The Bald Spot is having it’s shiniest moment ever
The saucer shaped, hairless crown in the yarmulke position on many middle aged men is seeing the spotlight for the first time, and it’s bouncing back diamonds.
Male patterned baldness is a sign of a grown-ass man. He’s a guy who’s old enough to have a 401k, father children, and contemplate philosophy. A man with a bald spot has loved, lost, and knows what to do next. He’s got big responsibilities and no longer needs foolish opportunities to demonstrate his manhood. This man is fully baked. He’s seasoned and salty from the wisdom of his years. Someone with the quiet confidence who knows life’s complexities leaves him with incomplete answers. Isn’t age a sexy hallmark of the masculine appeal? We celebrate a salt and pepper beard with years of sun damage chiseling a steely stare, but why hasn’t society revered receding hair as handsome? Why doesn’t a bald spot make a man of a certain age one toasty fella?
This spring, a new splash in sexy male energy entered the cultural awareness. Walton Goggins’s grizzly, miserable character, Rick, swooned viewers with his blistering vendetta in season 3 of White Lotus. Goggins, who’s better known for his work as a full costume and wig character actor, burst onto the pop culture scene as someone sexy—sans addendum “for his age.” Playing a rich-person-behaving-badly with a natural hairline women run from put Gogs in contention for sexiest man alive 2025. Including direct swoon over his hair and the parts that were bare.
Hollywood has long since loved its classically handsome leading man with a 20-something forehead. Today, let’s light a fire to the impossible beauty standards of the middle-aged male hairline.
Tons of discourse crawls across digital anthills about impossible beauty standards for women. It’s true. We have been molded by the images we see being worshipped in mass media since… cave drawings (practically). I am not discounting this, but lets consider extending the theory to the classically male experience of balding.
The ravenous reaction to a White Lotus character with male patterned baldness is unprecedented. It’s beyond Bruce Willis and Jason Statham. The filmmakers aren’t covering up his bald spot, or helping his hairline with hairpieces (ahem—Jude Law, Ted Danson). They are highlighting how Rick is flawed on and in his head. He’s not inherently likable. Yet, his girlfriend, the season’s most adorable character, is devoted to him. Maybe he’s dynamite in the sack? Rick displays a tolerant kind of devotion to his partner between searing stints of a blinding obsession with his own origin story. It seems his good looks offset his bad boy attitude. A little cliché, if you ask me. Although we cannot quantify this yet in dating trends, Rick has given the bald spot a long awaited moment.
20 years ago, I’d have been caught wincing after learning my situationship’s mother’s father was a cueball. As if I was a beauty geneticist, hand selecting attributes of a designer husband. Love doesn’t work that way, and genes don’t work that way. The mother’s father thing might actually be hearsay. You can pledge the lucky hair club for men all you want, but you don’t find out until your 30s if you’re officially in the fraternity. In my 20s, my girlfriends and I had dating standards which mimicked what we’d seen in rom coms and action flicks. We wanted someone adult with grit who either had hair or was bald, shaved. There was no in between. Balding – as if it were an act someone chooses to be in the middle of – undateable. And there would be times when a woman would not see evidence of this until the second or third date when he took his hat off! The shock… the horror…!
There is a Seinfeld plotline where George gets a cool hat at a flea market. Elaine encourages him to wear it to pick up women. George (as he does) laments about how he cannot wear it to meet an attractive woman because he knows at some point he will have to take off the hat and disappoint her with what’s underneath. There are plenty of episodes with George’s hair struggle in the spotlight.
Many men have been known to fight with all they have to keep their hair. A WSJ article from March highlighted Gen Z’s discovery of Propecia – the drug that claims to regrow and keep hair with the catch: while you take it, your dick probably won’t work. A new generation of men realizing: if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. I have discussed this drug with a number of men who’ve been open about this impossible choice. A lot of them have tried it, some more than once, and almost all of them to prefer to have a functioning penis. Other reported side effects include depression and suicidal thoughts. Are we sure that’s the drug? Or because limping through your sex life is depressing? I can only speak for straight women: working dicks are preferred. Although, we’ll get creative if vibes are right. I imagine one gains more self esteem from what’s hanging between your legs than what’s hanging off your head.
Still, its interesting to see a new generation resolve to reverse the curse with the same drug. Guess the Z’s aren’t doing their research. At this point, giving Propecia a go is a gateway to manhood. Choosing between losing the livelihood between your heads is for grown-ass men. Maybe we should be celebrating it—a doble quinceanera for the 30 year-old-man! It’s a great age for gifts like table saws and lawnmowers. People love a rite of passage party.
The confidence-hair continuum for men induces similar body dysmorphic perceptions that fashion magazines and almond moms do for women. It's a button pressed by society telling them they are less-than, just by existing. Biology is a mean girl. Like all things anti-aging and skin care, men spend thousands of dollars on treatments, shampoos, hats, advice, systems, procedures, products, surgery and hope. Many traverse to Turkey on a transplant quest. To be a flight attendant for Turkish Airlines… sigh, all hail the glow up!
