Ayanna P ...

[uwe]

I know she's a member of "The Squad", but this is non-partisan-party-political, I just thought it very brave and moving.



I had no idea that black people are affected by alopecia more than anybody else and that the trendy braids/"Senegalese Twists" (I have no issue with the look, even like it) might be a contributing factor. As someone who digs Skin of Skunk Anansie,





I can find a bald woman very attractive (though with Skin - who describes herself as "bald, black & Brit" it's an image/life style choice, not a health fate), but I can also understand how hair loss hits women much harder and more fundamental than men.

[westen44]

[uwe]

Those Vendetta scenes hit home with depressing pictures in my mind of women in concentration camps or female "collaborators" having their heads shaven bald in 1944/45 after Allied victories in German-occupied countries (similar scenes happened in Germany during the war when German women and girls were "caught fraternizing" with Eastern European POWs or forced laborers). It's always the same intention: degrading and dehumanizing women. 

[westen44]

That's true.  But in this case I just mostly look as Natalie Portman playing yet another sci-fi role.  Overall,  she actually didn't look bad bald.  Neither did that Indian actress who played in the first Star Trek movie. 

Those scenes of women having their heads shaved after WWII that I've seen seem to have mostly been in France.  It is painful to watch. 

[uwe]

That's true.  But in this case I just mostly look as Natalie Portman playing yet another sci-fi role.  Overall,  she actually didn't look bad bald.  Neither did that Indian actress who played in the first Star Trek movie. 

Those scenes of women having their heads shaved after WWII that I've seen seem to have mostly been in France.  It is painful to watch.

Naw, it was pretty much everywhere. It started in France because Germany was driven out from there first, but there were similar scenes in Belgium, Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, Czechoslovakia ... It caught on. There was (understandably) a lot of hate (and a lot of those acts were not so much from resistance organisations, but from the enraged mob) and it focused on these poor women whether they had worked as, say, secretaries for the German occupiers or had entertained a romantic liaison with a German soldier/bore the child of one.

Frida of ABBA



is the daughter of a German Landser stationed in Norway with a Norwegian mother. Her mother had to move to (in WWII neutral) Sweden (for good) after the liberation of Norway to raise her daughter in peace - staying in Norway would have meant succumbing eventually to state pressure to give the "tysker bastard" away to an orphans' home; nobody wanted these children post '45 in Norway (and there were quite a few of them, Scandinavians were viewed as "fellow Aryans", so the German military had no issues re romantic liaisons with the populace). It's one of those historic injustices: Scandinavian volunteers for the Waffen-SS



could live in Germany after the war and eventually assume German nationality to save them from persecution in their home countries, but no such offer was made to the women and girls who were mothers of children with German fathers. 

[westen44]

I didn't mean that France was the only place it happened.  Just that when you watch documentaries they seem to show France more for some reason.  Just like Civil War photographs tend to focus on the same images of slaves over and over again.  Or POW photographs tend to show the same picture of 3 Confederate soldiers after they were captured at Gettysburg, etc. 

Note:
After posting that, I went to the grocery store where they were playing ABBA.  It seemed liked quite a coincidence because that music is rarely played now.  Frida was my favorite. 

[uwe]

GGG!

Good German Genes! 

[westen44]

GGG!

Good German Genes! 

It certainly seems like it.  I have German genes myself, but maybe not necessarily good ones.  The male equivalent to Frida's vocal talent would have been very nice to have.