On the day after President Obama endorsed same-sex marriage, news broke that teenage Mitt Romney once led a band of prep-school toughs that cornered a younger boy and pinned him to the ground screaming and crying, as Mitt “repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors”. The attack went unpunished; the victim, John Lauber, was later thrown out of school for smoking a cigarette, and died in 2004.The liberal media immediately interpreted the incident as an anti-gay assault. Romney, though apologizing for the “prank” (which he says he doesn’t remember), has insisted that “a classmate's sexuality…was the ‘furthest thing’ from his mind at the time.” (Apparently, Lauber was just acting and looking like a sissy.)How fair is it to hold 18-year-old Mitt’s actions against today’s candidate? After all, the current president has admitted to both eating dog meat and doing “a little blow when [he] could afford it” in his youth. And really, is forcibly removing a part of another person’s body that grows back anyway so terrible? Surely the involuntary haircut is just boyish bonhomie on the level of short-sheeting a bed. What deeper malice could it possibly imply?We set to find out.Glee (2010). Tyrannical gym teacher Sue Sylvester scissors off a boy’s ponytail and says, “There. Now you no longer confuse me with your she-male looks.”Peter the Great’s Beard Tax (c. 1700). Worn by Russians as a sign of Orthodox piety, the westernizing Czar hated beards as much as he hated the church. (He was a mustache man.) Nobles who refused to shave were slapped with a 100-ruble beard tax; courtiers caught with a beard in his presence were liable to getting it ripped off by Peter himself.
Indian Boarding Schools (c. 1880–1970s). As part of then-progressive “assimilationist” policies, the U.S. and Canadian governments contracted religious societies to set up residential schools that offered total immersion in mainstream culture. If removed from their families early enough, it was thought that native children could be molded into productive members of society. Alongside new Anglo names (and harsh punishment for speaking anything but English), proper clothes and haircuts were considered key to acculturation. Later investigations found systematic sexual abuse.
Pigtail Ordinance (1873). Ostensibly to prevent fleas, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a law forcing prisoners in city jails to have hair cut within an inch of the scalp. The mayor vetoed the measure “as a special and degrading punishment inflicted upon the Chinese residents for slight offenses and solely by reason of their alienage and race.” In 1876, Sacramento overrode him with an identical law on the state level. The Chinese Exclusion Act came in 1882.Though known in the U.S. as a peculiarly Chinese style, the braided “queue” was actually worn as a mark of fealty to the Manchu emperor. When the Qing Dynasty was overthrown in 1911, Chinese republicans took to the street chopping them off, with varying degrees of consent.
Auschwitz, et al. (1942–45). Worse than the chambers and ovens and chimneys, many modern visitors agree that the single most sickening exhibit at the Auschwitz death camp is the bales of human hair. As a final act of duhumanization, long hair was scalped from female corpses for industrial use. The fallout continues: In 2009, the huge auto-component manufacturer Schoeffler AG—then seeking a government bailout—was accused of having used the raw material, covered in trace amounts of Zyklon B, in wartime car upholstery.So, indeed, Mitt’s defenders are right. Aggressively removing hair that’s perceived, by victim or perpetrator or both, to be integral to one’s identity is a time-honored human hijink. Boys will be boys!
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Nazi “Collaborators” (1945). After liberation, French, Belgian, Dutch, Scandinavian, and other women believed to have fraternized (i.e., slept with) German troops were publicly shamed by having their heads shaved, as Allied troops looked (or cheered) on. Sporting a Sinéad O’Connor was tantamount to a scarlet swastika. (Clip from Black Book.)