Baldness and Other White People Problems

What’s strange to me is that our culture, one so obsessed with appearance, faults people far more for trying to preserve what they once had as opposed to simply enhancing what they never did. Bald guys had hair at one point, I think pretty much everyone knows that. Also, of the bald guys who are out there, some of them look terrible when balding or totally bald, and look fine with a full head of hair. Yet their attempts to look better are simply laughed at or looked on with scorn. That idea of, “You’re not getting away with anything. We know. We know underneath all that fake stuff on your head you’re really just a bald piece of shit.”

Why? Why is this? I just don’t get it. I imagine part of this dates back to when these products first started coming out, and the fact that men in general have a very poor sense of what looks best in the way of appearance. You get combovers that are no more than seven strands of hair, when more or less anything would look superior. Or you’d have balding men looking for ways to get hair with no concern for the overall appearance it generates. They just want hair, period, and if it doesn’t really match the remaining hair on the sides and back they do have, whatever. At least it’s hair.

In other words, like many facets of male life, the solutions we come up with for things are worse than the problems themselves, and that’s funny. Like my buddy who once attempted to extinguish barbecue flames with a bucket of grease. Fine, fair enough. Still, this seems to be the one fact of our image-based culture where attempting to improve a situation is not acceptable.

Working out to improve your physique, fine. In certain cases, taking drugs to do it, also fine. Breast implants, fine. Liposuction, fine. Collagen injections, fine. Fad diets, cleanses, and airbrushing, fine. Guy wanting to not be bald anymore, is deplorable.

Part of it I think is just how prominently hair plays into physical appearance as opposed to other things men or women seek to improve or enhance with respect to appearance. Describing a guy with no hair, it’s probably one of the first things you’d use to distinguish him to someone. “Wait which guy?” “”You know, he’s kinda short, he’s bald, late forties” “Oh that guy, okay.”

Conversely, you wouldn’t normally use these types of physical defects to describe women. “Wait, which girl in the office?” “You know, she’s in pretty good shape, friendly, super flat, works in accounting I think.”

More to the point, most of these cosmetic enhancements, as I mentioned, are fixes for things that are generally body features you’ve had for some time. Breast enhancement would be the classic. You’ve never had huge boobs, you want huge boobs, so you get them. Balding is not like that. Balding is a deterioration of the body, which is another reason I think attempting to correct it cosmetically is so frowned upon. “This is what fate intended for you, guy. You’re one of those balds. You’re not one of us anymore, so stop fucking pretending.”

Whereas for women, there’s generally something besides pattern baldness causing it, which leads to more understanding from society, and it’s also just rarer. It’s much more rare, so anything you do about it or don’t do about it is probably acceptable. There’s more sympathy than scorn.

I should probably note now that when I’m talking about all of this with respect to baldness, this is classic, textbook definition of White People Problems. White culture, if nobody is noticed, is a shame-oriented culture. You’re supposed to feel bad about everything, ashamed about everything. All other cultures take very specific pride in their culture, heritage, and all aspects of lives. There are parades celebrating these very things. In white culture, positives are made negative. In nonwhite culture, all negatives are made positive.

The stereotypes that you don’t want to see white people dancing, don’t want to see white people play sports, don’t want generic white people cooking, heavy white people is a bad thing, all comes from white people. This isn’t something that has been projected onto white culture, it’s volunteered. …and then noted, satirized and joked about by all other cultures as well.

Baldness is a perfect example. White guy going bald is a problem that requires some kind of patchwork solution. Fake hair, regrowing the hair, rejiggering the remaining hair to look better, adjusting to life as a bald person, etc.  Every other culture had a way better idea. Every other culture, there is no bald, there is a shaved head, and then made the idea of a shaved head fucking awesome. Nobody is going to say shit to Michael Jordan. A shaved head is now cool. As is an earring. Best of all, now, nobody knows. Now that a shaved head is a fashionable, cultural style, you can live out the rest of your days looking attractive without anyone ever knowing if you’re going bald or not.

By the time white people figured this out, it was too late. The stigma for white people with shaved heads is generally, let’s face it, a Skinhead. By the time anyone thought to try to bandwagon onto the positivity, we had already made the decision to stigmatize it as we do with everything else, and there was no going back.

This extends beyond baldness as far as pride versus shame. The only culture where it’s not okay to be fat, is white culture. Every other culture made that okay. Case in point:

You hear talk all the time about “white girl butt” or “pancake butt” in contract to all other women, black, latina, etc. And to me it’s all representative of the cultural ideas that what you have, what you contribute, whatever that might be, is okay. As opposed to white culture, which amounts more to, whatever you have, what you contribute, is in need of reform. That at the end of the day, you’re supposed to feel bad.

With respect to white male baldness, the solution that seems okay is regrowing hair with pills. Taking these Monoxidil, Finasteride type tablets to just potentially stave off hair loss and maybe regrow some that’s lost. Synthesizing a pill you can now not only ingest, but also sell for billions is a solution white people can wrap their head around. Can’t stigmatize capitalism.

Once again, this post didn’t end up anywhere near where I expected it to. In any event, the baldness animosity thing to me seems ludicrous. Honestly, life is too short. Even for white people.