Bald Women: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|''"Bald women: you're bald because you're bald."''|'''Johnny Q. Public,''' "Women of Zion"}}
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Disch further points out that the bald woman actually represents "empowerment". By playing off well-known [[Hair Tropes]], bald women show that they transcend their femininity and become stronger as a result. Whether this character development occurs or not depends on the character.
Overlaps with [[Bald of Awesome]] and [[Bald of Evil]]. [[Rule 34|Rule 36]] applies, of course.
== Advertising ==
▲{{examples|Examples:}}
* An Adidas commercial featured a woman shaving her head totally bald, including her eyebrows. It is soon revealed that [[Bald of Awesome|the woman was preparing to swim]]. "Long Live Sport", indeed.▼
== Anime
* Mahoja in ''[[D
* Parodied in ''Master Of Epic'', in which a band of female players try to fight a monster that ends up giving them bad haircuts. Their solution to beat it? Shave their heads totally bald. {{spoiler|However, it doesn't quite work out the way they planned...}}
* ''[[
* Lata in the manga ''[[Buddha]]'' starts off as a pretty girl with beautiful black hair, but when she becomes one of Buddha's disciples...
* {{spoiler|Kriem}} in Episode 18 of ''[[Tiger and Bunny]]''. {{spoiler|Most likely, the hospital staff shaved her head to keep her from wreaking havoc when she woke up.}}
== Card Games ==▼
* Hitomi from ''[[Legend of the Five Rings]]''.▼
* ''[[Magic the Gathering]]'' has several cards featuring this: [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=32224 Cabal Surgeon], [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=83869 Angel of Despair], [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=134762 Fugitive Wizard], and [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=197010 Fallen Angel] for extra [[Bald of Evil]].▼
** Finally, [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=45150 Vile Deacon], assuming you don't count horns against one's baldness.▼
== Comic Books ==
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* Nebula from Marvel, after her escape from Titan and a cybernetic operation.
* The [[Black Panther]]'s [[Bodyguard Babes]], the Dora Milaje.
* P.J. from ''[[Y:
* Cassandra Nova of the [[X-Men]].
* Sometimes, Delirium from ''[[The Sandman]]''.
* Many female characters in [[Alejandro Jodorowsky]]'s ''[[
* This once happened to [[Superman|Lois Lane]], in combination with [[My Brain Is Big]]: [https://web.archive.org/web/20131207101403/http://www.politedissent.com/archives/615 here.]
* ''[[Wet Moon]]''.
* Prudence is a member of the League of Assassins that becomes an uneasy ally to Tim Drake after he adopts the Red Robin identity.
* Lynn from the ''[[Silent Hill]]'' comics becomes one after the prologue of Dying Inside.
* {{spoiler|Mindscan}}, in the original ''[[Guardians of the Galaxy]]'' series. Not that you find out until fairly late in the series, as she {{spoiler|wears a wig all the time to hide her [[My Brain Is Big|swollen, lumpy skull]]}}.
* In recent comics, Angelica Jones, AKA [[Spider
* In the original run of ''[[Excalibur (Comic Book)|Excalibur]]'', there was a
* Zelda from the comic book ''[[Gold Digger (Comic Book)|Gold Digger]]''
* Madame Louisa Dem Five in ''[[Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire]]''. Not that it's a problem. Especially given that with [[Hello, Nurse!|that figure]] probably few men [[My Eyes Are Up Here|look as high as her smile]], and she isn't tall.
== Films ==
* Ellen Ripley in ''[[Alien]] 3'' provides the picture for this trope, after her head is shaved due to problems with head lice at the Fury-161 penal colony.
* Ilia from ''[[Star Trek:
* The ''[[Dune]]'' films make Bene Gesserit bald for whatever reason.
* ''[[
* Agatha in ''[[Minority Report]]''. Like in ''[[The Matrix]]'', it was because her hair didn't grow while she was kept in stasis.
* Of all people, ''[[Satan]]'' from ''[[The Passion of the Christ]]''. In this case, it also counts as [[Bald of Evil]].
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** Likewise in the French science fiction film ''Dante''.
