5 hours ago
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The Oscars were this week, and as usual I took the day off to judge the red carpet looks from my tracksuit pants-ed position on the couch, pick apart the monologue (love you Conan), declare I could write better presenter segments, and keep an eye on social media to see which stars cause the most buzz.
This year, I noticed something interesting: in a room full of classically handsome stars such as Chris Evans and Michael B Jordan, as well as newly minted hotties like Heated Rivalry’s Hudson Williams, I was reading many appreciative and deeply thirsty tweets about … bald 75-year-old Ed Harris.
There was a focus on Ed because his wife, Amy Madigan, won an Oscar and his reaction was lovely, but a lot of what I saw was about how hot he looked. He has, of course, been handsome forever, sporting sharp cheekbones and piercing blue eyes. He has also been at some stage of balding for his entire career, something that has never once stopped him being considered sexy.
The Ed praise brought to mind the discourse around male hair loss, something I have been thinking about for a while. I am not a man, I am not a balding man, and I am not romantically interested in men. I have a complicated relationship with many straight men, because they have a complicated relationship to me being a fat woman. However, it doesn’t stop me observing society and heterosexuality and, like in an Unlikely Animal Friends situation, I have something unexpectedly nice to say to straight men: I like your balding heads. And I think we should be bringing sexy balding back.
I have documented my perplexity around the heterosexual need for men to be tall in order to be desirable, and I feel much the same about the hair. I know there are ways society treats people badly due to lack of hair, and I’m sure it changes how you look at yourself, but ageing is inevitable, and the majority of men are going to experience some hair loss.
Of course, not all of them are going to look like the handsome actor Ed Harris when they go through this, and not all women are going to love it. I do however think most men would be more attractive if they accepted what was happening, rather than trying (and often failing) to hide it.
There are pills and lotions and potions, and of course the current trend of flying to Turkey to get a hair transplant, which is quickly becoming socially acceptable to talk about. These all have varying degrees of effectiveness, and just as I don’t judge women for undergoing cosmetic changes to their bodies, I would never judge a man for doing the same. If you think being balding is holding you back, and you have the means, go get that hair. But my personal opinion, based not only on what I think, but also on the types of men I see get into loving and stable relationships, is that you don’t need to.
I’m not just saying this because there are famous handsome balds. The standard these days seems to be that either you can pull off shiny bald because you are Ed or Stanley Tucci or The Rock, or you must figure out how to not be bald at all.
But lately I’ve been watching a lot of shows from the 80s/90s/00s, and every second macho man character has the John Carroll Lynch wraparound hair with bald patch on top. In the show Just Shoot Me!, one of my favourite balding men on earth, Enrico Colantoni (also Veronica Mars’ dad), plays a photographer with the John Carroll Lynch hairstyle, and his character is a womaniser who is constantly sleeping with models. Hot men with bald heads exist – what they have in common is that they wear it with confidence.
If you go out into the world and take notice, you’ll see that many men are in various states of baldness, and nobody cares. Women everywhere are desiring and dating balding men, fondly stroking their thinning manes. Of course, like height, a thick head of hair is of great benefit to men, but unless I’m full-on hallucinating, it’s not a must-have for most women.
As someone who also doesn’t fit into society’s standard hot categories, I know this is easy to say and hard to do, but: wearing your hair or lack of it with confidence, not letting it control you like a little bald rat under your chef’s hat, does wonders.
Obsessing over the hair loss, trying to come up with innovative ways to hide it, being a never-nude of the head under various hats, these are the things that will draw attention – not to your baldness, but to your unease. It’s hot to be secure and self-assured and know that your worth is not tied to how much hair you have or how few wrinkles you have or how straight your teeth are.
I just do not see balding as a bad or ugly or unappealing thing that you need to either grudgingly accept or expensively change. And I don’t want balding looks to be accepted in a patronising way either, like telling fat girls they are sooo brave for wearing a bikini. I think balding and bald men are hot, especially when they aren’t trying to hide it, and I’m not alone.
Work on your hairline if you want to, but I think the work should start behind the hairline, inside the skull. Try to start loving that beautiful head of yours, and show me your dome!
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Rebecca Shaw is a writer based in Sydney
