To a reasonable degree what we stereotypically find attractive is due to the side effects of sex hormones. When men produce testosterone they end up with broad shoulders, a deep voice, a strong chin and an assertive personality, all of which women generically find attractive. Women with estrogen develop female fat distribution, a soft voice, soft skin, a 0.7 waist/hip ratio, etc all of which men find attractive.
Since baldness is also a side effect of high testosterone (right up there with broad shoulders, an assertive personality and a strong chin) why aren’t we attracted to bald men, why don’t men intentionally give themselves horseshoe haircuts to attract women? Is it because baldness doesn’t strike until the mid-late 30s for most people and for the vast majority of human history most men are either dead or no longer virile when they reach that age?
I saw this theory on the Science channel so I don’t have a citation for it. I do have this though.
In the human face the basic proportions are sexually dimorphic, male traits develop under the influence of testosterone and female traits develop under estrogen. In the case of the broad male chin as a feature of attractiveness the constraints seem to be known. If females want dominant males, broad chins may signal a tendency to dominate others. This is indeed the case. It has been shown that males with broad chins are perceived in 8 cultures as those who are likely to dominate others.
After long consideration, but off the top of my head and out of my bellybutton, I think “beauty” is the combination of traits that signify the following three things: symmetrical, fertile, young.
With an overlay of cultural stuff accumulated by chance which changes by the decade.
Such as the standard beautiful woman face: wide set eyes (= young), good skin (= fertile, young, with an additional component of “immune to pockmarking diseases and not infected by parasites”), full lips (= fertile), small nose and chin (= young).
I think “bald” = “not young”.
I think if you had a race of people with a founder effect that made all the virile males go bald by twenty, that you would find a strong cultural predisposition in that corner of the world towards women being turned on by bald men.
Do you recall this comment in another thread: “Ewww! Gray pubes!”
To me, I think balding isn’t attractive, but bald can be beautiful. So maybe it is the whole balding implies getting older thing. But just because you’ve got no hair doesn’t mean you’ve got no hope. Hello Patrick Stewart!
Baldness had almost always been perceived as an age thing. When a guy starts to thin out, it’s always “Geez, I guess I’m getting old.” It’s a weird thing for me though since I went bald starting in my early 20’s. So feeling old has not been part of it for me. Now at 35, I’m as bald as Jason Alexander. But it’s other things that make me feel old.
I wonder about cultures like medieval Japan where the men traditionally shaved their heads into a virtual male-pattern baldness. If that’s the kind of guys the girls grew up seeing, it may have been a complete non-issue.
All you ladies who like it bald can contact me through the SDMB.
Besides, how many years of research did it take to find out that baldness is caused by testosterone? Up until that point, bald = old. Young guys with too much testosterone and with hair look young. Middle-aged guys with too much testosterone and no hair look old. Old-aged guys with too much testosterone and with hair look like they’re wearing toupees. Only one of these three groups tends to get a lot of job offers as swimsuit models.
I’ve known guys who have used clomid, which is a drug that increases testosterone levels. It causes them to produce alot more semen. Women who were attracted to bald guys would end up sleeping with men who produce more semen, who then, as a result of the increased semen production and increased virility, would be more likely to have kids would would be likely to inherit the preference for bald men, eventually leading to a species wide attraction to baldness. That is my understanding of how evolution for this stuff works, the men & women whose bodies show off the side effects of high sex hormone levels are more fertile and people are attracted to it. Its not really based on current scientific research into baldness or anything, just an unconscious preference for one body type over another.
Perhaps youth is more important than attractiveness when it comes to sex. I vaguely remember a study some years ago that claimed to show men value youth more than beauty, and perhaps that’s true for women also.
