On Baldness…

I was just entering my teenage years when The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and took America, and the rest of the world, by the scruff of the collective neck and shook them up a little bit.

In addition to changing much of what we thought we knew about popular music and the English people, The Beatles forever changed fashion in general and particularly the way we look at hair, specifically a man’s hair.

Now, in polite society, at least when I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, there were certain aspects of appearance that were not openly discussed.

Although children would not hesitate to refer to an overweight kid as “fat, fat, the water rat,” or some other equally witty appellation, we would never dare to refer to an adult as “fat,” not at least to their face.

If a person were badly scarred it was not openly discussed in polite society. Someone’s taste in clothing, or his or her lack thereof, was not a topic of open dialogue. The same was true of someone with bad teeth or bad skin or any number of other “afflictions”.

People with severe “handicaps” such as missing limbs or birth defects were definitely not a matter for open discussion. In fact, these misfortunes were often widely ignored, at least as conversational topics. It was “rude” and might, after all, result in cruelly hurting someone’s feelings. If such matters were ever discussed it was generally in hushed whispers hopefully well out of earshot of the object of the conversation.

So if a woman had wart on the end of her nose, if a child had an unsightly birthmark, if a man was missing a finger, or if anyone had any bodily adversity, either by birth or by misfortune, it simply was not discussed in gracious society.

Unless you were a bald man. (more…)