* At the end of ''[[Shaolin Soccer]]'', {{spoiler|Mui}} shaves her head bald in order to join the team as [[The Hopeless Replacement]]; Sing [[Hangs a Lampshade]] on the fact that her actress is wearing a rather obvious bald cap:
{{quote|
* Most people of both sexes in the [[Recursive Reality|in-story real world]] of ''[[The Matrix]]'' are either bald or very close-shaven. Sort of justified because it would appear that the machines' [[People Jars]] prevent hair growth for those inside, but most of the characters would presumably have been out for long enough to grow some more hair, so that's probably not why ''everyone's'' hair is like that.
** This can be explained away as function over fashion. They're in a situation where everyone who can hold a gun and shoot semi-competently is a soldier fighting for survival. Long hair tends to be a hindrance in such an environment. It's also quite likely that Zion has to ration water quite carefuly, and shorter hair is much less of a hassle to keep clean.
* As mentioned above, in ''[[V for Vendetta]]'', Evey gets her head shaved. In the movie, [[Natalie Portman]] actually [[Dyeing for Your Art|had her head shaved on-screen]], instead of wearing a bald cap.
* Dren from ''[[Splice]]''. Of course, baldness was hardly her only odd feature, as she also had wings and hooved feet.
* ''[[Heaven]]'' with Kate Blanchett.
* [[Toni Collette]] in ''8½ Women'' by Peter Greenaway
* [[Hong Kong]] movie ''Temptation of a Monk''.
* {{spoiler|Rapunzel}} from ''[[Shrek]] The Third''.
* Dementia from ''[[
* ''Hiroshima Mon Amour''.
* The Irish lead character of ''Ryan's Daughter''
* [[Repo!
== Literature ==
* In ''Murphy's Gambit'' by Syne Mitchell, Thiadora Murphy is one of the Floaters, a society of humans who live in zero gravity and are treated as second-class citizens. Like all Floaters, Thiadora's head is totally bald. In fact, the cover art for the book features this.
* ''[[Starship Troopers (
* Inverted with the Seanchean in ''[[The Wheel of Time]]'', for whom baldness is a social indicator. Members of the nobility partially shave their heads, the high nobility mostly shave their heads, and the royal family is entirely bald.
* Kin Arad, the heroine of Terry Pratchett's ''[[
* At least one of the hominid species living on the [[
* Valerie Russell in ''Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie'' by Holly Black.
* Santuna in the [[Cordwainer Smith]] short story "Under Old Earth". In her case, it may be a reference to the grooming practices of ancient Egyptian nobility, since the man she's in love with is compared to the pharaoh Akhenaten at one point in the text.
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* The Elizabeth I installment of ''[[The Royal Diaries]]'' features a bald female jester.
* One bald woman appears in ''[[Otherland]]'' (forgot her name, the Australian Aborigine — but not Dread's mother).
* Maria in ''[[
* In [[Ursula K. Le Guin]]'s ''The Dispossessed'', women are ''expected'' to be bald in Urras society.
* In Classical poety, the anthropomorphic personification of a limited opportunity, especially of concepts such as Fortune and Time, is as a bald woman with only a single lock of hair on her forehead. The moral being that if you do not seize her as she approaches, there is nothing to grab her by once she's passed.
{{quote|
<small>
<small>And duty--zeal and duty are not slow,</small>
<small>But on Occasion's forelock watchful wait</small>|<small> -- ''Paradise Regained'', [[John Milton]]</small>}}
* ''OMNI'' magazine featured this trope on its cover art several times.▼
== Live-Action TV ==
* Zhaan in ''[[
* Bonnie, one of Ross' girlfriends on ''[[Friends]]'', was described as being bald. However, by the time Ross meets her, Bonnie had a full head of hair. Until {{spoiler|Rachel persuaded her to shave it off again}}.
* ''[[
* Two first-season episodes of ''[[Small Wonder]]'', the pilot and "RoboBrat", featured a briefly bald Vicki.
* In one early episode of ''[[Frasier]]'', we see that artist Martha Paxton is bald; she also never bathes and often wears a poncho.
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* In Season 7 of ''[[The Amazing Race]]'', Joyce had to shave her head to win a Fast Forward
* In ''[[The Pretender]]'', several episodes have included bald women among the randomly surreal background characters in scenes at the Centre.
* Cycle 6 of [[
* ''[[
* In an early episode of ''[[Panico Na Band]]'' (The successor series to ''[[Panico Na TV]]''), Babi, one of the [[Lovely Assistant|Panicats]], had her long blond hair shaved off. She definitely looked like a true babe nonetheless!
