'Mr Sex': Hair Yesterday, None Today

Something you might not know about me; I’ve been shaving my head for over ten years. It had been on the cards for ages; I remember being in a barbers when I was 22, and he mentioned that my hair was really fine. And I thanked him. By the time I was 25, it was starting to thin out like a bastard, and I got obsessed with checking the top of my head on CCTV cameras. By the time I was 26, I took a razor to my scalp. It was either that, or my wrists.

In many ways, I was extremely lucky to go bald when I did. I was in London, a place where people generally don’t give a toss what you look like. And I was in the mid-nineties, when head-shaving was a bit fashionable and actually a bit sexy (thank you, Grant Mitchell). I had none of the dilemmas that my slap-headed ancestory had to deal with; getting a rug, using those mad hairsprays or trying to rock a Bobby Charlton were not options I could entertain. The best thing to do was get shot of it all and not give a fuck. Which I did, and I do.

In the spirit of Dan’s recent post, and for the benefit of men everywhere who are heading that way - and for women who don’t understand – this is what it’s like..

1. Yes, it really is a very big deal.

Losing your hair, no matter how brave a face you put on (or underneath) it, is horrible. For starters, it’s usually the first sign that you’re beginning to slip away from your peak. Not only are you constantly tracking the spread of your male pattern baldness, you also start monitoring people’s reactions to it. You watch the direction of their eyes when you talk to them, and are just waiting for them to make comment on it. And when you’re in a relationship, it’s even worse; it’s a very obvious dealbreaker (in fact, I still believe that me shaving my head was the nail in the coffin of the relationship I was in at the time).

2. When you do it for the first time, you turn it into an event.

There’s no turning back, and it’s almost a rite of passage, so you have to make the most of it. You could book in at the most expensive barbers you know and have someone apply the straight-edge razor to your head (seeing as it’ll be the last time you ever have need of places like that), or you could spend a couple of hours slowly doing it yourself – giving yourself a Travis Bickle Mohican along the way, of course.

3. You will spend the first week constantly touching your scalp, looking in every reflective surface in the vicinity, and feeling extremely vulnerable.

It’s weird how the lack of a couple of inches of hair makes you feel fragile as fuck. Just as someone who switches from glasses to contact lenses can’t help pushing a finger along the bridge of their nose, you will be flinching whenever the wind changes.

4. However, at some point in that first week, you will walk under a low-hanging tree and realise that you suddenly have an enormous new erogenous zone.

Seriously. And when it snows for the first time, your knees will buckle.

5. Your mates will deem it The Most Important Thing to Ever Happen in The History Of Everything.

One or two of them – the infantile sort whose sense of humour never left the laughing-at-one’s-own-genitals stage – will make constant references to Kojak, do the slapping thing Benny Hill did to Jackie Wright, etc etc. Yawn. The others will bang on relentlessly about how brave you are, as if you’ve amputated your own arms with a knife between your teeth during a polar expedition. Either way, you’ll be obliged to reveal it to everyone you know as if you were The Queen unveiling a statue, over and over again.

Oh, and none of your male friends will tell you what you need to know – that you don’t look like a twat.

6. Your female friends, on the other hand, will tell you that you don’t look like a twat.

But, unless they suddenly pull you towards them and say “My God, I never realised how sexy you are – let’s do it right here, on this pub table”, you won’t believe them.

7. Then they’ll tell you that you look like Harry Goldenblatt off Sex And The City.

But seeing as you’d sooner watch your Dad shit in a glass bucket than that load o’ rammell, you won’t know who he is, and get a bit scared that he’s a paedophile or something.

8. You will automatically lose any chance of getting some with at least 60% of the female population.

Sorry, but it has to be said.

9. Of the remaining 40%, half of those that would get with you want to because they think you’re something you’re not.

This was a real eye-opener for me. I used to have a skinhead cut when I moved to London, and an alarmingly high percentage of my peers thought I was a racist, Gay, or a Gay racist. As soon as I shaved it all off, a lot of people assumed I was hard as fuck (when I’m actually soft as arseholes). A lot of the women I ran into appeared to have a penchant for nightclub bouncers, and were a bit let down when I wasn’t nailing them to the bed and offering to beat the shit out of any man who had done them wrong, even if all he had done was short-change them by 5p at the newsagents.

