Brotherhood of Bald People Worldwide

From "The Cueball Chronicles" by Suzy Hansen:

Hansen asks: Who discriminates more, men or women?

Kuntzman answers: Very glad you asked me that. There are academic studies that deal with this, and I updated them for my book as well. Men are much more likely to think of bald men in negative terms than women are.

Hansen: Do bald men know that?

Kuntzmann: No, that's the problem. The results are quite shocking and should hearten bald men around the world. I'm trying desperately - and hopefully with this interview - to get these results out because not enough bald men know. I've sent it to the Associated press but for some reason they just didn't have the guts to prove it.

So here's the latest results. Only 30 percent of women who responded to the poll thought of bald men as old or unattractive, while a whopping 69 percent of male respondents described bald men with the same unflattering terms. Only 30 percent of women thought that a man becomes less attractive as he loses his hair while 60 percent of men thought so. Two-thirds of women said that a bald man and a man with hair are equally attractive, while only 36 percent of men felt the same way. Men are much more inclined to think of bald men - and therefore themselves - as less sexy.

Hansen: Is it a locker room thing?

Kuntzmann: Men are conditioned to think of baldness as the first sign that they're getting old. And men and women are vain in slightly different ways. With men, being thought of as old is totally connected to their own virility. It always has been. Bald men are seen as less virile. All the typical signs of male aging such as less strength, less ability to run the bases in a softball game, inability to get an erection or inability to remember things - these things happen much later in life. But when the hair goes, sometimes in the 20's or 30's, that's the first sign that they're getting old. Women, whose hair loss happens so much later in life, have a totally different way of thinking of themselves as old.

None of the women responded - out of hundreds of responses - that the word "failure" pops into their mind when they see a bald man, but 10 percent of the male respondents said that word pops into their head when they see a bald man.

To read the full interview: http://archive.salon.com/books/int/2001/05/31/bald/index3.html