== Newspaper Comics ==
* [[Dilbert]] once met a woman like this. She also had a big brain.
== Professional Wrestling ==▼
* Molly Holly became bald after Wrestlemania XX, as a result of losing a Hair Match.▼
* Likewise, Roxxi Laveaux.▼
* Serena Deeb became bald when joining the Straight Edge Society, but oddly enough, not in a Hair Match. She willingly allowed her head to be shaved by [[CM Punk]].▼
== Tabletop Games ==
▲=== Card Games ===
* In one of the sourcebooks for ''[[Mage: The Awakening (Tabletop Game)|Mage: The Awakening]]'', there is a young 20-something who keeps her head bald because her nimbus manifests as sparks running along her scalp serving as a sample character (for the Pygmalian Society in ''Legacies: The Sublime''). This electricity is not strictly ''real'', but the feeling of lightning through her hair is unsettling enough that she prefers to just keep her head shaved bald (if asked about it, the book states that she'll claim to be making a statement on 'gender or something'). Interestingly enough, she actually has the [[Hello Nurse|Striking Looks merit]], indicating that she's actually exceptionally ''attractive'' in her own unique way (not [[Angelina Jolie]] level, as that's the higher-level version of the merit, but still attractive enough to draw eyes) and it's mentioned that she's been featured on covers of magazines a few times. Judging from the page art, she deserves the merit.▼
▲* Hitomi from ''[[Legend of the Five Rings]]''.
* In ''[[Deadlands]]: Hell on Earth'', all [[Psychic Powers|sykers]] are absolutely bald. Including women.▼
▲* ''[[Magic:
* The Tau, of [[Warhammer 40000]], are universally bald, save for a single lock at the back of their head which they typically grow [[Braids of Action|just past shoulder length]]. In the RPG books, human women sometimes are partly or fully bald, such as the Sisters Repentia.▼
▲** Finally, [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=45150 Vile Deacon], assuming you don't count horns against one's baldness.
=== Tabletop RPG ===
▲* In one of the sourcebooks for ''[[
▲* In ''[[Deadlands]]: Hell on Earth'', all [[Psychic Powers|sykers]] are absolutely bald. Including women.
▲* The Tau, of [[Warhammer
* In ''[[Forgotten Realms]]'' Thay has a custom of shaving heads - Red Wizards and everyone else with status worth a mention has a bald head and often a tattoo or several on it. This includes women, but given that anyone important from Thay is likely to be an arrogant representative of their evil magocracy and/or engaged in slave-trading,<ref>there are refugees, but since they would rather not be identified on sight to begin with, they tend to abandon this tradition</ref> the aesthetical side of their traditions rarely becomes a prominent concern.
==
* Karan Sjet in the ''[[
* Jack (aka Subject Zero) from ''[[
** Talitha, a minor character in the first game, was also shaved bald.
* Janne from ''[[
* Safiya in ''[[Neverwinter Nights 2]]''. She is a member of Red Wizards of Thay, who all shave their heads in order to mark their scalps with sigils of arcane power. She doesn't have nearly as many tattoos as Red Wizards are supposed to have, though.
* Zenoa in ''[[Suikoden Tierkreis]]''
* The [[Ax Crazy]] villainess Sasha from ''[[
* Some Orc women in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' are bald; it's treated as just another expression of their [[Badass|badassitude.]] They are the only women in the game with baldness as an option.
* {{spoiler|Momma Bosco}} from ''[[The Adventures of Sam
* Healers of Agrela in ''[[Majesty]]'' (the first game, anyway).
* Christine from the ''[[Fallout: New Vegas]]'' DLC "Dead Money". You'd think it the fault of the Auto-Doc you find her trapped in (which tore out her vocal cords) or the horrific experiments that left her scarred all over, but, in fact, she shaved her head voluntarily and becomes mildly irritated when you assume otherwise.
* Kalin from ''[[
* ''[[Star
* The titular character of [[Alice: Madness Returns]], in a flashback/hallucination of her time in an asylum.
* The dark elves from ''[[Dungeon Keeper]] 2''. Overlaps with [[Bald of Evil]].
* In ''[[Legacy of Kain]]'', it seems to be a religious thing, maybe as an extension of the hiding-women's-hair rules of some real religions.
