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In an election season, the relationship between hair, masculinity and power come to a head

LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS

For centuries, men have been ingesting pills, applying pastes and wearing wigs, fearing their aging pates' inevitable exposure. Hair is power and, in an election season, politics. Our hair is the only physical feature on which we blame an entire bad day. One person's hair styling and appearance (or another person's judgment of them) ignite passionate discussions about who we are – our class, race, sexuality and gender, yes, but also our values and basic good taste.

This is especially true when it comes to women. Hillary Clinton's recent New York salon visit inspired a slew of articles debating everything from the alleged cost ($600) and the fact that women pay more for haircuts to which historical Clinton hairstyle was the best and – maybe most importantly – why we are even talking about her hair in the first place.

But men are far from immune to this societal obsession. Perhaps countering claims of dead-keratin sexism is our equally insistent fixation on the hair of the (shudder) presumptive Republican nominee. Election-watchers are as fixated on Donald Trump's hair as we are on his xenophobia and the social faux pas of his supporters, and how his Dolph Lundgren-blond crown plays into his promise to bring American capitalism back to its supposed glory days.

In December, 2015, White House press secretary Josh Earnest called out Trump and his hair after the Republican proposed banning all Muslims from entering the United States.

"The Trump campaign for months now has had a dustbin of history-like quality to it, from the vacuous sloganeering, the outright lies, to even the fake hair," Earnest said, arguing that Trump's statement on Muslim immigration "disqualifies him from serving as president." In a way, Trump is the fun-house mirror of this polarized, image-focused age – a former reality-TV and WWE star whose performance of authentic manliness includes both denying allegations of assault and defending the size of his supposedly small hands.

Many Canadians like to think of our politics as less performative than the billion-dollar American election rodeo, but we are no less susceptible to the glamour stampede. No matter their political affiliations or levels of engagement, people in Canada have had plenty to say about Justin Trudeau's hair ever since the Conservatives started the conversation with a dismissive campaign: Trudeau "just isn't up to the job," they argued, but "nice hair, though."

Trudeau himself is aware of the symbolism: In 2012, after defeating Senator Patrick Brazeau in a boxing match, then-MP Trudeau infamously cut Brazeau's hair, stating: "When a warrior cuts his hair, it's a sign of shame, so it's very apropos." It was a move for which Cree writer Clayton Thomas-Muller criticized Trudeau harshly. "To touch a Native man's hair, and especially to cut it, has a profound impact on the individual," he noted.

It's true that the act had numerous historical echoes, since forcible removal of hair has been a tool of humiliation and subjugation throughout time. Head-shaving was used as a punishment for accused Nazi collaborators in occupied France, while indigenous youth had their hair cut off to accelerate their assimilation in colonial Canada's residential schools.

Hair has always mattered to a man’s image, whether it be former Toronto mayor Mel Lastman’s toupée, the everyman appeal of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’s do, or former prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s masterful use of the comb-over.

Hair has always mattered to a man’s image, whether it be former Toronto mayor Mel Lastman’s toupée, the everyman appeal of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’s do, or former prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s masterful use of the comb-over.

Donald Weber/The Globe and Mail; Joe Raedle/Getty Images; AP

More playfully but just as meaningfully, in the early 2000s, former Toronto city councillor Howard Moscoe purchased then-mayor Mel Lastman's toupée at a charity auction, and used it as a duster for his seat at meetings. Hair has always mattered.

Last October, on the night of the federal election, I was in a room in Toronto surrounded by heartbroken NDP supporters who watched the Liberal red tide return Canada to its pre-Harper status quo. As prime minister-elect Trudeau delivered his victory speech, one agitated voice shouted, "You dye your hair!" sharing a public doubt that a man could make it past 40 without a single grey hair.

The message, echoing the Conservatives, was that only phonies dyed their hair. (The vexing contradiction, of course, is that women in the public eye, Clinton definitely included, must neither present too old, nor too young.) Yet now, as the PM is photographed doing push-ups at home and boxing in Brooklyn – we get it, we get it, he's fit – his thick coif reaffirms the notion that a head of hair is integral to our collective perceptions of masculinity, manliness and power.

Unlike other physical attributes we fetishize on men, hair is tied intimately to male insecurities about lost youth that have been a source of ridicule and praise for centuries. Anu Korhonen, a cultural historian at the University of Helsinki, gets into the way-back history in her 2010 paper Strange Things Out of Hair, which explores male baldness and masculinity in 16th-century England.

Korhonen cites early readings of the Bible – about Julius Caesar's epic comb-over and the story of how, when the prophet Elisha asks God to punish children who made fun of his baldness, God sends two bears to maul them – as points of reference for early modern Englishmen. Ultimately, she blames "dematerializing masculinity" as the source of their insecurity.

Not only does the absence of a full head of hair mean a loss of ideal masculinity, Korhonen writes, but it comes with a need to avoid being vocal about this worry, for fear of being seen as preoccupied with superficial "feminine" concerns.

Then there's the ritualistic head shaving, a common narrative device signalling major change. For men and women it can represent either institutionalization ( Full Metal Jacket, V for Vendetta), corporal punishment (Boyhood, Game of Thrones), self-empowerment (GI Jane) or life-altering medical treatment (every cancer movie ever). Depending on the person or the message, a shaved head can be either a sign of defeat or a new beginning.

Toronto hair stylist and salon-owner Cheryl Lone often deals with client insecurities around hair loss. She tends to be frank: Options are limited, with a good hair transplant costing at least $10,000 and still carrying the risk of mixed results. "I have made judgment calls, after doing a guy's hair for long periods of time, to say, 'Just shave it,'" Lone says. "It's definitely an adjustment," but over time "they feel good."

Ultimately, the coiffeuse believes that individual acceptance and comfort changes public perception. For example, the progenitor of Canadian "mania" politics, former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau displayed comb-over combinations unduplicated in the PMO since his 1984 resignation. No fuddles were given in Trudeau Sr.'s hair regime. While certain men choose to shell out for surface confidence, others wear their age with dignity.

Perhaps at some level this is part of why Bernie Sanders is resonating with so many young Americans. He seems to reject the absurd pressure to be young forever, signalling his authenticity in a world of Photoshop and smartphone beauty filters.

And maybe this is why we care so much about Trump's hair: because we know he must be keeping a secret in that nest. He's decided to carefully craft his image, the authoritarian libertine laurelled with his never-cresting brass wave, untouched by the wreckage of Reaganomics.

The disconnect between our collective aesthetic head-shake and intense media-shaming, and Trump's unwavering attachment to his hair, only serve to further illustrate how hair is so important to some men.

It doesn't necessarily have to look good. It just has to be there.