The adage about the Academy Awards is that nobody remembers who won last year. Will Smith has ensured, of course, that no one will ever forget that he won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as Venus and Serena Williams’ father in “King Richard” — even as his awards-ceremony performance eclipsed it.
As everyone knows by now, Smith got out of his seat, marched up to presenter Chris Rock — who moments earlier had made a snarky joke about Jada Pinkett-Smith’s shaved head, a response to her autoimmune alopecia — and slapped him. Smith then added insult to injury with an emotional apology/about-face in his acceptance speech a few minutes later. (Smith has since apologized to Rock as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reviews the incident.)
Nothing about Smith’s behavior is in any way excusable. But I also think Rock is equally culpable in a moment that rolled out every cliché pf America — stupid, classless and violent.
It has become acceptable in the digital, post-Trumpian age to ridicule others. Teasing, bullying and making borderline jokes are all right as long as they’re at others’ expense. Ridicule is never a two-way street. Do unto others before they do unto you: That’s the new Golden Rule.
Even so, it’s always been acceptable to parse women’s looks overtly in a way that women do not parse men’s. But then that’s because men have had all the power, while women have had to derive theirs from those looks, which are inextricably bound with long, thick, straight luxurious locks — Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge hair. Think of Lady Godiva taking her ride to protest taxation clad in nothing but her cascading tresses. Think of Rapunzel, letting down her hair in more ways than one. Think of all those princess brides parading across the centuries, their flowing tendrils the symbols of the virginity they offer their princely grooms and the nations they are also wedding.
If hair is a woman’s “crowning glory,” then the loss of it can be used to signal her ignominy and shame. The victors shaved the heads of women who slept with the enemy in wartime. (See World War II., in which the Nazis shaved the heads of interred Jews as a way to further dehumanize them.) Indeed, so potent is the shaving of the female head that to do so without a medical reason is generally looked on as quite mad. (See Britney Spears.)
So having alopecia — which is irreversible and disproportionately affects Black women, who have had a fraught relationship with hair — is not just about losing “some hair,” as one male New York TImes poster put it, or am “aggravating” inconvenience, as one female dermatologist put it, when there are admittedly worse things in the world. It’s the devastating loss of an emblem of female sexuality and status imposed by a patriarchal society — particularly in Hollywood, where looks are everything.
Now we don’t want comedians to stop making jokes. And we don’t want hecklers to take it into their heads to punch them out. But it is time for men to stop commenting on any aspect of women’s looks. It’s a no-win situation that has the unfortunate effect of suggesting that the ridiculer is making a desperate play for the woman’s attention. (Rock’s excuse that he was really making a joke about the pretentious 1997 movie “G.I. Jane” — for which Demi Moore famously shaved her head to play a Navy Seal trainee —`was the funniest part of the whole episode. “G.I. Jane,” really? Not exactly cutting-edge humor.
But then, maybe it’s time for all of us to be a little more judicious about the way we speak of others — remembering that anything can seem funny till the joke’s on us.