The Compulsory Baldness Law

Nobody in the whole country expected it. Everyone knew that the new president was a sort of a misogynist, but no one expected and neither understood how a law like this one could be approved. The law is as follows: every year, a few girls aged between 18 and 25 would be selected in every town. Those girls would have their heads shaved bald and would have to stay bald for a whole year. They wouldn’t be able to hide their scalps with anything, call it hats, wigs or whatever, and there would be punishments in case they didn’t maintain their head smooth, some of them really disproportionate. It was an utterly cruel law, worthy of a dystopian movie. Shavings would be done in the months of July and August, and towns would decide when and where they would be done. Most towns, including mine, had chosen to do it during the town fair.

The first day of the town fair arrived and the whole town was there. The town’s barber had prepared a sort of a stage with a chair and a table where there were all of his tools. Everybody was eager to see what would happen, and young girls were on the brink of anxiety, since no one knew which ones would be chosen to get shaved until the last minute: only thing we knew was that there would be four ladies. Suddenly, the mayor got into the stage and uttered the first name: Jill Martin.

Jill, a 22-years old girl with platinum blonde hair cut past her shoulders, suddenly got petrified. Her parents tried to calm her and made her go up to the stage. Some tears ran down her face as she walked towards the chair. As she was sitting down and getting caped, she begged the barber not to shave her, but he turned a deaf ear. Next time we heard was the sound of the clippers shearing Jill’s head. Her weeping intensified as she watched her hair fall. Soon her golden locks were on the floor and she was almost bald. The barber lathered up her head and passed a razor until there was no stubble left and Jill was as bald as an egg. After the shaving, he swept Jill’s former mane into a transparent plastic bag and handed it to her. To add insult to injury, Jill was given a hand mirror so she could see herself bald. She started to cry even louder. She looked weird bald: her head and her ears looked bigger than before. All the town folks watched the ‘show’ with a straight face, except for Jill’s family.

As Jill sat down in a bench in the back of the stage, another girl was called up: Stephanie, a dark-skinned 18-year-old of mesmerizing African beauty (no wonder she had been chosen as the fair’s beauty queen) and a luscious Angela Davis-style afro. Stephanie begged not to be shaved, but it was futile. Her black curls were mercilessly shorn as she cried: the big Oster clippers showed their power by making their way through Stephanie’s thick afro as if it was an old man’s thinning hair. The razor would later finish the job and make her head as shiny as gold. As it happened with Jill, the barber handed Stephanie a bag full of thick curls and made her take a look in the mirror. She went to the bench where Jill was: the two chrome-domes tried to console each other.

The mayor pronounced another name: Olivia. That was hard luck, since Olivia was already 25 years old and if she didn’t get it this year, she was out for good. Olivia was perhaps the most beautiful girl in town, thanks not only to her face and body, but also to her spectacular red hair, which almost reached her ass. As it happened with Jill and Stephanie, her pleas to the barber and her tears were to no avail, as her hair was prey to the clippers and the razor. Strip by strip, her glorious red tresses were disconnected from her head, and the razor later scrapped off the stubble. There was something special about seeing those manes fall: I had come to fantasize about seeing some of my friends or acquaintances without hair, but I thought that day would never come. The truth is that, even bald, Olivia was beautiful, perhaps even more without hair than with hair. Her bare scalp had the whitest white color I had ever seen, matching her skin. The barber gave her a bag full of long red locks and then she went to the bench with the other two baldies.

The last one was Patricia, a 20-year-old Asian hottie who didn’t even flinch when her name was called. She already imagined that begging for mercy would be futile, so she simply sat back and let the barber do his job. However, that didn’t stop her from crying her eyes out as she was being stripped of her long jet black hair. I tried to conceal my growing erection as I watched the clippers shearing Patricia’s mane. Meanwhile, I also wondered why no one around opposed the slightest to applying this disproportionate law. Nobody thought about what the girls could be feeling: they looked as if they were going through the biggest humiliation of their lives. When Patricia was already bald, she joined the rest: the four of them hugged each other, trying to find some consolation or comfort. They were about to leave, but the mayor stopped them:

“Girls, before you leave, I have to remind you of the penalties for skipping the mandatory shaving. If you skip it once, you will have to be bald for another year. If you do it again, 5 years without hair. A third time, 10 years without hair. And if you skipped it a fourth time, a product would be applied to your head which would burn and destroy your follicles. In other words, you would be bald for the rest of your lives.” The girls were horrified at the thought of losing their hair forever. “Of course, if you don’t commit any stupidity, none of this will happen, and in a year’s time you will be able to grow your hair back – did you understand that?” The girls nodded and walked down the stage. Once downstairs, they sought comfort from their parents, friends or boyfriends. The sunlight reflected on their bare heads, making them glow.

That night, the four of them dressed up as much as possible: make-up, skimpy dresses… Everything to try to draw attention away from their freshly shaved heads, but it was useless, since it was impossible not to look. Luckily for them, they were not the only chorme-domes in the fair: there also were girls from other towns which had already held their fair, and therefore they had already been shaved.

A YEAR LATER

The law was applied all over the country without exception. It was no longer strange to find girls without any hair on their heads wherever you went: libraries, colleges,clubs… Not even celebrities or well-known girls in general were spared from getting shorn: for instance, a girl with more than a million followers in both Instagram and Tiktok got her characteristic brown waves shorn. The girls tried to live as if nothing had happened. As for the boys, most of them didn’t like bald girls and preferred those who still had their hair. I wasn’t part of that majority, and the truth is that baldies usually appreciated the attention.

Next year’s fair arrived and none of the girls had committed any infractions related to the shaving. On the first day of the fair, after four new girls got shaved bald, they were given a certificate proving that they had completed the year of mandatory baldness and could therefore grow out their hair. However, I was able to catch this conversation in a moment of the night:

“Jill, are you serious?”

“Yes girl, I’m gonna keep shaving my head some time.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know, I think I enjoy being bald. Besides, I love not having to comb my hair or wash my head.”

EPILOGUE

Years passed by, elections took place and a new president arrived, a woman. Obviously, one of the first things she did was abolishing the cruel “compulsory baldness law”, as it had been called, something that women were grateful for. Girls that, because they had skipped shaving, had several years of baldness ahead of them, were pardoned.

However, the law created a sort of a trend. Some girls who had to shave their heads had remained bald, and upon telling their friends and acquaintances about the benefits of such cuts, there were several of them who had decided to get rid of their manes and get a comfortable, low-maintenance shave. Eventually, this became normalized and it was increasingly common to see women of all ages with shaved heads, especially in the summer months, when barbershops were filled with women seeking to escape the heat with the “clippers and razor treatment.”

Jill was one of those women. Ever since her blonde mane had been shaved off, she had kept her hair very short: she sometimes tried things such as flattops or mohawks, but she always ended up going back to a shiny, smooth head: a head that I had been able to enjoy more than once. One day, at the beginning of summer, I found her at the barbershop, where she was being shaved. Something strange, since she always shaved herself at home. I noticed that they were spreading an ointment on her head. What could it be?

“Hi Jill, what are doing here? I thought you shaved yourself.”

“Hi! Well, I came to get something… special.”

“Are you talking about that thing they were spreading on your head? What the hell was that?”

“Let’s just say it will help me not having to shave my head”, she said with a cheeky smile on her face. “You know, I was tired of having to shave every day.”

“It’s that what I think it is?”

“Yes. Let’s just say hair won’t bother me anymore. No more “Jill the dumb blondie”.  I’m sure you’re gonna love this…” she said while taking my hand to her hairless scalp. I couldn’t hide my excitement.

THE END

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