PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anita Rao 0:00
It's a Sunday morning routine in our house, my partner and I in slippers with coffee turn on SNL from the night before. So there we were lounging on a Sunday not too long ago when this sketch came on.
SNL CLIP 0:15
We are bald red, and that is that on our first date, I typically wear a hat, and there's nothing for you to be.
Anita Rao 0:31
Amid laughter, there was a silent acknowledgement that this SNL skit was hitting home as my partner's bald spot has emerged. So too have our hidden biases around baldness. When I'm sitting behind him giving him a shoulder rub, he says, Don't look at my bald spot. When he's mindlessly playing with his hair, I say, don't make your bald spot worse. We're a progressive minded couple with a healthy skepticism about beauty standards. So what is this all about. Have we failed to fully interrogate this particular body ideal? Are we just existentially afraid of aging? It is time to find out where these feelings and fears of baldness come from. This is embodied. I'm Anita Rao, it's natural for people of all genders to experience hair loss throughout their lifetime, but today we're talking about the specific and distinct experiences of balding men. According to the American Hair Loss Association, over 60% of American men notice thinning hair by 35 and that percentage creeps into the 80s at age 50, those are the facts. But what about the feelings? To start our investigation into the driving forces that shape how men feel about their baldness and how other people perceive them, I'd like to introduce e Patrick Johnson. Decades ago, he was one of the first scholars to really bring blackness and queerness into conversation within academic spaces, and he has brought this intersectional lens to baldness as well. E Patrick is the Dean of the School of Communication and the Annenberg University professor at Northwestern University. E Patrick, welcome to embodied.
E. Patrick Johnson 2:12
It's great to be here.
Anita Rao 2:14
So because this is radio and nobody can see you, I have to state the obvious and say that you are, in fact, bald I am. When and how did the first inklings of your future as a bald person emerge?
E. Patrick Johnson 2:28
It's so interesting because when I was young, I had a mane full of hair. I mean, big, big hair, and I loved my hair, and I loved I even had, I don't know if, if listeners would remember that trend in the 80s called the rat tail.
Anita Rao 2:46
Oh yes, oh yes, yeah, that
E. Patrick Johnson 2:49
even had a rat tail. But when I turned 27 I started to notice my hair thinning, and because I had so much hair, I didn't think much of it. But by the time I was 30, it was noticeably thinner, and I started cropping my hair, keeping it cut really short. And then by the time I'm 3132 as the kids say it was a wrap,
Anita Rao 3:24
was going bald, something that you predicted happening to you at some age based on family cues, like, did you see this in your future?
E. Patrick Johnson 3:31
I did not, and it's, you know, I'm the youngest of seven children, and there were five older brothers, and only one had gone bald, so I didn't really think that it would happen to me, and it eventually caught up to them as well. But because I had hair, I had so much hair, and then I didn't
Anita Rao 3:55
so you had this big hair, it was something that was kind of a big part of your identity when you first started balding and started noticing that thinning hair, what were the feelings that you remember associating with that change?
E. Patrick Johnson 4:11
Initially, it was a feeling of loss, because I didn't think that I could do anything about it, and I certainly wasn't going to wear hair pieces, and all the things that some men decide to do when they start losing their hair. And then I started to notice how people around me started to behave when I no longer had a lot of hair and had bald hair, which actually prompted me to write about that experience, because I felt for the first time in my life threatening to others, because of my baldness and because of my maleness and because of my race. Yes, I want
Anita Rao 5:01
to get to those feelings about threat in a second, but I want to go back and ask you about something you said. You said, you know, I would never have considered a hair piece or anything like that that other people were doing. Why, like, why was that an automatic no for you?
E. Patrick Johnson 5:17
I think it's because I never felt that the men that I saw wearing, you know, what we call rugs, they looked fake. You could see the if you were viewing some man who was wearing a toupee or wearing a wig, you could really tell that it was a wig or a toupee. And I just thought that is not authentically who I am. And so it was never an option for me to buy a iron piece.
Anita Rao 5:53
So it almost exaggerated the baldness when you saw that.
