Over on baldiness.com, the blogging bald guy asks why the hirsute place so much emphasis on hair while those who are follicularly challenged or waxed lyrical cranially don’t seem that fussed.
As you will see from the photo on my resume page I too am less than hirsute from the neck up and so feel I can comment without worrying about being PC.
I think it’s only those without hair that worry about why anyone worries about their hair. Those with hair worry about it, because they can. If you’ve got none, you’ve not got anything to muss up and gel, so you cannot see the point.
Hair is more than merely a way of identifying an individual, it’s a characteristic, a trait, that helps define the individual and has to have been important to our ancestors all along as we at some point in our evolutionary past lost the body hair (mostly) that made us indistinguishable from the mammalian masses. Once we had a sense of being different to those cousins hanging on the family tree who ape around I guess we found that our appearance more than our scent became increasingly important.
Perhaps therein lies the key. We don’t rely as much on sense of smell for attraction but being visual creatures we focus on appearance. Hair can be changed, so setting one individual apart from another in the mating game, is possible with nothing more than a few braids, a bit of wax, or a bottle of hydrogen peroxide solution.
Anyway, if we were all bald, all you hairies would have no right to call anyone else slaphead.