Dear Sweet Barberette,
Shall I give you all the Web sites dedicated to this fetish, or would you just like maybe a couple of really excellent ones to start? Here they are: http://headshave.erotimania.com and www.baldgirlz.com. That's right, my sweet Barberette, not only is your fetish a real fetish, it is very nearly a common one. Many sites include message boards where you will no doubt find willing victims and like-minded buddies to hook up with.
One that I enjoyed with Suicide Girls-like reluctance is Kat Surth's site (www.katsurth.com), which includes a list of films where women are shaved or given haircuts on or offscreen, including the gem, The Passion of Joan of Arc, starring stunning Maria Falconetti. Those who love sulky art girls who do mutilated Barbie photography and write inflammatory essays on why incest is good (contending they can't be published anywhere else with insinuations of controversy and oppression) will love this foxy little shinehead. Kat answered some questions about the source of this fetish.
"It mostly begins in a person's childhood or early teen years," she explains. "Children get fantasinated [I know, I know, but I love this undoubtedly accidental portmanteau word] by many things, but there's always one thing that stands out more than most. One woman who wrote to me told me her hair fetish began when she was around five or six years old, when she watched her cousin get a hair cut. She was amazed by the cutting of the hair and how it floated to the ground."
Curiosity, another prime sexual motivator, is also a factor, Kay says. "What makes a woman decide to shave her head? How does she do it? And what really does happen in a women's salon? What does her head feel like? Is she bald all over, too? The imagination takes over and can make all sorts of fun fantasies about this subject in order to figure it out."
Kat says she hasn't explored the aspect of forced shaving, when people "like to see women abused, punished, or ‘brought down off their high horse,'" but this also seems a great stimulus for many devotees. See www.plazaone.com/rldc/redlite/hairlist.txt for an extensive list of books and films on forced hair cutting and shaving. I can't believe some people read Anne of Green Gables for its erotic qualities. I have officially seen it all.
"There is an amazing scene in a forgotten Hollywood potboiler called Voyage of the Damned in which Faye Dunaway cuts her hair off," says art porn filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. My favourite of his own films is called No Skin Off My Ass, and although I appallingly have no recollection of head-shaving scenes, he assures me they do exist. You will also find the same in LaBruce's film Skin Flick, of which I also have no memory, but that was because I got to have dinner with LaBruce and Vaginal Cream Davis before the premiere, and I was out of my mind with excitement.
Still on the artsy sexy tip, have a look at one of Helmut Newton's hottest photographs "Arielle After a Haircut," which you can find here: www.american-buddha.com/helmut.48.htm.
To me, it's easy to recognize one of the fundamental reasons why hair cutting and shaving was sexualized: through religion, the great subversive architect of kink. Think of any religion's relationship with hair. Each has one, and it's almost always about shame, modesty or strength, three hallmark characteristics of sexuality.