E. Patrick Johnson 5:57
Yes, and I also will say that at the time, you know, this was in the 90s, the technology for hair pieces was not as sophisticated as it is now today. I mean, there are some men who are, like, totally bald, who get hair pieces, and particularly African American men, you cannot tell that they are bald because the technology is much more sophisticated where the piece is glued to the scalp, and because most men still grow hair around the edges, they can get a fade on the side that then gradually is blended in with the piece that is glued to the scout, where you really can't tell. But back in the 90s, that technology did not exist, and for African American men in particular, there was a spray on solution that also looked terrible. And if it got wet, it was dripping down people's face. It was horrible. So that was a hard no for me. So
Anita Rao 7:12
it was clear to you, okay, hard No, I'm going to shave. Was that decision in that day? Dramatic? Was there, like, you know, a scene in the bathroom montage head shaving. Or was it, or is there a memory you even associate with, like the decision to commit to a shaved head? No,
E. Patrick Johnson 7:32
I mean, I besides that initial realization that, you know, my hair is not coming back, you know, I felt kind of sad, but after that, I began to embrace it. And again, you know, we can talk about this in a little bit, but I also it in some ways, it made me feel more masculine to be bald and more attractive in certain ways at the same time that, you know, as I said, Before, I began to experience feeling threatening. So it was a whole mix of emotions that came with losing my hair. Okay, so let's
Anita Rao 8:13
get into that tension that you are introducing these internal feelings and ways that you're seeing yourself kind of juxtaposed with the way that you're noticing that other people are reading you. What are some of the ways that you noticed other people observing you were there, like implicit things that were being said to you, or was it more an explicit message that you got?
E. Patrick Johnson 8:37
It was both implicit and explicit messages that the first thing I noticed was, before I lost my hair, and I had, you know, pretty big hair, I could be read as an effeminate black gay man. Some of that was due to, you know, the different hairstyles that I had. I presented myself differently when I had big hair than when I didn't. And so the first thing I begin to notice is being in an elevator, which is always an uncomfortable space for some people, being in an elevator with a stranger, people, particularly white women, standing further in the corner away from me, I also noticed walking down the street people, again, mostly white women, but not always moving to the other side of the sidewalk, clutching their purses tightly when I walked by. And again, I had never experienced that when I had a lot of hair. And then I started reading biographies and memoirs about that experience by other men. And something clicked this, oh, this is what's happening. I. I've now become the embodiment of the stereotype of the threatening black man, you know, the beast, the rapist, the mugger. I've now become the embodiment of that.
Anita Rao 10:22
E Patrick has traced this stereotype of the threatening bald black man through decades of racist cultural imagery, and while he's observed and at times even played up the fear evoking potential of his own bald head, he's now in his mid 50s, and his relationship to baldness has taken on a very different tone, more sexy than scary. We're going to get into that after the break.
We want to remind you that we love to hear from our listeners, and there are a couple of different ways you can get in touch with us. We have a virtual voice mail box called Speak pipe, where you can record us a message. You can find a link in the right hand sidebar of our website embodied W unc.org you can also send us an email to embodied at W unc.org we recently heard from a listener who was deeply impacted by our episode about later in life autism diagnoses. He wrote as I listened so much, clicked like, Hey, I do that too, and that and that, applying the lens of autism to my life growing up and currently, it all began to make sense after hearing the program I was diagnosed with level one ASD my entire life. Makes complete sense now. Thank you so much to the listener who sent that message in I've loved reading it.
You're listening to embodied from North Carolina public radio, a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We'll be right back.
This is embodied. I'm Anita Rao, we are neck deep in exploring why men's baldness evokes big reactions in people, whether you're the balding party or not. E Patrick Johnson is a dean at Northwestern University and a bald person himself. When he went bald in his 30s, he observed an unexpected shift in how people responded to him in his big hair era, he was often read as gay and effeminate. Baldness made him threatening and masculine. He started to make sense of these experiences through literature and by finding characters whose stories mirrored his own.
