
Portman is not the first actress to shed her locks for a role. Demi Moore shaved her head for G.I. Jane and moviegoers, in addition to longing for a return to her Striptease days, reacted with the same shock and horror. And like actress Sigourney Weaver (who went bald for Alien 3), Moore doesn’t mind losing her femininity, but it comes with a big price tag. In 2004 it was rumored Moore would shave her head again, but only if $1 million be donated to a charity for women with cancer and the haircut happen at a time convenient for the actress (sorry Ashton, you’ve been punked—your wife has no hair!).
Not to be left out of the bald craze, a recent episode of America’s Next Top Model (don’t be judgin’) had the would-be cover girls get bald for a photo shoot (using skull caps of course). Host Tyra Banks reminded the girls that without their hair they would have to rely on their other facial features to carry their beauty. Eyes and nose, it’s all up to you now! Work it! The results were horrible, if only because the girls have been conditioned to equate beauty with hair and looked lost and incapable of posing without their weaves.
In some cultures bald women signify mourning. During slavery in the US and in the prison camps of Nazi Germany, a woman’s hair was shaved as punishment. Stripped of her hair, she was stripped of her dignity. In the heady days of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s, short hair became the norm for women wanting to challenge traditional notions of femininity and smash the state with a set of scissors. Nowadays, we like our women hairless, just not above the neck.
We describe Captain Picard and Bruce Willis as sexy while anti-Rapunzels are described as rebellious, tough and liberated. Not bad adjectives at all, but sexy rarely enters the equation. If beauty does, it’s often proceeded by the word “unconventional.”
And rather than wearing their politics on their sleeves, bald women are seen to be wearing them on their, well, heads. Sinéad O’Connor’s baldness is regularly mentioned in the same sentence and deemed as subversive as her political lyrics and that time she ripped up a picture of the Pope on national TV and urged viewers to “fight the real enemy.”
Years ago, while in university I shaved my head. At a wedding about a month later, a guest asked what I wanted to be when I graduated. She wasn’t content with my answer of “out of debt,” so I said I wanted to be a journalist. “The world needs more political writers,” she replied. I told her I was more interested in writing about music than politics. (I didn’t know yet that “everything is political.”) “Oh, I just assumed with your haircut you were, you know, ‘political.’” After a few more trips to the open bar I complained to my date about her comments. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s cool. Until you shaved your head, I never realized you had really nice eyes.”
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