One scene within the 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street became a “microcosm for the themes of debauchery and debasement” experienced by some women who worked within the financial world of the Nineteen Nineties (Calautti, 2014). A young worker, amidst the sexually charged, orgiastic atmosphere of your entire trading floor, consents to have her head shorn publicly in exchange for the $10,000 she has promised to spend on breast implants.

Director Martin Scorsese’s camera lingers on this woman within the minutes after her ordeal. Grabbing clumps of her shaved hair, she looks dazed and confused and seems genuinely to not have appreciated what she had just allowed to occur.

The image, apparently based on true events, is awfully disturbing and, though the situations are fundamentally different, calls to mind the general public humiliation experienced by French women who were accused of consorting with German officials in the course of the Occupation of WWII.

In “ritual acts of vengeance,” and with verbal taunts, jeers, and even physical violence, French Resistance fighters forcibly shaved the heads of those shamed women and paraded them through city streets (Deslandes, 2022; Easton, 2022). In response to one source, not less than 20,000 were known to have had their heads shaved as a “mark of retribution and moral outrage” amidst an “ugly carnival” atmosphere of “vicarious eroticism” (Beevor, 2009).

A lot of these French women, whose husbands were away at war, had essentially no selection apart from to make compromises to feed their families. Some were forced to deal with German soldiers, and still others were even falsely accused of collaboration horizontale (Beevor).

Satirically, it was the Nazis who shaved the heads of concentration camp prisoners to dehumanize, abuse, and humiliate their victims and deny them their hair, “an intrinsic marker of human identification” (Deslandes).

Throughout history, hair has been a “metaphor for social control” (Greenberg and Cody, 2022). The traditional Greeks and Romans shaved the heads of their slaves as punishment (Stewart, 2022) as they saw an exposed scalp as a “sign of degradation” (Giacometti, 1967).

Through the Middle Ages, even Church dignitaries were subjected to public head shearing as punishment, authorized, for instance, by ninth century Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne.

Further, in the course of the years of slavery within the U.S., hair was “weaponized as a tool of political oppression” such that the heads of slaves were shaved as punishment (Greensword, 2022; Greenberg and Cody).

The military has also used head-shaving to exact conformity and discipline amongst its recruits, making a “sense of depersonalized individuals” and conveying a way of authority for those in command (Freedman, 1994).

Since hair has been related to points of femininity and seduction, some religions implement strict codes about hair. Muslim women, for instance, are expected to cover their hair and far of their bodies in a sort of “portable seclusion.” Further, Ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic women cover their natural hair with wigs (Greenberg and Cody).

There is usually considerable social pressure for hair to evolve to cultural standards, though these standards may change over time. Well into the twentieth century, blacks were made to feel their hair needed to be “conquered, tamed, and controlled” by straightening to evolve to arbitrary, i.e., white, standards of beauty (Greensword).

Political hair is defined as “the ways hair is systematically used to find out, illustrate, and exemplify who’s in charge, who may impose their will upon others, who’re the oppressed…” (Greensword).

Sometimes, though, hairstyles will be used to thwart the predominant culture in what some have called the “tangles of resistance.” Through the Black Liberation Movement, the Afro hairstyle became a “symbol of protest” (Johnson and Barber, 2022).

In recent times, dreadlocks, braids, and cornrows have reflected a way of expressing racial pride relatively than reflecting protest (Tate, 2022).

Since hair will be styled like clothing but can also be “corporeal just like the body,” it “suggests each the private and non-private concurrently” (Heaton, 2022).

Hair is usually the very first thing we notice about others, and it may have an “integral role in shaping our individual identity” (Wan and Donovan, 2018), particularly since “ours is a culture that places a premium on physical appearance” (Grimalt, 2005).

Nowhere does this grow to be clearer than once we develop “appearance-altering conditions” (Grimalt), similar to when hair loss is because of illness or the results of treatment.

Those that undergo chemotherapy describe their lack of hair as a “public display of a newfound illness identity” (Wan and Donovan), “personifying the cancer diagnosis” (Boland et al., 2020), or “an commercial” of their sick role (Freedman).

Though women can camouflage hair loss with a wig or scarf, some speak of not recognizing themselves within the mirror and seeing the expression in others’ eyes (Freedman). Cancer-related alopecia “not only affects how individuals perceive themselves but additionally how others perceive them” (Dua et al., 2017).

Chemotherapy or radiation-induced alopecia, which damages the hair follicles, affects about 65 percent of patients, though its severity can vary because of age, comorbidities, hormonal status, drug dosage, and administration (Boland et al.). It affects scalp hair diffusely or in patches (Dua et al.), but it may also affect eyebrows, eyelashes, and hair in other areas of the body (Freites-Martinez et al., 2019).

Many ladies consider hair loss essentially the most traumatic side effect of treatment (Boland et al.), and a few have poignantly described it as “more traumatic than the actual lack of a breast” (Freedman, 1994). Though it is normally reversible after a delay of three to six months post-treatment, this regrowth may differ in color or texture (Dua et al.). Persistent or everlasting alopecia secondary to cancer treatment occurs in 30 percent of breast cancer survivors (Freites-Martinez et al.).

Hair loss can occur as a standard a part of aging in each men and girls and isn’t necessarily pathological, though the “balding industry” attempts to medicalize it (Jankowski and Frith, 2022). Men are likely to lose more hair; for some, the loss is distressing enough to subject themselves to dubious remedies of

trichoquackery (Kligman and Freeman, 1988).

Note: For my general discussion of hair, see my blog.

References