E. Patrick Johnson 12:37
I think that I was I was reading the book parallel time by Brent staples, where he is talking about an experience of being on the south side of Chicago, on 57th Street, I think. And it was in the evening, and he's walking down the street and a white couple actually brushes by Him because they are or they cross the street to avoid him. And he called that scatter the pigeons, which I ended up naming an essay that I've written about my experience baldness. But that section of his piece was paradoxical, because, on the one hand, he's talking about becoming the embodiment of the stereotypical black man at the same time, or later in that book, he also talks about having an effeminate person in his neighborhood where he grew up, and he refers to that person as the F word. And it struck me that, on the one hand, you know, he has this interesting critique about racism and masculinity, and on the other, he engages in this homophobic rhetoric. And it dawned on me at that moment that I am sort of this mix between this embodied threat and an emasculated defeat. Man, I'm all of those things depending on the context.
Anita Rao 14:18
Was your baldness changing your personal relationship to masculinity like we're talking about how you were read and perceived by others, but I'm curious about how it felt to you in isolation, or if it was even possible to isolate that relationship from how you were read by other people.
E. Patrick Johnson 14:36
Yeah, I think it would depend on again. The context, in some ways, when I would look at pictures of myself bald and had facial hair, I felt sexy. But in some pictures where I had the ability to have some hair, I was like, Oh, I missed my. Hair. But as I've gotten older, I totally embrace my baldness. I don't have any anxiety about being bald, and I also don't long for hair in the way that I used to when I first started to lose my hair.
Anita Rao 15:22
How did that shift begin to happen for you? I mean, you kind of took us to the beginning point where you're making these observations. You're thinking about how you're being read differently. When did your personal relationship with your own baldness begin to shift and what led to that,
E. Patrick Johnson 15:41
I think as more of my peers also began to bawl, it didn't feel as as much of a stigma. The other thing I'll say is, in the 80s and 90s, you didn't have as many representations of positive images of bald men as you do now, people had hair. I mean, that was the era of the Jerry curl. I mean, and now you see lots of men who are considered sex symbols,
Anita Rao 16:13
who are bald. How does baldness intersect with sexuality, in your view, in a more contemporary context? I mean, you talked about how you know the way that you were read as more effeminate or more masculine would shift based on people's perceptions of your sexuality. So how do you feel about that now, like, is there something inherent about baldness that makes it threatening or desirable, or is there kind of a hinging point on the sexuality and race of the bald person.
E. Patrick Johnson 16:43
I don't feel that people in general think of black bald men as threatening as much as they used to. I do think that baldness is considered sexy. I don't think that people who are trying to cling to their hair, and this is across the spectrum, whether White, Black, Latino, or whatever their racial identity might be, the comb over is not cool. It just isn't. No one finds it sexy. People just sort of, you know, give that look of, oh, just let it go. Just let it go. Or lean into the fact that you're balding. It's instead of trying to hide it in plain sight,
Anita Rao 17:38
what I'm thinking about, as you're talking is that there is this kind of turning point, it seems like for many bald people, from those initial moments of the loss, and maybe that's when the fear is really loud and strong, of like, Oh, my bald spot. Like, oh, I'm self conscious. And then maybe there's a turning point when a decision is made to commit to some path, whether that be shaving your head or whatever, and then there is freedom on the other side. Like, is that a narrative that you've seen happen with other bald folks in your life? Am I right about that? Like, the tension being maybe more at the beginning?
E. Patrick Johnson 18:13
Yes, it, you know, because it's really hard to deal with a bald spot because you're not quite bald totally, but you don't have a head full of hair, and so you're in this liminal space of, what do I do? So it is anxiety producing. I have a nephew now, for instance, who is in his early 40s, and the bald spot is growing, and he's in the phase where, where I was, when I was in my early 30s. Of you got that bald spot on the crown of your head. What I do judges, keep having my hair cut close so it's not that noticeable. Or do I start shading it all together? And so you really are in this liminal space around what to do about your baldness. And he is lucky, and I was lucky that our bald spots happen in the crown, where it's it's a little more manageable. But for those people who have receding hairlines, oh, my goodness, that's the worst, because when you go to the barber, they have to get really creative about how to give you your hairline because it's starting so far back on your forehead that it's it's just impossible.
Anita Rao 19:44
I want to end with reflecting on this idea of performing baldness. It's something that you wrote about in the essay that you have referred to. You are a performer. You inhabit other personalities and stories you. A lot I'm curious about how you think about baldness as a part of performing identity in your life now, like, is it something that you are performing, or is it just something that's part of who you are?
