Bald who can!
Motto of the disabled chief
I was pleasantly surprised to discover the great activity of our deputies in this spring of 2024. Evil minds believe them busy talking about what the newspapers emphatically call "the big problems of the day": France's debt, the looming tax increase, the war in Europe, the famine in Gaza, the risks of attacks, the Olympic Games. These are only passing problems, which will only find a solution through a lack of decision, according to the maxim of the late Henri Queuille, occasional president of the Council of Ministers.1 in the years 1948-1951, who put it into practice. Well no! Our deputies have finally understood that it was necessary to tackle the major problems of civilisation. The problem of hair discrimination required a political approach and I would like to congratulate, from the bottom of my heart, the President and Vice-Presidents of the National Assembly for having included this topic on the agenda so that the deputies could devote their available brain time to it, making the necessary efforts to finally provide a solution to this problem.2The French are unanimously holding their breath...
However, I hope that the deputies will devote a little more effort to extending their legislative activity to all discriminations concerning body hair. Since we must start with the foundations of this major cultural conquest that is emerging, I will recall that we have known, since Louis Pergaud, that only the development of a certain amount of body hair in the right place authorizes young citizens to vote. This is an unbearable attack on the equality of citizens and this is where the deputies must begin to drive the point home. We live in the country that Julius Caesar called "hairy Gaul": it is our ancestral honor that we must defend. Let us not forget that it was the poilus of the Great War who saved France!
They will have to quickly enrich our language by naming this anti-aging, anti-sex and anti-hair hatred appropriately. I propose the name hairophobia, which perfectly sums up all the discrimination suffered by people with long hair, pigtails, European or African braids, dreadlocks, cadogans, but also redheads3. As always, it seems that blondes have been excluded from the discussions that prepared the work of the National Assembly. This is an insult to intelligence: everyone knows at least one blonde who has studied; all pseudo-humorists who say otherwise should be fined as a deterrent.
Hairophobia sometimes manifests itself in insidiously: in the radio soap opera Signed Furax, Pierre Dac and Francis Blanche called the first episode "Woe to the Bearded Ones". This is not admissible. I reported this call to hatred to the public prosecutor, under article 404, who replied to me: (i) that there is a statute of limitations, the broadcast in question dating from the years 1951-52; and (ii) that the original soundtracks were lost by the INA… A clever way to get out of trouble! I am certain that there was a plot to make them disappear. In any case, it is a way for the prosecutor to put into practice the famous “no waves” dear to the National Education.
Returning to the area of capital hairiness, I have not seen anything concerning bald people in the bill. Using the privative prefix a-, I propose to complete the term presented above with that ofapoilophobia which seems to me to be necessary. My professor of endocrinology, at the faculty of medicine of Bordeaux, knew how to take pride in his baldness (distinguished, like all baldnesses) by tilting his head towards us to show us the absence of any hair on his shiny skull, saying: "Eunuchs are never bald!" But we could feel his shame breaking through his arrogance when he heard the chorus of students (this age is pitiless!) proclaim that he was showing us a landing strip for flies.
We must salute the courage of our former Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, who anticipated the vote on the law to devote himself to aesthetic medicine, one of whose missions is to reimplant missing head hairs, despite the opprobrium he immediately received from politicians and journalists who dared to say that he was "less expected [by the clinic that recruited him] for his handling of the scalpel than for his address book."5 ". What an injustice! Let us recall that Jérôme Cahuzac, nicknamed "eyes in the eyes", also distinguished himself in the fight against apoilophobia by devoting all his energy to the reimplantation of hairs from scalps.
Let's go down a notch and take a look at the moustache. It is often considered a symbol of virility and is used as such to celebrate the month of November, renamed Movember by Unicancer to raise awareness among men about prostate cancer6. I sense discrimination: in the same way that men can be pregnant according to family planning7, women can very well get prostate cancer and it would be unfair to exclude them from this campaign on the grounds that they carefully shave their upper lip so as not to have a moustache, precisely.
A notch below8 there is the beard, often associated with the moustache but less loaded on the symbolic level: did not bearded women have a street presence in the aisles of funfairs? The fashion for wearing a beard varies according to the era. Without going back to Claude Monet or Johannes Brahms, a professor of anatomy at this same faculty of medicine wore it loose and long like them; his lunch menu was displayed in bits and pieces, which ensured his success in the lecture hall, especially with the female students. He was retired when I began my studies but the old men still spoke of his beard with a tremolo in their voice and tears in their eyes.
The fashion is for the affrication of dentals, but there is another infirmity that strikes those who lisp: it is essential to banish from the French language the derogatory expression "avoir un cheveu sur langue". I am certain that Jean-Christophe Averty9, who enchanted the airwaves in my youth with The Music Hall Crazies, felt a microaggression when it was used in front of him, even without meaning to mock him, like black Americans when they hear the word "field" which evokes the cotton fields where their ancestors worked.10. And I'm not talking about hair in soup, which suffers from unjustified disgust from gourmets.
It is very rude to tell someone that they have "a hair on their hand"! This is another expression that should be banned from our vocabulary, both to promote hair in general and to exonerate the lazy: if they really have a hair on their hand, I doubt they chose it! I fear that it is most often congenital, perhaps even hereditary. Just as some pseudo-scientists are looking like the Holy Grail for the longevity gene to sell it in gene therapy, the laziness gene must be identified. It was necessary to analyze the genome of 6 men with prostate cancer and 637 control subjects to identify the role of the 7q361 locus in the risk of developing prostate cancer.11 and it will probably take as many to identify the genetic locus of this hair in the hand: it will be easy to gather the 6 to 7 subjects needed, laziness being the most widely shared thing in the world12.
When this law has been passed, France, reconciled with itself, will bring to the world proof of its universal compassion! It is well worth the few hours of work that our deputies have devoted to this problem. The unfortunate discriminated people have made a fuss: it was precisely by a hair's breadth that we forgot to legislate on the hair problem that concerns all French people, but we must not split hairs and procrastinate endlessly to avoid arriving at a text that seems somewhat far-fetched.