The Shorn Identity

[mlao]

I think that all the bald celebrities and athletes mentioned would be just as popular if they had hair or not. Lets face it Bruce Willis was a star way before he started losing his hair and Jason Statham was the best thing about Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels and he was an Armani model before that.
Most of the people that are mentioned on this site who do shave their heads are effectively their own bosses. Michael Jordan, Andre Agassi will never have to take orders from anyone. A lot of them adopted the look at the height of its popularity and they made it work them. Which is great. They are defined by it. No one is going to give them grief because they are bald.
Now lets go to the regular world. Some guys look fantastic with a shaved head. They spend time at the gym, dress great, and have excellent facial features and head shapes that make them look even better then the celebrities mentioned. Plus they have jobs where the look works and is accepted.
But a lot of people feel they look better with some hair framing their face and they feel more comfortable with it.
So while I don't need to defend Fixed by 35 (he does a great job of that on his own) I can respect and see his side of the issue. Especially when it comes to the straight corporate or political world, you see a lot of politicians and heads of corporations who are losing their hair but a lot of them are not shaving their heads.
In the end all you can say to each his own.

[jooder]

I think its great that fixed by 35 has an opinion.......the world would be very boring if we were all the same.
The thing i have an issue with is the way he tries to present his argument as fact. Bald maybe grotesque to him...... but it isnt to everybody.

[Fixed by 35]

Black men often shave their heads, and they seem to get away with it in a way that white and Asian people don't. So okay, you've found an exception to the argument.

God, has hair loss really led to this? Arguing about just how shit it really is? I can't believe I even need to argue the point. Bald is crap and most of the world agrees.

[jooder]

Most of the people in your world agree

[gmonasco]

Black men often shave their heads, and they seem to get away with it in a way that white and Asian people don't.

In other words, all bald men are discriminated against -- except the ones who aren't, of course. But there's always some excuse why the exceptions don't count.

I can't believe I even need to argue the point. Bald is crap and most of the world agrees.

The people in living in the world in your head, perhaps.

[jooder]

I think the reason some people have a problem with fixed by 35's arguments are because he changes the boundaries so often.
First he says bald men are ugly and arnt successfull.......so you show him a succesfull sportsman.......then he says sportsmen dont count. Then bald men dont get good sponsorship deals...........so you show him Michael Jordan........then he says bald black men are excluded too. He says practically all women in the world think bald is ugly.....so you post numerous links from dating forums where the response to 'is bald sexy?' is overwhelmingly positive. Then he generally doesnt reply but starts the same arguments in another thread.
He is entitled to his opinions.....yet often tries to present them as facts.... which they are not.

[Fixed by 35]

If you actually look carefully at dating sites, you'll notice women who say bald is sexy often also provide a hair preference which is not bald. My hunch is that they say bald is sexy in such an environment to avoid appearing shallow, even though there really is nothing shallow in disliking baldness. Society needs to stop calling people who choose partners based initially on looks shallow, because it is perfectly healthy to choose a partner you are attracted too.

I don't know of any white or Asian men who can carry off the bald look. I know of the examples others give, but so many of them suffer from an inability to match their appearance to their personality, unless they're a meat head.

The difficulty with the argument is that it is hard to pin point and there will always be exceptions. However, I'm interested in trends; celebrities are a particularly useless pool of data subjects because money talks and explains pretty much why they're an exception! As a general rule, the bald men I used to see on a daily basis were far more likely to be in menial work; likely to be single or married, rather than playing the field and generally a bit depressing to be around. The exceptions tended to be men who balded at an older age.

I'm worried that support groups try too hard to make people feel better rather than informed. It's the same as calling a retard 'special needs.' They're still a retard. There are lots of websites which say that men like fat women too if you want to find them, but I know that isn't true because the contrary is starkly obvious. The truth is hard to find; the only place I have found it is academic journals and observation, which does not bear out the happy nonsense you guys would like to believe.

[jooder]

"I'm worried that support groups try too hard to make people feel better rather than informed. It's the same as calling a retard 'special needs.' They're still a retard"

This line just about sums up your whole personality.

Yet another rambling post with no evidence to support your theory.
Ive grown tired of giving example after example to refute your ideas. The evidence is out there for all to see - successfull bald sportsmen, actors, businessmen, politicians. Bald men with good looking girlfriends......... basically, open your eyes and you will see

Fixed - I truly hope you can change your life for the better and begin to enjoy life. Do whatever you need to in order to live a more fruitfull existence...... maybe a hair transplant would be just the thing for you. I believe there are surgeons out there who can do a great, realistic job. After all, there must be more to life than moaning about every hair loss 'solution' there is. However, something tells me that even if you had a full head of hair, the world of 'fixed by 35' would still be negative.

[Fixed by 35]

Life was great before I started losing my hair, actually. I can pinpoint the day that life went from great to shit.

[25 going on 65]

Having skimmed over this back-and-forth, I will throw a few observations/ideas out.
First, there are definitely some balding men who look better shaved than when their Norwood is grown out. I don't think they all look ugly by any means; e.g. I actually think Jason Statham is a good-looking dude.
That said, the majority of men unfortunately can't pull off the "bald guy" look very well, and there are a lot of reasons for that. Fixed and I are in this category - we cannot shave our heads unless we want to lose more of our looks than we already have. So it's a choice of looking bad with hair loss, or looking worse with a wet shave.
Also, consider that even men who look OK bald look better with hair. At least in most peoples' opinions - and that's what it all comes down to. We are perceived and treated differently for the drastic change in our appearance that MPB has caused, which is why all of us dislike balding. It's the reason we're here - because among homosapiens, hair matters. Caring about hair is in our DNA to some extent (not just our minds), and if society really thought bald was beautiful, this forum would be a ghost town.

Um, where was I going with this? I guess I'll close by saying that I understand jooder's point - that life goes on with hair loss, and some balding men have been very successful. It IS possible to be bald and have a good life.
But I also understand where Fixed is coming from. Unlucky genes started taking our youth and looks from us in our early 20's, and there is no trendy "wet shave" option for us to fall back on. Either we have hair, or we look bad. And that's a really frustrating choice to have to make. In fact... it's not so much a choice made, as a dilemma faced.