E. Patrick Johnson 20:15
I think both. But unlike before, when I noticed people's reactions to me, when I first became bald, I would use it to my advantage and play it up and, you know, lean into the fact that people were afraid of me, and that was my own way of resisting the kind of racist reception I was getting as I've gotten older, though I don't really perform my baldness in that way, my performing baldness is more about embracing my age, if that makes sense. I'm now more than middle age, you know. And I now perform baldness as a kind of, I was gonna say father figure, but that's not quite right as a seasoned human being, you know, so that I am the wise one in the room, and my baldness helps support that I am of a certain age, and I've had certain experiences, and I have certain life knowledge that are reflected in the fact that I'm bald.
Anita Rao 21:35
I love all of those reflections. E Patrick, what a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much.
E. Patrick Johnson 21:41
Thank you. It's my pleasure.
Anita Rao 21:46
After this conversation with E Patrick, a new question started to emerge for me, when and how often are the dominant cultural narratives around male baldness at odds with how bald men see themselves? Our embodied producer, Kaya went out to investigate this with a small focus group of our W UNC colleagues. At any time, have you been afraid of balding?
Jon Hardee 22:11
Never because, as I was growing up, all of my male role models were bald. I knew it was inevitable. The it
Terry Gildea 22:25
is a scorched earth policy on the top of my head, there's not much that happens there anymore. I had a long run, a good career at long hair. I used to have hair down past my shoulders for most of my 20s, and so I really took advantage of the hair that I had at the time. I was never afraid of balding. I knew was gonna happen. Never really had any negative feelings about it at all. I think the best part about being bald is the low maintenance. You know, I don't have to go to a barber. I don't have to go to a hairdresser. I just wear a lot of ball caps.
Russ Henry 23:02
I As the story goes, it follows your mother's father, my grandfather on my mom's side, died when he was 93 with a full head of hair. My dad, of course, had the male pattern baldness. He sported a terrible comb over so it you know, I never thought it was going to happen to me. I'd always had a cowlick on the back of my head where it was a little bald there. And then one of my coworkers at one point, and she's like, you've got a bald spot going on back there? I'm like, No, it's just my cow lick. And she's like, No, I don't think it's a cow like, you know. Then I was like, what's going on? But I wasn't willing to pay a lot of money for Rogaine or any of those things that you know. I was like, Ah, forget it. I'll just shave my head. I'll be fine.
Anita Rao 23:51
John Terry and Russ all feel kind of neutral about their bald heads, and that may be a more common experience than we're led to believe Glen Jankowski has been unearthing new perspectives about baldness in his current and ongoing research. He's an assistant professor in the School of Psychology at University College Dublin. Hey, Glenn, welcome to embodied.
Glen Jankowski 24:14
Thanks for having me
Anita Rao 24:15
so your journey into deeply studying and thinking about baldness began with some research you were doing for a PhD about men's body image in the UK, and you were reviewing all of these studies about men's appearance and how they feel about it. And you started to see conversations about baldness bubbling up over and over again. Take me into that research cubicle, that discovery. What were you finding?
Glen Jankowski 24:42
That's right, my PhD was between 2012 and 2015 and I was reviewing the research on boldness, which is an important area of men's appearance that can be a site of dissatisfaction. And I kept noticing it was the same kind of methodology. Used across studies, and it wasn't a very good methodology. It was market research, which we don't tend to use in academic work. And then I also saw that it was commercially influenced, so it was funded by companies.
Anita Rao 25:14
So you're saying that the research that was supporting ideas that baldness is distressing was being done by companies that were trying to sell anti baldness products
Glen Jankowski 25:26
Absolutely. And it was being done through psychology colleagues, people that I knew in my field, they were being paid by these pharmaceutical companies, and they put their name on the front of them. But actually, when I looked at the methodology, it was the company that had more control of the questions that were asked, and I also think COVID The results that were taken from those studies. So
Anita Rao 25:49
you're a psychologist, you have looked at other studies before. Is this like a distinct phenomenon? Did this stick out to you as like, yikes. I can't believe this is happening.
