The 'hair-raising' subtext of the Oscar slap

Baldness in women is yet to be included in the warm embrace of political correctness

The Oscar awards of 2022 will probably be remembered most for the 'hair’-raising burst of physical (and verbal) violence by actor Will Smith, who walked up on stage and slapped comedian Chris Rock. This was because Rock, who was anchoring the show, had made a joke about Smith's wife Jada Pinkett Smith's shaved head. Pinkett Smith suffers from alopecia, a condition that leads to severe hair loss.

Was the joke tasteless? Absolutely. Was Will Smith justified in playing the alpha male caveman attacking someone who had taken a dig at his mate? Absolutely not.

But leaving aside the question of who was more to blame, that eye-popping bit of Oscar shenanigan - which at once sparked a furious debate on matters as diverse as the boundaries of comedy, star entitlement, race, violence and so on - had an inescapable subtext: In most cultures, women without hair, or with less hair, are an object of ridicule. While people look at bald men without turning a hair, so to speak, a woman who sports thinning hair, or no hair, is regarded as someone to be made fun of.

Also read: Oscars producer did not want Will Smith physically removed after slap

When Chris Rock joked about Pinkett Smith's hairless pate, he may have genuinely thought that he was making a harmless crack. But, in truth, the joke, and his obvious sense of hilarity around it, arose from a deep cultural bias against women who do not have a full head of hair.

Women are, of course, subjected to impossible ideals of beauty and attractiveness. A woman must be thin, ageless, high-breasted, slim-waisted, and, if she is Asian, especially Indian, she must also strive to be fair. While her body must be as smooth and hairless as a baby's, her crown must be overflowing with a gorgeous mass of hair!

Even though many women resent these absurd standards of beauty and femininity, most toil endlessly and spend huge amounts of money in trying to achieve them. And more often than not, they suffer from serious loss of self-worth if they fail to acquire these stratospheric markers of desirability, which seem to have been invented for the sole purpose of eroding women's self-confidence and keeping them perennially trapped in a sense of inferiority.

But here's the thing: Of all the cultural diktats about what a woman should look like, hair, or rather, the lack of it, attracts a completely different level of pressure. That's partly because baldness or sparse hair in women is yet to be included in the warm, if often hypocritical, embrace of political correctness.

If you fat-shame a woman, you'll be universally denounced as obnoxious and unfit for polite company. If you comment on her dark complexion, you will at once be labelled an odious racist. If you so much as dare to suggest that someone is, er, challenged in the looks department, you will be treated to howls of outrage over your "lookist" approach to humanity. And if you call a woman 'old', you are — what else — an insufferable ageist best relegated to the dung heap where crass, antediluvian notions go to die.

But a woman who is deficient in the hair stakes enjoys no such immunity from open jeers. Call it the atavistic instinct of equating a woman's hair with her fertility quotient, or the very rare instances of women going au naturel with a relatively or a fully hairless head (there's a reason why wigs, hair patches and hair extensions do brisk business), the sight of a scanty-haired or bald woman is too freakish even for the holier-than-thou practitioners of political correctness.

Also read: Chris Rock says 'still kind of processing' Oscars slap

Hence, unless we are talking about Masai women who customarily shave their heads, or women in showbiz who may flaunt a dramatic hairless look for the odd movie (remember Indian actress Persis Khambatta in Star Trek or Zimbabwean-American actress Danai Gurira in Black Panther?), a woman without significant hair on her head is regarded as an oddity who can be openly treated to contempt and ridicule. Funnily enough, it is often other women who lead the charge against them.

Full disclosure: Not having been blessed with luxuriant hair myself, I have endured many a derisive comment from hairdressers, and the occasional pitying remark from female acquaintances and house helps. A friend whose genes or hormones have wreaked serious havoc on her hair and who refuses to wear a wig to hide her condition, tells of the rude stares that she gets from strangers and the snide remarks that come her way from relatives and colleagues.

Contrast this with male baldness. Men carry their baldness with insouciance — because society empowers them with myths like 'bald men are brimming with testosterone', 'they're more virile', and so on. Hence, while baldness in women is a big turn-off and also a stick to beat them with, male baldness is valorised as downright sexy. It's why the likes of Bruce Willis and Andre Agassi were major sex symbols, but you won't be able to name a single A-list female celebrity who has ridden into male fantasyland with anything less than what appears to be her abundant natural hair.

Yes, yes, we know that the rules are different for men and women. In the Hindi movies of yore, the hero and the heroine would often prance around on snow-clad hillsides with the hero dressed in a thick pullover and the heroine in a skimpy blouse and a diaphanous saree. Evidently, if a woman is hot, her natural hotness cloaks her against such things as frigid temperatures. And evidently, like the gender gap in pay or the gender gap in housework, there's a gender gap in everything else — including society's response to the absence of hair on one's head.

Will Smith's slap, violent and loutish though it was, could count for something if it makes a hair-breadth's difference to the sexist derision directed at women who buck the beauty ideal and wear their baldness with matter-of-fact ease. But don't bet on that happening. Society has a way of hanging on to its iniquities. And let's not forget that Smith himself was laughing at the joke at his wife's expense moments before he got up and landed a juicy one on Chris Rock's jaw.

(Shuma Raha is a journalist and author)