Baldies of the world, throw off your chains
Speaking as one myself, I am troubled by the news that bald men are more likely than others to suffer severe symptoms from Covid-19. Male sex hormones are catnip to the virus, it seems. Bald men are bursting with these. One study found that 79 per cent of male virus victims in Madrid hospitals were also victims of hair loss. Frank Gabrin, the first doctor in the United States to die of Covid, was bald.
This is only the latest example of the vulnerability of our kind in modern society. It is typical of our marginalisation. Whereas the virus vulnerability of black and ethnic minority groups was quickly noticed and an inquiry into the causes was established, the threat to us emerged only last week. No one has lifted a finger to help us. We are hurting.
We baldies are ignored out of deep-rooted prejudice. Men with hair exploit their power to indoctrinate other oppressed groups, such as women, to see us as unattractive. In the 60-year dominance of television, no bald political leader has led his party to victory at a general election. Neil Kinnock, Iain Duncan Smith and William Hague, whose sole “crime” is visible in the photograph on the page opposite, fell foul of this unwritten law, imposed by popular fear and structural exclusion. In the present Cabinet, only the Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, and (more arguably) the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, share our problem.
Only 12.5 per cent of the 16 men in the Cabinet are bald, yet we make up nearly 40 per cent of the male population. Boris Johnson’s blond, unthinking sense of entitlement is deeply disturbing.
It is not just politics. Where are the bald role models across society? When has the Doctor in Dr Who or James Bond ever been played by a (visibly) bald man? We are almost completely absent from advertisements, confined to “character” parts in films and hairbrushed out of fashion-modelling. Where are the bald celebrity chefs? In TV political coverage, Nick Robinson was almost the only severe hair-loss victim on air. It is telling that, in recent years, he was moved to radio, thus becoming invisible.
Many bald men have felt driven to conform to the demands of the intolerant, hirsute majority. Photographs of Elton John in the 1970s, for example, suggest that he had less hair then than now. To succeed, he was forced to live the lie of hair “restoration”. This coping strategy, which helped make him Sir Elton, was an understandable reaction to oppression. But it won’t do for the rising generation of the bald. They demand justice.
And yes, racism is involved. All mainly white nations – led by Britain, Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic – are disproportionately bald. In modern culture it is considered perfectly acceptable to complain about the “male, pale and stale”, whereas comparable remarks against women and ethnic minorities are rightly stigmatised. “Male, pale and stale” also means – let’s be clear – bald. When you consider that China, the origin of the virus, has the lowest rate of hair loss in the world, the pattern starts to look positively sinister.
So it is time to speak out. Our anger may force us to chuck statues of men with hair into the nearest harbour. Already our global movement is stirring. Our president is the Duke of Cambridge, and our secretary is Dominic Cummings (although we have not, so far, had time to ask them about this). Bald Lives Matter!
Covid-19, which came from
China, is keeping Chinese students away. British universities, which have become dangerously dependent on them for their money, are therefore in a pickle, as potential entrants for the next academic year take fright. At Cambridge, for example, they charge Chinese students roughly twice what they charge British ones.
It will be sad if able Chinese students no longer avail themselves of the benefit of a Cambridge education. But the current problem does expose a strange feature of the Cambridge system. Nowadays, admissions of UK students are “contextual”. This word, translated, means that applicants from independent schools are discriminated against, with those from poorer backgrounds given places on worse academic results. This is justified in the name of increasing “access”.
In the case of Chinese students, no such process applies, since China is a place in which only the rich get a good education and all power derives from the Communist Party (whose senior members are very rich). So virtually no poor students from China apply to Cambridge. Nick Chrimes, a historian of Cambridge who helps Chinese students there, tells me that they come exclusively from the Chinese upper middle class, with a few super-rich “Red princesses” thrown in.
So the “privileged” Britons are turned away and the privileged Chinese are let in.
Many question the coming
compulsion to wear a face mask on public transport. Some have cause to fear it. An asthmatic acquaintance writes that he cannot use a dust mask because, especially in hot weather, it restricts the inflow of air: “As soon as an asthmatic starts gasping, it is a painful downward spiral.” He needs his inhaler. He has had to write to his doctor for a certificate of exemption.
Not for the first time in the Covid story, a genuine, direct threat to health seems to be considered less important than a more distant, debatable one.