Glen Jankowski 26:00
We don't routinely learn and teach psychology as a discipline that's commercially influenced, all that is societally influenced, even and it is, of course, a problem elsewhere, including the DSM. There's a great series of studies by Lisa Cosgrove, which shows that mental health diagnoses are related to pharmaceutical funding.
Anita Rao 26:21
So you notice these orange and red flags in the balding research, and you, at the same time, have some personal context to this. You have been experiencing partial baldness that began when you were a teenager. So where were you in your personal relationship to baldness at the point that it became a professional interest?
Glen Jankowski 26:45
Yes, I have been bolding since I was 17. I've always tried to conceal it, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. And my personal relationship to Boldness is quite different from my professional relationship to boldness. I like to joke that, like a parent, do as I say, not as I do. Yeah, I don't necessarily have the best response to my personal boldness, but my research and take home messages, I think, are what be of listening to.
Anita Rao 27:15
Well, so Did you feel any sense of betrayal then, when you were finding that you know these claims of distress that maybe mirrored your distress were being promoted and magnified by people who had other interests in mind?
Glen Jankowski 27:31
Yeah, completely. It's very frustrating when you take the time to find research or an objective forum or social media page and you expect it to be objective, and then you find actually, hang on, this is actually an advert disguised in these ways, because that's not what we're going for. Research for. We want the truth. We want evidence. So I did feel frustrated. So help us understand
Anita Rao 27:54
kind of how we got to this point where there are products for anti baldness, there is this commercially backed research, because before then you argue that baldness was actually, for a lot of human history, seen as pretty mundane. Is that right? Completely?
Glen Jankowski 28:14
Yeah, of course, there were always some people who had baldness who interpreted it negatively. But there were lots of neutral, mundane interpretations of boldness historically and also very positive ones, especially this association of the shaved head with religiosity and being closer to God. So the monks tonsures. There's a 14th century depiction of Jesus that's bold. Virgin Mary had some frontal alopecia and some depictions. So that historical representation reminds us that today's representation of boldness isn't unchangeable. So
Anita Rao 28:50
to get from that to today, there were some pretty significant shifts in the 20th century, and one of those was the medicalization of baldness. So talk to me a bit about that and how we became to conceptualize baldness as a disease.
Glen Jankowski 29:07
Yeah, medicalization refers to the transformation of normal bodily processes or aspects into diseases, often for commercial profits. Some of the first studies around baldness were by a researcher called Hamilton, and he actually studied castrated male inmates of an American asylum, and noticed that their twin brothers, when they had twins, one would be balding, one wouldn't and he linked this to the castration and a depleted role of testosterone that those men had, he very controversially, injected some of those men with testosterone and then documented the occurrence of boldness, if they also had it in their family. And this uncovered the genetic, hormonal length of boldness, but it also helped produce it as a medical condition rather than a. Normal bodily aspect. As you notice at the start of the program, most men will go bold, many women too. So actually, it's it's the norm, not the disease state that we portray it as today. So
Anita Rao 30:12
this physician that was trying to understand the links between hormones and baldness was doing these studies, there are some links. They're genetic links to baldness, but most of the time, baldness is not medically problematic, right? Exactly?
Glen Jankowski 30:34
And as Conrad points out, a medicalization researcher, there are other aspects of our bodies that are hormonally and genetically influenced, like eye color, but we wouldn't say that that was a disease. So who
Anita Rao 30:45
kind of stood to gain by making baldness a disease state and something that people perceived as like a problem to be fixed? So
Glen Jankowski 30:57
really significantly, it would be companies, of course, for a long time, one of the key popular forms of snake oil has been anti boldness products, but it was only in the 20th century that these products could gain more popularity and legitimacy by this research suggesting boldness was genetically hormonally caused, and therefore these products weren't snake oil, but they were actually treatments
Anita Rao 31:27
companies profiting from people's insecurities about their bodies. Not a shocker, but what is striking in the history of anti baldness products is how they did it, and how strongly these ideas about baldness have taken hold. After the break, we'll get the details on how Rogaine changed the way we talk about baldness and even forged a new path for marketing medications to consumers. We'll be right back.