* Shapers in ''[[Vega Strike]]'' are a faction made up of transhuman perfectionist folk [[Designer Babies|genetically modified]] with adaptations to a wider range of environments (among other things). This includes skin pigmentation and hair, - they chose as the common part of their phenotype [[Dark-Skinned Blond]] with no hair above eyebrows ([https://web.archive.org/web/20190710193659/https://sourceforge.net/p/vegastrike/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/masters/animations/load_screen.ani/Shapers.png like this]).
* [[Mortal Kombat]]:
** D'Vorah, though her species clearly are not mammals.
** ''[[Mortal Kombat 11]]'' shows that ''all'' the Tarkata (Baraka's people) are bald, females included.
== Web Comics ==
* In ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'', Zoe was bald for some time. While changed into a camel, she bit off Gwynn's hair; Gwynn retaliated with a spell that made Zoe lose all of her hair.
* The succubi from ''[[Oglaf]]''.
* The furry webcomic [[
* Arkady from ''[[
* In ''[[The Order of the Stick
== Western Animation ==
* Eustace's mother in ''[[
* {{spoiler|Heather}}, during the second season of the ''[[Total Drama Island
** Then {{spoiler|Dakota}}, in Season 4
* Luann in ''[[King of the Hill]]'' lost her hair in the Megalo-Mart explosion in the end of season 2. Traumatized by both her hair loss and the death of her boyfriend Buckley in the same explosion, she, as Kahn put it, "puts on strange [[Sin Ã]]©ad O'Connor act" and rants about "starving Irish children".
* In ''[[Doug]]'', the [[Token Girl|only female member]] of The Beets is bald.
* An episode of [[Rugrats]] once featured a female news anchor with a very memorable hairstyle, to the point where she's recognized as 'the one with the hair'. At the end of the episode, it's revealed to be a wig, she is completely bald underneath.
* In ''[[
* On an episode of ''[[
** "That's the one place you ''want'' them to have hair!"
* Kitty Katswell from ''[[
* In the episode "Sweet and Elite" of [[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
* An episode of ''[[Jimmy Two-Shoes]]'' revealed that Heloise wore a wig, though this was likely a one-off thing [[Reality Warper|Lucius]] caused.
* One ''[[The Simpsons (
* Many female characters in ''[[Gandahar]]'' - most notably, Queen Ambisextra and her Councilwomen.
▲== Professional Wrestling ==
▲* Molly Holly became bald after Wrestlemania XX, as a result of losing a Hair Match.
▲* Likewise, Roxxi Laveaux.
▲* Serena Deeb became bald when joining the Straight Edge Society, but oddly enough, not in a Hair Match. She willingly allowed her head to be shaved by [[CM Punk]].
▲* An Adidas commercial featured a woman shaving her head totally bald, including her eyebrows. It is soon revealed that [[Bald of Awesome|the woman was preparing to swim]]. "Long Live Sport", indeed.
▲** Also happens in a Korean Powerade commercial.
▲* ''OMNI'' magazine featured this trope on its cover art several times.
== Real Life ==
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* An effect of chemotherapy for various forms of cancer is often the loss of hair, so many women with this look in [[Real Life]] qualify as [[Badass]] for beating back the disease. It's also fairly common for her friends and family members to shave their heads for her in solidarity.
* Scottish TV presenter Gail Porter lost her hair when she developed alopecia.
* Model Amber Rose has recently{{when}} been sporting a bald head.
* [[Britney Spears]] was known for being bald a couple of years ago.
* Buddhist Nuns are notable for their shaven scalps.
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* Certain totemist African tribes believe themselves to descend from lions, so their men traditionally wear long hair, reminiscent of a lion's mane, and the women are shaven bald. One such example is the Masai of Kenya and Tanzania.
* Certain Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women are traditionally required to shave their heads when they get married, and then wear a wig over their bald heads for the rest of their lives, even if they divorce.
* St. Clair had her head shaved by St. Francis of Assisi when she asked to join up with his religious order <ref>
* Ancient Egypt had a problem with lice. The Egyptians' typical solution was to shave their heads and wear wigs. This also had the advantage of being easier to maintain and style than natural hair would be, and easily removed to cool off on hot days.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:
[[Category:
[[Category:Hair Tropes]]
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