The Psychology of Baldness : Part 2

Hair!: Mankind's Historic Quest to End Baldness
by Gersh Kuntzman

(Page 2 of 3)

"If I be shaven, then my strength will go from me and I shall become weak, and be like any other man," Samson tells Delilah in a moment of affection (for which he had, no doubt, paid in advance).

The rest, as they say, is the history of bald prejudice. But the Bible is only the jumping-off point. History shows us that hair has always been a powerful tool of subjugation and humiliation.

Roman obsession with hair nearly equaled our own-and like today, baldness was considered a scourge. Caesar, appalled that his naked pate projected an image of frailty, concealed his own baldness by combing his remaining strands forward, the antecedent of the classic comb-over that torments us to this day. Roman historian Suetonius captured it best when he declared Caesar a "dandy" and described his gratuitous use of laurel wreaths to cover his head.

"Of all the honors voted him by the Senate and People, none pleased him so much as the privilege of wearing a laurel wreath on all occasions," the historian wrote. "He constantly took advantage of it."

Of course, there was no end to the list of Roman "cures" for the blight, including pomades made out of hippo fat, salves containing the urine of young foals and liniments of sulfur and tar.

The Roman obsession with hair gave first-century satirist Martial (think of him as Tom Wolfe in a toga) a lot of material with which to work. The Spanish-born poet, who is best known for his twelve-volume collection of witty and deeply cynical epigrams, offered a condemnation of a Roman nobleman's futile efforts to conceal his baldness with a comb-over that could've been written (minus the flowery prose) today:

From the one side and the other, you gather up your scanty locks and you cover, Marius, the wide expanse of your shining bald scalp with the hair from both sides of your head. But blown about, they come back at the bidding of the wind and return to themselves and gird your bare poll with big curls on the side and on that . . . Will you please, in simpler fashion, confess yourself old, so as after all to appear as a bald person. Nothing is more unsightly than a bald man covered with hair.

What Martial failed to take into account, of course, was what it felt like to be bald in a society that despised baldness. It was bad enough being a slave in those times, but if you were a bald slave (talk about a double whammy!), you were believed to be fit only to clean toilets, stables and street gutters. Prisoners, adulteresses and traitors were typically shaved to heighten their humiliation, a practice that the French revived for Nazi collaborators during World War II.

And history has shown us-whether among the Maccabees in the Bible, the Visigoths in the fourth century or Native American cultures more recently-that there's no better way to humiliate your vanquished foe than to slice off his hair or even scalp as a trophy. (As a badge of courage, many Native American warriors purposely left the frontal forelock on an otherwise shaved head, the better to facilitate the scalping should they be defeated in battle.)

You can try to put a positive spin on it-as the military does by making the bald head a symbol of obedience or as monks do by making the tonsure a sign of servitude to God-but baldness has never looked good to the wider society at large.

Face it, monks don't get dates.

Lest you doubt the weight of history that is carried on the back of every bald man, dozens of recent studies confirm that women and men typically prejudge the hairless as weaker, less potent, less friendly, older and, in one study, less "good"-especially when it comes to the all-important first impression.

"Bald or balding men may be disadvantaged in initial interactions, which may affect their social experiences and quality of life," said Thomas Cash, a psychology professor at Old Dominion University, who has studied the psychological impact of baldness for years.

University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Albert Kligman goes further: "Consider the consequences for a young woman whose hair has thinned out substantially by the age of twenty-five years. Can anyone doubt that this may seriously hurt her chances for dates and mates, for jobs, for achieving self-confidence-and so on, endlessly? . . . Those who are less beautiful or even unattractive are disadvantaged in virtually all human interactions."

Defying the stereotype that men are supposed to be Stoics about personal appearance and leave such frivolity to the fairer sex, bald men will often describe in painful detail their lives without hair: the teasing, the bad job interviews, the declining self-image.

"Maybe it's just middle-aged male vanity," joked Stewart, a fifty-one-year-old salesman I met in the office of New Jersey transplant surgeon Robert Bernstein. Stewart relaxed comfortably in a dentist-style chair moments before Bernstein was to carve out a swath of his scalp, dissect the thin pelt into individual hair units and then transplant the hairs into one thousand holes punched into Stewart's balding areas.

Copyright © 2001 by Gersh Kuntzman.

About the Author

Gersh Kuntzman has been a New York newspaperman for more than a decade, most recently as a reporter and columnist for The New York Post. Kuntzman's weekly column, MetroGnome, roots out the quirky underside of New York life.