Pandemic hair loss more noticeable

             With more time on my hands, I’ve taken time to self-reflect. Literally, as in looking in the mirror. 

Perhaps I've been looking too hard, but I have noticed a couple stray hairs since the pandemic began. Either I’ve grown some new ones below my hairline or they’ve become stranded. I clipped one of them – shaved it right off to see what would happen. 

I’m not sure if this is just me over-analyzing things. I tend to do that. My wife says I’ve always had a high hairline.... since my youth. But this high? 

There’s a battle of genetics going on here. I learned a long time ago that hair loss is passed down through your mother. So basically you get your maternal grandfather’s hair. In that case, I’m in trouble. Or maybe it’s your maternal grandmother's father’s hair? I have no idea. 

My grandma is 97 and her hair is lustrous. I would die for her hair in my 90s. My dad’s is just as thick, and he’s in his 70s. Hasn’t lost a single hair to Father Time. 

So I thought maybe I would escape the fate so many of my uncles have succumbed to. The nightmares I used to have in my 20s of going bald (no joke) went away in my 30s. But now, in my early 40s, the reality is downright scary. 

I'm reminded of the Seinfeld episode where George, a balding man himself, diagnoses another man whose hair is thinning. With the tone of an oncologist delivering bad news, George tells him he's got “14 months. Maybe 10.” When asked if there’s anything he can do, George replies: “Live, dammit. Live! Every precious moment as if this was the last year of your life. Because in many ways...it is.” 

Once all hope dies, I suppose it’s easy enough to take a razor to your scalp. The style these days is to shave it smooth as a baby's bottom. Then grow a beard.  

But I worry about the transition phase, when one has to find new and interesting ways to comb what’s left of your hair. I've been monitoring a political commentator on TV who's been finding interesting ways to keep some strands alive on top. They've become fewer and fewer, and I keep wondering when they’ll finally blow away.

The combover isn’t in vogue anymore (thank goodness), but there are other options for balding men. There’s the comb back which can last for a while. I once had a prof whose comb back ended in a nice pony tail. This distracted attention from the lessening of hair on top. 

There’s the island piece, where a patch gets stranded in front. That isolated chunk can survive for a while, depending on its size and thickness. 

The legendary bald spot is probably the least of my worries because it is so common. You only see it when a picture is taken of you facing the wrong way. At least I won’t see it. 

But there’s also the Friar Tuck look, where you lose the hair on top, but keep it nice and bushy on the sides and possibly even in the front. This is wrong on so many levels. 

Some people (with hair) might be tempted to say that balding isn’t a big a deal because so many men experience it. But then I think about male politicians... Can you really make it to the upper echelons of political power as a bald man? In a democracy??

Joe Biden comes to mind, but his hair loss at nearly 80 years of age is understandable. He makes the comb back look pretty good. The American public also knows how he used to look as vice-president. Most relevant of all, he just replaced a lunatic with loads of so-called hair. 

I worry more for burgeoning politicians like Erin O’Toole. Not that I really worry for the guy – I just sympathize with the state of his head. Now I know Conservatives never thought much about this when they voted for him as leader, and they shouldn’t have. 

But I still wonder... How many women (and possibly men) are going to subconsciously vote in the next election for the long, luscious mane of hair that has become the hallmark of Justin Trudeau as opposed to the shinier top of O’Toole? 

One image speaks to youth and vitality – the other, a reflection of our greatest fears. That we will one day grow old and lose some of our youth. 

Not to be too superficial, but none of us want to lose features of our physical prime. Not even the individual hair I clipped a year ago.  

By the way, it never came back. 

Barbie may limit your career

When I asked whether my nephews would take some pink hangers among the white ones, I was surprised at the response. They don’t do pink. At the tender ages of four and six, they understood: Pink is for girls.  

They like toys that go fast. They like to build things with real tools. When he was three, my youngest nephew wanted to sleep with a hammer. Not a play hammer, either – his dad’s actual hammer. 

I didn’t share the same obsession with construction tools like my nephew, but I had an endless supply of Lego, space ships, and cars. And I was betting on the Saskatchewan Roughriders by grade four (no real money at stake, just my prepubescent pride). 

Having raised a daughter, I understand that her interests will never quite be the same as mine. I can’t get her to watch football for longer than five minutes and her interest in vehicles is limited to the car we own, not the car I dream of owning (a Porsche, of course). Granted, she shares my disinterest in farming and construction and my interest in science fiction (live long and prosper).

Not all interests fit into a neat gender box, but there are some that we come to expect in younger children. And when a child bucks the trend, it grabs our attention. A couple years ago, my dad was pleasantly surprised to see one of my nieces playing with some toy tractors at their house. It went on for a few minutes as normal, but then the vehicles started talking to one another. She gave them personalities and they began to form relationships. It’s just the way girls are, we assumed. Or is it? 

In her book, Gender and Our Brains, Gina Rippon suggests children are more aware of social signals than we give them credit for. “Gender signaling is in place even before our little humans arrive and their very earliest experiences will be of color-coded signposts,” she writes. 

The association of pink with girls is the most obvious social construct of a colour that “belongs” to a particular gender. Pink is no more feminine than blue is masculine (at a certain age, boys lose the baby blue).

And kids are particularly sensitive to social cues from parents, grandparents, and society in general. As a family, we talked a lot about my nephew sleeping with a hammer, but I doubt we would have been quite as vocal if he slept with a doll or (gulp) a Barbie. Not that there’s anything wrong with that... We just might keep it on the lowdown. Call it a stage, if you will. 

Interestingly, playing with Barbie might actually be more damaging than we think. Not for boys, necessarily, but for girls. Those deeply embedded stereotypes (even though some of the liberated Barbies now design washing machines) can actually limit the careers of young women. One study showed that women who had played with Barbie Fashion Dolls were less likely to choose male-dominated careers than those who had played with gender-neutral toys. 

Rippon demonstrates through solid research how society’s expectations steer us through childhood and beyond, into our career. For women, it often leads to the “soft” sciences, administration and communications. For men, it’s the “hard” sciences, politics, and basically, whatever they want to do. 

Men don’t face the same hurdles as women, particularly within the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math). The research Rippon unearths on this topic is revealing. To offer one example, an experiment was conducted where the same application for a laboratory manager, one with a man’s name and one with a woman’s, was sent to evaluators at high-ranking universities throughout the U.S. The same application got a different reaction from evaluators (both women and men), depending on whether it was “John” or “Jennifer” applying. Jennifer was more likely described as “likeable” and “pleasant,” while John was described as “competent” and “more hirable.” Guess who tended to get offered the job? Same application, different results.

The evidence is clear that women, in their ability to do any kind of science, math or engineering, are on equal grounds with men. It’s the social constructs, much like with systemic racism, that limits them.

Back in the 1800s, some (allegedly) intelligent men suggested women were inferior, similar to “children and savages” in their mental faculties, in large part because their brains were physically smaller then those of men. We find this offensive now, but in another fifty years we may look back at today’s gender bias with similar disgust. 

So let your children (and grandchildren) play with the toys they want, and encourage them to try ones they don’t – whether pink, blue or rainbow coloured. But if it all possible – boy or girl – try to stay away from the Barbies.