Just examining this area of one’s head requires a choreography of circus mirrors. The more elaborate, the bigger the hope to find growth. It’s my understanding that most of the sorcery is snake oil. Which is as disappointing as TrimSpa and WonderBra. It’s got to be evermore haunting for a man losing hair on his head to find it growing at increasing rates on the rest of his body.
All through this men are told to maintain total confidence, man-up. There is no cure, and it’s a double edge sword. Both “rugs”, and wigs contain the stigma of being too into one's looks or too concerned with appearance for a man who’s not a gameshow host. Taking a Bic to one’s skull is an extreme ritual if lines are receding at a glacial pace. I’d think you’d want to keep what you have for as long as you can. All through this, men are expected to be authentically masculine and intrepid no matter what's happening behind their fronts.
In retrospect, judgements about men based on the state of their hair are totally unfair. Make no mistake, a middle-aged man who has his shit together: responsive and responsible, is sexy – hair, no hair, or some of his hair. Male bald(ing) shame is a result of unrealistic beauty standards.
All beauty standards are unrealistic. None of these ideals are inclusive, that’s what it means to have ideals. With societal ideals, no one wins. We all pay the pretty tax with our wallets and peace of mind. However, with more and more perspectives broadcast from behind the camera and editorialized on our pocketbots, ideals may have less power over us—if we are careful. I’m talking about influencers and social media creators en mass. This collective and those squawking in the comments can challenge greenlighters in tinsel town, the big apple, and every big ad agency to chill out on the cookie cutter look-a-like worship. We all want to be worshipped in our own way. That’s why social media persists, right? So we all have our own little channel where we can receive the admiration of others for the things we like about ourselves. …This is probably a good time for:
It’s interesting women don’t have more empathy for the male plight. Women bang on and on about unrealistic beauty standards killing psychological wellness and draining pocketbooks. These standards invented to keep an entire gender spinning wheels thinking beauty (and youth) equals power. In some ways it does. That’s what we have been taught to value anyway. But what if we manufacture a new value system and embrace this parallel? Let’s reduce the us versus them battle of the sexes. We are never going to be allies if we don't have compassion for one another.
At the same age (the middle ones) a woman can be contemplating Botox and surgically changing her eyelids, while a man agonizes about an expanding bald patch on his head and a crop growing on his shoulders. Both of them try just about everything to keep their waistlines in check. Although the former is more of a matter of expelling heart disease and diabetes than a vanity move—it’s a common ground in middle age fitness. What's ironic is these same two people can be married to each other, yet each obsessing in their own little corner about the container they walk around in every day. These people exist perpetually next to each other without one kind word regarding one another’s attractiveness. How many times do we ignore a free resource that might boost the other? We can all agree these ideals are shams.
Dating apps house the most pervasive form of aesthetic ideals. Reducing everyone to a headshot for sorting with a swipe this way or that. As if liking someone enough for mutual nakedness and building a life together wasn’t already the most challenging societal construct we’ve come up with—next to privatized healthcare. Picking a mate is so challenging that 50% of marriages fail, and 60%-70% of second marriages fail. Could we be assessing these mug shots with a kinder eye? As with everything presented on mobile media, we could stand to be more curious about the flaws we don’t see. A quick swipe will extinguish a flame instantly, but a slow burn could stoke the best blaze.
Superficially, we know the physical currency of hetero attraction. For the straight, single woman of any age—a man’s height is notable. A towering 6ft+ is nice-to-have. A man’s height is analogous to a woman’s breast size or ass shape (a hypothesis). For any human decent enough to date, bodily assets are a bonus after meeting other compatibilities. Yet, our feral human brains rely on judgements made on first impressions.
For every man who covets a woman with any-sized body parts at every point in her life, there is a woman who doesn't give a shit what the back of his head looks like--she's probably too short to see it anyway. She’d much prefer he'd stop worrying about it and think kindly in her direction.
This isn’t to say society’s messages aren’t louder than a partner’s, or we should all try to fall in love at the office, a’ la Jim and Pam. Of course society expects women to lose baby wait instantly—how else would fitness influencers make money? Perhaps a new mom can see an equivalence when descending a staircase behind a middle-aged man?
We do ourselves no good by glorifying impossibilities and the rewards society bestows on the good looking (and the good-enough looking with deep pockets). Let’s accept each other’s bodies and the things we do to keep them healthy and attractive—for our own self esteem, for the celebration of realness. At least before the robots take over.
Thats why Rick turned heads in Thailand. He was unencumbered by ideals. That’s what’s really sexy. He wasn’t concerned with it, so why would anyone else? Maybe we turn a kind word to the people who make our hearts whole and pass less judgement on strangers fighting for our overdone construct of beauty. Sure, we are all conditioned to want to be it, to be with it—but that doesn’t make it a productive pursuit. However fleeting those moments consume us hour by hour, they add up. We can choose to let that shit go. There is more important stuff to get after than whether or not a bald spot is social currency for human value.
Brilliant writing, KDubbs!