Oh Queensland, you enigmatically regressive Northernparadise. It really is no placefor a pastey and/or flabby Melburnian woman at the best of times. But a pastey, flabby and BALD woman? Shut. Up.
I have been bald for a year, and my week in Queensland was testing. Aside from the obvious practical concerns regarding the sun’s keen interest in toasting my scalp to a tropical hue (somewhere between ‘Tequila Sunrise’ and ‘Rock Lobster’), Queensland is loaded with discomfort for the bald lady. A beanie looks entirely out of place. A sunhat is a good option, but trusting the climatic penchant for wind (see ‘cyclone’), there is a large possibility that a rogue gust will de-cap you, exposing your dirty, hairless secret to the brown and blonde lovelies lazing on the beach.
Of course, Queensland is not the only location of the phenomenon regarding female baldness, which I would like to term ‘para-racism’. In my funky and forward-thinking town of Melbourne, I have been avoided on public transport, ignored by the service industry and laughed at in supermarket shampoo aisles (ok, I guess I’ll pay that). But I really have noticed an attitude which flickers idly between disdain and what seems to be complete horror towards my moon face. Why? I suppose it is unexpected, and I probably get a similar quantity of attention as someone with an ‘outrageous’ hairstyle. But the quality is entirely different. Where the punks with mohawks might receive awed or disapproving attention, I get shock and revulsion.
I propose two reasons.The first is comprehension. The awed and disapproving audience can at least understand that (in punks/goths/tradies) they are perceiving an alternative aesthetic disposition, and pass judgement accordingly. Fembaldism, conversely, has not been popularised or legitimised by music, lifestyle or other forms of sub-cultural devotion. In fact, apart from those two lovely lasses Sinead and Portman (with whom my mirror-self unfavourably compares), the bald lady has been mostly absent from integration into popular culture.
The second reason is more complex, depressing and possibly (hopefully) a delusional imagining of someone who has spent time with Freud and Kristeva. I propose that the imageof a fem-bald head suggests a kind of nakedness, a desperate vulnerability akin to seeing someone fully dressed sans pants (a common nightmare) which invokes in the viewer a distaste so palpable as to trigger a reaction of revulsion before the sensible cognitive mind can intervene. The bald lady represents the exposure of human hideousness, which cannot forever be suppressed or contained, and which will eventually claim a corporeal victory over our bodies. Every person sees their own aesthetic downfall in the baldhead, their descent into ugliness; and the shocked revulsion they experience isakin to the reaction to abject expulsions of the body – snot, blood, faeces and vomit. We are afraid of our own innate ugliness, the ugliness we make, which we desperately hide with clothes, makeup and tampon advertisements that refer to vaginas via a cartoon beaver.
My aim in publishing this theory is to hopefully encourage the sensible, cognitive reaction to kick in a little more quickly. Because there really is nothing threatening about a bald scalp.They’re actually quite shiny and smooth, like a beach ball or an egg. Your aesthetic downfall WILL eventually occur, ie. you will eventually become hideously unattractive, if you continue to subscribe to a narrow and exclusive idea of beauty. So maybe we should give the human race a break and consider that bald, along with old, fat, short and hairy, might just be beautiful too.