Re: Baldness
Felicia,
Excellent post. I had high expectations for it and it exceeded them.
I think you agree, I think baldness is viewed much more negatively on women. It's interesting that you basically never see women that are bald/balding and NOT trying to cover it up somehow. Old (white) ladies often go with what I call the grandmafro, which is the ultra frizzy perm clearly designed to spread the hair out as much as possible. Seems extremely common. I think appearance in society in general is (at least perceived as) being more important for females than males. Perhaps this is based in evolutionary reasons, who knows. Also, that baldness is so much more prevalent among men must be a factor.
Just the other day I was in a grocery store talking to a friend of mine. We were at the checkout and there were the usual 500 tabloids all with Britney Spears on the cover with a shaved head. My friend made the comment that he had basically always thought of her as not unattractive but not particularly attractive. However, in the shaved head shots he thought she looked very attractive. We then discussed how each of us, like many other guys, thought Natalie Portman looked very attractive (more than usual) when she shaved her head for a movie. People felt the same about Demi Moore as well. While the sample is small and famous here, I think it is evidence that you are correct that these women would be better off just cutting it very close to their head.
Personally, as I said in the diablo discussion forum discussion thread, I started getting a reasonably serious receding hair line at about 19. I have always had thin hair, I am jealous of the guys with a fro because I've wanted one since being a teenager, probably because it was impossible even with a full head of hair. A bit after the recession (heh) I started getting thin at the top as well. Not like a bald spot in the back, but the entire top of my head - especially the front in general. Since about 16 I had had the pretty short, slicked forward type hairstyle. I switched to just the very short (too short to do anything with) at that time after getting my hair cut from the usual lady, for my sister's wedding, who cut the side a bit longer to cover up where the hair line had receded. Basically, she gave me something sort of like a comb-over. When I was about 18 or 20, I went to a dermatologist for acne issues I still had. She reccomended that I take Propecia and gave me a prescription. Basically, it's a baldness drug that apparently doesn't add hair, it just keeps you from losing it. I decided that that wasn't worth at all worth the side effects so I never even filled it. The last couple of years I've gotten a lot thinner. I often just shave my head completely bald. It starts to look bad when I, due to laziness, let it grow too long.
I am 100% with you. I think that efforts to cover up baldness are 99.9999999% of the time bad. They often focus the eye on the area in question and actually call more attention to it than just the lack of hair would.
Jared
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