This is embodied. I'm Anita Rao, today we're talking about the forces that have shaped cultural narratives around male baldness, including the idea that baldness is something to be feared. We're undertaking this investigative mission with researcher Glenn Jankowski, and we've reached the part where pharmaceutical companies are about to experiment with a new method of product promotion that will shape not only how men think about their baldness, but the future of pharma advertising. Rogaine
Glen Jankowski 32:27
was actually the first direct to consumer product promoted from pharmaceutical company, which meant, instead of going through doctors, the company individually targeted men through adverts. And often those adverts would associate boldness with a very, very bleak future, an unlovable future, an unemployed future, a depressed future, and only their product being there to save them from that future. Well, so you
Anita Rao 32:54
said that it was the first pharmaceutical drug to be advertised in a direct to consumer way. So we're so used to that now, like watching TV and seeing ads for medication, but Rogaine was the first so that must have really made a significant impact on people.
Glen Jankowski 33:07
It really did. And there was analysis at the time that showed that they spent more promoting that product than on any other product that they had. And journalists, unfortunately weren't very critical about that promotion, they could receive a press release from the company. Believe that boldness was, you know, something that really could relate to, and then just unfortunately reiterate some of those press release points that then fed into this idea that it must be treated and it is a disease.
Anita Rao 33:35
So you mentioned that you have used anti baldness products on and off throughout your life as you began to dig into the research and the fine print around these products, what stuck out to you as either in line with or contradictory with your own experience using these products? Yeah,
Glen Jankowski 33:54
and I used those products for a very long time, from a young age 17, 1819, and I'm relatively nerdy. I was trying to read up about them at the time, but I remember being overwhelmed by the sort of level of information the companies would put out about it. Now that I've a researcher, I know what meta analyzes are. I know what systematic reviews are, and they gather lots of evidence and synthesize it, so they're great to look at, and there are two great ones on antibodies, products that show the efficacy is quite limited. Then the hair regrowth amount isn't considered normally, cosmetically meaningful, between eight and 15 hair follicles in one centimeter of scalp is considered for most boldness products be the maximum hair regrowth in one centimeter of scalp. Most people have 120 hair follicles. So the success is very limited, and especially with unfortunately for asteroid, this risks of harms seem to be quite high. So in my work, I say that for so little success, the risks are. Be quite high on these. There's
Anita Rao 35:01
also, I remember my partner and I, in like, a very early conversation about baldness, looked into this. And once you stop using the products, all of the effects go away. So once you start using them, you're kind of signed up for life. Is that right?
Glen Jankowski 35:17
Right? And they are inconveniences. Rogaine is often required twice day. It's a sticky foam. And not only are they slightly inconvenient, but they're also potentially a risk to your health. Really, they should be taken with medical monitoring, but most men don't have time for that.
Anita Rao 35:32
So you mentioned that these advertisements kind of project this, this sad future, this bleak future. Were they targeting all men equally? Do the messages change based on race?
Glen Jankowski 35:48
Yes, absolutely. They were targeting, in particular during the 20th century, white and richer men. And some of these companies and studies are very explicit about it, where they only research countries that have people with enough income to buy their products. And this kind of tied in with an earlier 20th century kind of movement eugenics, which is this idea of, you know, the white race is morally and physically superior. And some claims by eugenicists that boldness was a evidence of white men's ultimate evolutionary superiority. Our brains were so big they pushed out hair follicles. And that kind of coalesced to really say that boldness was a white male trait, which, of course, isn't true, and the racism is really explicit in that that's
Anita Rao 36:39
kind of reminding me of this classic example that comes up where folks say, you know, if men could menstruate, then menstruation would be seen as this glorious, beautiful celebration of life. And it's kind of a way for people in power to justify things about themselves by using these like pseudoscientific arguments, I guess, like you're saying with eugenics,
Glen Jankowski 37:04
Yeah, completely and unfortunately today, with good intentions, people want to associate boldness with positive characteristics because it's so negatively represented. But sometimes that has consequences. So there is an association with boldness, with ultimate masculinity, with authority, with intelligence. And that can actually end up isolating some groups of old men like gay Bo men or women who go bold, or other people of color who go bold, because it's these tie into stereotypes about masculinity being aspirational, or that intelligence is limited or linked to white people.