10. Regardless of whether they fancy you or not, all women will want to stroke your head.

…whilst being totally unaware of Point 4, and not realising that to people like me, stroking a bald scalp is foreplay. I’ll be sat in the pub minding my own business, some pissed-up girl who I don’t even know runs her hand over my head on the way to the bar, and she might as well have licked it. When your female friends do it, it’s even worse; you have to fight to stop yourself running your hand up their leg in response. So please don’t do it.

(actually, fuck it; do do it. It’s the only pleasure I get nowadays)

11. You get used to it very quickly, to the point that you’d look weird with hair.

Although the downside to this is that you’re locked into looking the same way for the rest of your life. As the majority of men never use make-up, and we can never get away with going into town wearing a wig like women can, the only thing that men can do to change the way they look is to have a haircut. That option’s not open to me any more, which is a downer. Yeah, I could grow a beard, but it it’s an obvious over-compensating manoeuvre that fools no-one. Consequently…

12. You feel the need to tell every man to do as much mad shit with their hair as possible.

Not because it’s better. Just because you can.

Danonymous Dan: Hair today, hair tomorrow . . .

Who remembers Teenwolf? It is an awesome movie, in the rubbish way that so many ’80s movies are. Luckily for Michael J Fox he was able to take the hair off when the director yelled ‘cut’, but for some of us that isn’t possible, we have to live with a visual eyesore sprouting from our chests like the devil’s own cress.

I have to be honest here, I feel bloody cheated! I had older brothers and grew up watching bastions of the chest toupee fighting and ‘tearing shit up’ in movies as a kid. Programmes like Magnum PI nurtured in me the belief that hair was good; it was the sign of a man. Grrrr. Rugged. Hair was a signal to all that a massive membrum swung pendulously between the legs of a manly man who took what he wanted and damn the consequences. All the ladies swooned at the sight of the white jacket (with rolled up sleeves) and gratuitously open Hawaiian shirt that said ‘I’m here, I’m hairy and there is enough of me to keep you all warm on a chilly night.’ But now? Hair is seen as a sign that you’ve got an extra gene, probably from incest.

Luckily, I don’t have a hairy back… but time is no friend of the hairy man – it’s going to happen. My current girlfriend was a little shocked by what she refers to as ‘my condition’, as being a Californian she was mainly used to waxed or naturally hairless Baywatch types. I don’t know if there is something in the water in California but a lot of guys are really hair-less over there.

In any conversation I’ve ever had on the topic of body hair (and I have had a few, usually initiated when somebody sees for the first time that I have hair) most people – especially the girls – conclude that hair is grim and should be removed at all costs. I’ve had various reactions to my chest-tinder; thankfully nobody has reacted with utter disgust despite my general chat above. However I have had shock and a few ‘OMG (laugh) you’re so hairy…ooh its soft like dog’s fur,’ which is great for the personal confidence. However, I have on the whole noticed a difference between the hair-hating rhetoric and my own experiences with the opposite sex. Perhaps they were just being nice and trying not to hurt my feelings, but nearly every girlfriend I’ve had comes to love it. After the visual shock of the devil cress has passed, it’s always head on my shoulder while a snaking arm starts rubbing the chest and stomach – I guess there is something tactile about it.

While I wouldn’t class myself as a metrosexual (I don’t fuck free newspapers – boom boom) I’m no stranger to trying to remove the hair. I’ve tried the cream stuff, but that just burns like napalm and gives me a nasty red skin colouring for days; by the time the redness has gone the hair is growing back. Totally useless!  I remember somebody once saying to me, “don’t worry about it, Ron Jeremy is covered in hair,” I am pretty sure that it wasn’t Ron’s hair that gave him a triple decade career in porn but more likely the fact he can suck his own nob.

When I was about 19, I fell asleep drunk and some friends decided it would be funny to wax a strip out of my chest. The shock of it (and the fact I had inhaled two bottles of Jack Daniels) made me throw up – ruining the coat of the person who’d waxed me. Payback’s a vomit-coloured bitch. So with summer dawning, I was left with a ridiculous looking strip running from my ribs up over my nipple. So I bought some Veet strips and then – pencil between the teeth – attempted to finish the job. Fucking hell. The stomach was the worst part, the process took me three days and the bruising I caused myself was epic. I looked like a jaundice sufferer who’d been attacked by an acupuncturist.

So there we go. I’m boyfriend and furry fire hazard all rolled into one. They say that fashion rolls around in a circle which means the time of the ware-man will come again – no doubt I will be 70 by then and in no safe state to wear a white suit. Crap.