A Great Cry Over Little Wool: The Inconsequence of Hair

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“May God protect us from hairy women and beardless men.”—Arab proverb

“Not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.”—Nora Ephron

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—5/9/11—Seven miles annually! Three hundred and fifty, over a lifetime! And that’s just the hair that arises from your scalp; not your face, underarms, legs, and elsewhere. The Nazis thought so much of it, they shaved two tons off at Auschwitz, while someone recently paid $15,000 for the clippings of Elvis’s first buzz-cut. In the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, police are inspected regularly to insure mustaches are “serious,” but not “mean.” Clearly, hair is important across the globe, or we would not spend about $100 billion on it each year in the US alone.

A brief history of hair should comb out my point.

The Greeks made many of their gods, such as Artemis and Apollo, blond, even though most of the hair around the Aegean was and still is black. Since many Egyptian gods had beards, Queen Hatshepsut wore a fake one to demonstrate that her authority was no less than a man’s.

In AD 878, Charles the Bald and Wilfred the Hairy went to war, but it had nothing to do with hair. In 1705, Peter the Great imposed a beard tax on Russian men to encourage them to look more like the smooth-cheeked French. In the late 18th century, French aristocrats powdered their wigs with barrels of flour when the poor were starving, which, when they learned of it, led to the bloodiest revolution in modern European history.

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76), men with receding hairlines similar to Chairman Mao’s were seized and shaved by the Red Guards. And following the 2004 North Korean television show “Let Us Trim Our Hair in Accordance With the Socialist Lifestyle,” men were required to get two haircuts each month, whether they needed them or not.

Meanwhile Kim Jong-Il (known as “Cumulus” in the West for his tousled good looks), lets his hair grow à la Cosmo Kramer.

Like the state, the church has taken a variety of stands on what constitutes a proper ‘do.

Though the Bible does not mention Judas’s hair, medieval legend assumed it had to be red since “red hair is false,” as the folk well knew.

While Samson’s strength lay in his hair, Absalom’s elegant locks proved to be his weakness: when his hair caught on a tree branch, his enemies used him for target practice.

Though Martin Luther thought hair was “the richest ornament of women,” the English Puritan William Prynne wrote, “A woman with cut hair is a filthy spectacle, and much like a monster . . . [hair] being given them for a covering, a token of subjection . . . .”

While 17th-century French Catholic priests often wore wigs, Cotton Mather feared a wig-wearing acquaintance had failed God’s test: can we accept the hair that nature gives us?

By Taliban decree through the 1990s, all adult Afghan males wore full beards. When a circus bear was discovered with a “beard” of insufficient length, its nose was cut off.

I’ve already alluded to the broad bias favoring blonds and maligning redheads. Given the fact that 8 percent of humans are “spilled barley” and 7 percent are “carrot topped,” it’s safe to say that the sociology of hair color is poorly understood in a country where 84 percent of the brides are brunettes and 80 percent of the grooms hope to marry a blonde.

Moreover, the brunet who’ll settle for no one but “Goldilocks” is likely to tell a blonde joke on his honeymoon.

Despite the contempt blondes are held in, Gloria Steinem gave her chocolate-brown hair a lemon streak in the 1970s to make herself and her feminist message more appetizing.

A great many dark-haired people would agree with Fran Lebowitz that brown will be a popular color for flowers when purple becomes a popular color for hair. But, from where I sit at age 69, the most maligned hair color is “peppered salt” or “salted pepper.” De-pigmented protein whether it’s slumming as “gray” or dressed up as “silver” is sometimes referred to as “death’s blossoms” or “nature’s graffiti.” To this senior, the only thing worse than gray hair is a mop of righteous, moss dyed enamel black.

At another extreme, baldness has been mocked for centuries, and many shorn of their fleece have wondered where the hair fairy was because hair loss, the sages assure us, is compensated for by wit and wisdom.

In the Book of Kings when “forty-two children” mocked the prophet Elisha by calling him “Baldy,” Yahweh promptly sent “two she bears” to kill the foul-mouthed rascals.

In World War Two, to humiliate French and Dutch women who had German boyfriends, baldness was imposed by a razor-wielding tribunal. However, when the humiliation of the head is performed on masses of athletes and military recruits, it can be a powerfully adhesive force, cementing bonds where none existed before.

In the last 50 years, actors such as Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas have helped to make a shaved scalp, but not a bald pate, a handsome sign of virility.

A friend of mine shaved his head when his wife lost her “crown of glory” during radiation treatments for cancer. Those who knew why Michael had doffed his crown stood in awe of his supportive gesture. When those who did not know made cruel comments about his “egg head” or “cue ball,” Michael laughed and said he had just grown “taller than his hair.” Meanwhile, his wife bought a wig.

When Anita Loos published her novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in 1925, which became a Broadway musical in 1949 and a film in 1953, a proverb was born. Millionaire Andrew Mellon replied that, on the contrary, “Gentlemen prefer bonds,” but he may have been in his eighties when he said that. (The blonde bias is so pervasive that the grammar checker on my computer keeps urging me to change “bonds” in my last quotation to “blondes.”)

However, “suicide-blonde,” Mamie Van Doren, had the last word, when she implied that hair color is no sign of character any more than skin color or hand preference because on or off stage, “blondes prefer gentlemen.”

Indeed, if hair were any true measure of worth, Merino sheep would be the criterion: their hair grows 5,500 miles a year!