Anita Rao 37:45
So you're saying kind of that in order to own and be culturally kind of accepted in your baldness, you have to brand it almost and and make it a part of your your masculinity. Is that right?
Glen Jankowski 38:00
Yeah, it's resistance to these stereotypes often involves creating positive stereotypes, but unfortunately, those are still stereotypes, and they're still inaccurate. So bald men and haired men are as intelligent as each other, are as masculine as each other. And if we look at masculinity really, it's kind of a, I think, not very useful analytical tool that just kind of separates men from women in a way that says femininity is less valuable than masculinity, in my view.
Anita Rao 38:34
So we've been kind of setting up this big shift in thinking around baldness as something that is more neutral to something to be feared, and that some of this fear has been exaggerated to sell anti baldness products, but it kind of brings me to the question of how many people actually fear it like is the idea that most men fear baldness true? That's
Glen Jankowski 38:56
a great question. There are systematic reviews on this that gather all evidence to give a more definitive answer, yes, some men experience distress, but many balding men do not. Many bolding men accept it over time and also find positives from it. And overall, if we synthesize the status together, boldness is a moderately distressing condition, not a severely distressing one.
Anita Rao 39:21
How did learning about this shape your own feelings about baldness? Did it reduce any distress that you do or have felt?
Glen Jankowski 39:31
Yeah, it really did. It was a great reminder that most bald men are sort of a silenced majority in the research, in the forums, in the adverts, they accept it, and that, of course, created solidarity for me. You know, eventually I will be there as well. Sometimes I feel like I'm not, you know, as mature as my colleagues or other bold men, in my own response to it, and I work with other bold male researchers. Who are bold themselves. And in the club that we have, we joke that, you know, the first world of the club is not to talk about Glenn's hair. I'm not there yet. Wait,
Anita Rao 40:12
so you're part of a club of other bald researchers. Yeah,
Glen Jankowski 40:16
we collaborate. Oh, I'd love to, yeah. And they mock rightly. They mock my sensitivity around my head, because they brave it, and they're kind of brilliant for it. And yeah, we research boldness together. And of course, we experience it together.
Anita Rao 40:34
I love this. I see a documentary in your future. I want you to follow up on a thread that we were talking about with E Patrick Johnson about representations in culture and the literature of baldness and how those inform how we think about and view baldness. One of the really early observations we had as a team in putting together the show was how often villains in superhero movies are bald, and there are a lot of bald, white villains. In particular, I'm curious about the popular culture representations of baldness that stand out to you and how you think it plays into the bigger conversation. Yeah,
Glen Jankowski 41:19
so the stereotyping of villains as having unusual appearances and boldness isn't unusual in the population, but it's considered unusual. It's lazy. Changing Faces is a great charity that talks about visible differences, including boldness and the villainy stereotype, and they point out it's harmful, and it just promotes this idea that looking unconventionally attractive is inherently means something wrong with the character, I think, with the representation of white bold men being higher as villains, I think it's really important to always kind of take a global perspective and to factor in racism. And in my view, because black men and black women have their hair stereotyped so often as uncivilized, and face real discrimination around their hair type. I feel that there's a floor effect where the representation for them can't get any worse. So we would see a worse representation of white bald men, but that's because the majority representation of black people's hair is already so bad
Anita Rao 42:21
you you're talking about kind of discrimination in the bigger, kind of big de discrimination context. I'm curious about in a more intimate relationship. We've talked about this thread of baldness within romantic partnership, and I love how e Patrick said he's really found the sensuality in his baldness, and it feels like a sexy thing for him. I'm curious about for you, like, how does baldness shape the romantic sensibility that you have?
Glen Jankowski 42:55
Personally, I've come to see bald men as certainly more attractive. Since I've done my research in a personal way, I believe they have a bit of a philosophical journey. And I believe if we look at the accounts of old men, often they say they're less superficial in how they view others. So I see it as more of a positive on a personal level, in my romantic life, for instance, and the claim that bold men are romantically discriminated against, that's not something I've ever experienced. Of course, I do conceal my boldness, and it's also something that I do critique in research, because that claim often leads to this idea that women are superficial and the responsible for men's pain and suffering. And I think that's so sad, because when we look at it, women's appearance standards are quite brutal, and there should be solidarity across genders on this and against a shared kind of enemy, which I would say are cultural, commercial pressures around appearance.
Anita Rao 43:55
You mentioned that you do still conceal your baldness. What is your kind of current, I don't know, current thinking and relationship to it yourself in this moment
Glen Jankowski 44:09
in my work, I try and emphasize it's tongue in cheek, but A Vindication of the Rights of bold men to their heads.
Anita Rao 44:17
Fair enough. Fair enough.
Glen Jankowski 44:22
I want bold men to feel able, including myself, to do what they want with their heads free from scrutiny. And that can include a comb over. It can include wigs. It can include shaving. It can include easing products. And I'd love to take honestly scrutiny away from them onto the wider culture. But of course, I don't mind your question at all. I did raise it myself. I do use anti boldness products. Hopefully one day I'll change on that. But do as I say, not as I do.
Anita Rao 44:50
So as you talk about this, there is obviously the cultural change piece of it, but there's also it seems like room for policy. Show. And potentially more effective regulation and more informed research to shape how we think about baldness treatments. So talk to me about that like, what would you like to see in that more public policy realm that you think could shift the conversation? Yes,
Glen Jankowski 45:17
great. I would love to see healthcare generally less influenced commercially, and that includes dermatological or doctors appointments where bold men are asking medical professionals about boldness. I'd love to see that interaction less commercially influenced, and we know, unfortunately that doctors, dermatologists, especially, can be on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies, and we need regulation. I'd love researchers to not be able to publish if it's commercially funded and biased, because I don't think that's research. I think it's an advert. And I'd also love bold men in general to have more informed consent when they're taking products, and that really means transparency around the side effects, and also knowing about the bald men that accept it and live happily with it,
Anita Rao 46:07
I'd like to jump into Narrator mode for just a second here, because there's a complexity to this conversation that I want to underscore. Knowing more about anti baldness products and the research behind them may not change how you treat your baldness. Seeing more representation of non villainous bald men may not make you less afraid of balding. Like many other aspects of body image, it has many competing thoughts and feelings at once. So while we shared earlier that many of our colleagues feel mostly neutral about baldness that wasn't totally representative. There was actually one more interview that our producer, Kaya did with our colleague, Bob. Would you tell me if you are or have ever been afraid of balding? Yes,
Bob Kastl 46:54
one day was getting a haircut, and there was a new stylist, and at the end she goes, and here's your bald spot, holding up the mirror to the back. And I said, What? I've always had good hair. It was shocking. It just looks so weird because it's sort of so flat, and then the little dome of your scalp, and so it's just depressing. I guess it's something that comes with age. I mean, I'm 60, so do I wish I felt different about it? Yeah, I think so, and I don't know how
Anita Rao 47:26
so for Bob and everyone who feels in a similar boat, this is Glen's advice.
Glen Jankowski 47:33
It's common to fear it and to have concern. Partly that is because we are inundated with adverts that tell us that Boldness is devastating. So take the pressure off yourself. If you have that fear, you don't necessarily need to change it. It's not your fault. And if you can try and read more objective accounts of boldness, try and speak to potentially older, bold men that you might know in your life, and you might find a solidarity and some hope with how mundane and sometimes positive the boldness experience can be if it doesn't feel right now in an immediate way, look out for commercial biases in any research or forums or social media or influencer pages that you're consuming around boldness, because that will mean you're looking at an ad for not objective information.
Anita Rao 48:25
Glen, thank you so much for today's conversation, for your research and for sharing so much of yourself with us. I so appreciate it. Thank you
Glen Jankowski 48:35
pleasure. Thank you so much.
Anita Rao 48:37
Special. Thanks to John Terry, Russ and Bob for contributing to this week's show. We appreciate you. You can find out more about all of our guests at our website, embodied W unc.org you can find all episodes of embodied the radio show there, and make sure you're subscribed to our weekly podcast, a great way to catch up on anything you've missed. Today's episode was produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Amanda Magnus. Nina Scott is our intern and Jenni Lawson is our technical director. This program is recorded at the American Tobacco Historic District. North Carolina. Public Radio is a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm Anita Rao.