the virgin, the married, the widowed, the mourning.
In the Western world, parental concern that the sex of an infant not be mistaken led
to the social convention of the pink blanket or the blue. The second convention of
social importance is the haircut. Shorn of ringlets a toddler is certifiably a boy,
and woe unto the mother who delays for too long this critical event, for she will
be accused of trying to sissify her son. Yet the rock-bound belief that short hair
makes a boy and long hair makes a girl is as arbitrary as blanket color. Given a sample
lock for analysis, an expert would not be able to say if it came from the head of
a man or a woman. There are known racial differences in the way hair grows on the
human scalp, but the only true sexual difference is the phenomenon of balding.
Unhappily for white men, baldness is an inherited characteristic that afflicts Caucasian
males more frequently than other racial and sexual groups. Genes for baldness are
carried without regard to sex on the autosomal chromosomes of males and females, but
they are less frequent in the genetic pools of blacks and Orientals. Even though white
men and women both carry the baldness genes, it takes the androgens, the hormones
that induce male sexual development, to make the characteristic express itself. About
60 percent of all white men show some degree of hair loss by the time they reach the
age of fifty, and a receding hairline or a bald spot at the back of the head may begin
to show when a man is in his early twenties. A similar pattern of thinning hair occurs
later and less extensively in white women.
Like the big nose on the male proboscis monkey, baldness is troubling to the neo-Darwinians.
They can’t figure out what possible advantage it might give to the male sex, and to
white males in particular. Using their favorite line of argument, one could propose
that baldness serves an important function in sexual selection by warning a young
Caucasian female that here is a fellow who would not make a desirable mate because
he is past his prime and too old to provide for her and the children. But I don’t
like this sort of argument. I prefer to see baldness, like many other natural differences
between men and women, as merely accidental, a hormonal happenstance that has no larger
evolutionary meaning whatsoever.
But however irrelevant baldness might be to reproduction and evolution, it appears
to be the key to one of the more tenacious beliefs about masculine men and feminine
women, for the idea that long hair is feminine and that men by contrast should wear
their hair short took hold and flourished in white European civilization, while in
the East and in Africa, where men seldom go bald, this artificial polarity was either
reversed or met with great resistance, or was never taken up at all.
Egyptian pharaohs and their royal families had their heads plucked clean of natural
hair and covered with wigs that were sexually distinct, while their slaves wore their
own hair by law.Among the Masai and other African and Indian tribes that still hold to their traditional
customs, an imposing mass of long hair ornamented with shells, feathers or beads remains
a proud masculine emblem, inspired perhaps by the lion’s mane or the colorful plumage
of exotic birds, while the heads of tribal women go unadorned, covered or shaved.
A long tangle of braids that seems to frighten the white folks is a common sight on
the island of Jamaica, where male Rastafarians made the dreadlocks a part of their
religion. The great classic periods in Japanese art show that long, elaborate hair
styles were in vogue for men and women, although an expert can detect a sexual difference
in a decorative comb. During the tenth-century Heian civilization Japanese noblemen
wore their long hair in a topknot while court ladies wore theirs loose and flowing.
Oriental hair is usually suited to luxuriant
In the Western world, parental concern that the sex of an infant not be mistaken led
to the social convention of the pink blanket or the blue. The second convention of
social importance is the haircut. Shorn of ringlets a toddler is certifiably a boy,
and woe unto the mother who delays for too long this critical event, for she will
be accused of trying to sissify her son. Yet the rock-bound belief that short hair
makes a boy and long hair makes a girl is as arbitrary as blanket color. Given a sample
lock for analysis, an expert would not be able to say if it came from the head of
a man or a woman. There are known racial differences in the way hair grows on the
human scalp, but the only true sexual difference is the phenomenon of balding.
Unhappily for white men, baldness is an inherited characteristic that afflicts Caucasian
males more frequently than other racial and sexual groups. Genes for baldness are
carried without regard to sex on the autosomal chromosomes of males and females, but
they are less frequent in the genetic pools of blacks and Orientals. Even though white
men and women both carry the baldness genes, it takes the androgens, the hormones
that induce male sexual development, to make the characteristic express itself. About
60 percent of all white men show some degree of hair loss by the time they reach the
age of fifty, and a receding hairline or a bald spot at the back of the head may begin
to show when a man is in his early twenties. A similar pattern of thinning hair occurs
later and less extensively in white women.
Like the big nose on the male proboscis monkey, baldness is troubling to the neo-Darwinians.
They can’t figure out what possible advantage it might give to the male sex, and to
white males in particular. Using their favorite line of argument, one could propose
that baldness serves an important function in sexual selection by warning a young
Caucasian female that here is a fellow who would not make a desirable mate because
he is past his prime and too old to provide for her and the children. But I don’t
like this sort of argument. I prefer to see baldness, like many other natural differences
between men and women, as merely accidental, a hormonal happenstance that has no larger
evolutionary meaning whatsoever.
But however irrelevant baldness might be to reproduction and evolution, it appears
to be the key to one of the more tenacious beliefs about masculine men and feminine
women, for the idea that long hair is feminine and that men by contrast should wear
their hair short took hold and flourished in white European civilization, while in
the East and in Africa, where men seldom go bald, this artificial polarity was either
reversed or met with great resistance, or was never taken up at all.
Egyptian pharaohs and their royal families had their heads plucked clean of natural
hair and covered with wigs that were sexually distinct, while their slaves wore their
own hair by law.Among the Masai and other African and Indian tribes that still hold to their traditional
customs, an imposing mass of long hair ornamented with shells, feathers or beads remains
a proud masculine emblem, inspired perhaps by the lion’s mane or the colorful plumage
of exotic birds, while the heads of tribal women go unadorned, covered or shaved.
A long tangle of braids that seems to frighten the white folks is a common sight on
the island of Jamaica, where male Rastafarians made the dreadlocks a part of their
religion. The great classic periods in Japanese art show that long, elaborate hair
styles were in vogue for men and women, although an expert can detect a sexual difference
in a decorative comb. During the tenth-century Heian civilization Japanese noblemen
wore their long hair in a topknot while court ladies wore theirs loose and flowing.
Oriental hair is usually suited to luxuriant
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