Toupée or not toupée: that is the question

When men’s fashion magazines crowned Michael Jordan as the man who made bald beautiful in the 1990s, this honor was every bit as fatuous as when women’s magazines crowned Bo Derek as the woman who made cornrows beautiful.

After all, I vaguely remember my big sisters swooning over actor Yul Brynner and his chrome dome – as Rameses II in The Ten Commandments and King Mongkut of Siam in The King and I – way back in the 1960s.

But if bald is beautiful (or even fashionable), why is the hair club for men thriving so much? And why, pray tell, is a “leading man” like John Travolta wearing a toupée that has nothing to do with a movie role?

This latter question (in fact, this post) arises from a recent debate I had with a female friend, in which she argued that men are as insecure about losing hair as women are about gaining weight.

But I argued that the transformation of consciousness that men like Brynner and Jordan led – from harboring anxieties about male pattern baldness to flaunting bald heads as erogenous zones – belied her contention. And I cited the shining example former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani set by finally shearing his comb-over strands as dispositive in this respect.

Nevertheless, since wanting to appeal to women is the root cause of whatever insecurities most men suffer over going bald, I beg them to help disabuse my follically-challenged brethren of this hang-up by doing the following: