Sitting in high school biology, listening to the teacher drone on about genetics, I snapped to attention when she used male pattern baldness as an example of a dominant trait. My heart started pounding with fear - with bald men on both sides of my mother's family as far as the eye could see, I was doomed to have a chrome dome.
I remained anguished about the prospect of being bald for the next 20 years as my hairline retreated and my hair steadily thinned. Bald men seemed disfigured to me. I felt pity for them, so I tried to disguise my own condition by keeping my own hair clean and fluffed with a blow dryer. That hardly qualified as a treatment for baldness, but no other options seemed viable. I recoiled from the cost and the upkeep of a hairpiece. Minoxidil didn't seem to work very well. Hair plugs looked awful - one man I met looked as if he had been burned several times on the top of his head with a cigarette and each spot had sprouted a tuft of hair.
Once you’ve made up your mind that you never want to have any more children, there’s no more reliable form of contraception than vasectomy. But one precaution: To lower the risk of your vasectomy failing, make sure the surgeon who does yours is qualified and has a lot of experience.
When done correctly by an experienced physician, as few as 1 in 1,000 vasectomies fail to do their job — preventing you from ejaculating sperm when you have an orgasm, thus preventing pregnancy. But when performed by...
Like a man told he has a terminal illness, I worked my way through denial, anger, negotiation, and depression. Finally, I reached resignation - I would join the ranks of bald men - but I was far from resigned to the prospect.
Then, when I was in my mid-30s, I suddenly stopped caring about being bald. I felt as though someone had flipped a switch inside of me that turned off the shame I felt about losing my hair, and I never worried about it again.
But why do bald men feel shame? And how did I overcome the shame, embarrassment, and dread that baldness once inspired in me? And even more importantly, how can other men achieve the same blissful indifference to their own hair loss?
Going Bald: Understanding the symbolism of hair
As advertisements, Hollywood, and the behavior of countless men demonstrate, hair represents strength, power, and virility. Freudians used to argue that a man's hair symbolized his penis, so losing one's hair amounted to symbolic castration.