Hairbrain’ notion of baldness

A recent study claims hairy men are more intelligent. As hirsute bodies tend to sport shiny pates, why are toupees so popular?

Of all the misfortunes to which man is heir, the worse by far is to lose his hair.” So runs an inscription scratched on a neolithic wall by a caveman whom scholars believe must have been the first recorded victim of alopecia and bad verse.

Male hair, or the lack of it, is in the news again. First, the Advertising Standards Authority wrestles with the curious case of the man whose baldness vanished in an explosion of tresses, locks, waves and curls. Secondly, in the latest outbreak of Publicity Craving Syndrome (PCS), a psychiatrist tells a London conference that body hair is a sign of intelligence in men (but not in women).

The ads that taxed the best brains at the ASA were mail shots sent out by Bio-Med Research, a company which sells tablets whose effect, so it is claimed, is to “regrow lost hair and stop further loss”. To demonstrate the product in action, the ad features “before and after” pictures. The first shows a man of careworn aspect and naked cranium; the second shows the same man, wearing the confident smile of one who has called the world’s bluff, and sporting a thick savannah of hair stretching as far as the eye can see across what was once barren waste. Moreover, he is joined in this second picture by a glamorous female wearing pendant earrings, marginally more hair than him, and the kind of grin that would send a hyena back to the drawing board.

Now, truth to tell, we do not dwell in a world of innocence. There are those in our midst who, witnessing a miracle, will scoff and look for strings and mirrors. Thus it was that two such naysayers complained to the ASA that the second picture looked suspiciously like it featured a wig. As indeed it does. That would certainly explain why the woman in the picture is afflicted with terminal mirth. Wigs that look suspiciously like wigs are extremely funny. Quite properly, however, the ASA was not amused (or, if it was, it had the good sense to laugh behind its hand) and effectively banned the ad pending proof from Bio-Med that its claims are justified. No such proof seems likely, since the company has vacated its office, leaving no forwarding address.

Once again we are reminded of the terrible embarrassments and insecurities that mar man’s earthly span and provide a rich feeding ground for predatory mountebanks. When Burns wrote “Wad some pow’r the giftie gie us to see ousels as others see us”, he was not thinking of physical appearance; but all too many people can, without benefit of divine intervention, easily imagine how others see them, and they would give the earth to change that picture.

For women, the nightmares come clad in cellulite, for men, they parade themselves in shining baldness. Even those who survive the rocky whirlpools of adolescence and early maturity and sail into the supposedly serene waters of middle age are not immune. Many is the wrinkled dotard atop whose pate squats a man-made thatch, and many is the elderly matron who jigs up and down to the throb of the aerobic beat.

The answer, in the long term, lies with the geneticists. When we are all, in accordance with parental wishes, blessed with long limbs, plentiful heads of hair, retroussé noses, sculptured profiles, and odourless armpits, the charlatans will beat a retreat: only to return, one fears, with a cure for vanity.

In the meantime, bald men are offered a small compensation for their hurt and indignity. One of Nature’s few practical jokes is to ensure that men with little hair on the head are liberally tufted elsewhere. In some instances, such is the profusion of growth on chest, shoulders, arms, backs, buttocks and elsewhere that it appears its owners might almost belong to a different species.

The phenomenon caught the attention of a psychiatrist, Dr Aikarakudy Alias (a name so unlikely it has to be true), whose musings led him to ponder the characteristics of hairy men other than their hairiness. Why his thoughts should have taken that turn, it is not for us to question; psychiatrists have to think about something, and hairy men seems as good a preoccupation as any, and a lot better than some.

Dr Alias is not a man merely to recline and muse; his is a restless, practical curiosity. So it was, with a driven diligence, he took to examining hairy men in large numbers. He looked at members of Mensa. He looked at medical and engineering students. He looked at members of the male population in general. And when he had ceased from his labours, his records had a strange tale to tell. No fewer than 45 per cent of the American male students were “very hairy” compared with 10 per cent of the general male population.

All that remained was the final leap, and Dr Alias did not tremble at the brink. Body hair in men, he declared, is a sign of intelligence. Take that one stage further, and a bald head is almost certain to contain an above average brain. That leaves but one question, and it is imponderable. Why should someone blessed with an abundance of intelligence want to wear a toupee?