There is a discussion going on over here about hair loss. The other adult in this house says women are lucky because they don’t have to worry about going bald. As far as he’s concerned, there’s no feminine equivalent to male pattern hair loss.
I say he’s got to be joking. We don’t have to worry about losing hair because we are too busy trying to work out surreptitious ways to remove it from places it shouldn’t be without leaving stubble. Ask any group of women of a certain age where they’ve found rogue hair recently and you’ll need two hours for the answers.
He says it’s not the same. Unwanted hair can be shaved or lasered or waxed, but you can’t grow back hair from a head once it’s gone without some major medical interventions.
I say fine, but what about the weight thing. That’s worse than losing a few hairs on your head because it’s omnipresent, it’s forever, and it’s everywhere we look and turn.
To demonstrate, I went to my local milk bar and bought three women’s magazines. One was headlined “Curves are Back”, the other “Anorexia Intervention – The Fight to Save Posh”, and the third “Don’t call me Fat”, which a certain Court was meant to say to a certain Scott, whoever they both are and it doesn’t matter, except that all this was featured on the front covers of the magazines and all in the same week. Whether you buy these magazines or not, you can’t escape them and their ridiculous covers because there they are on the newspaper stand every morning.
Sure, one magazine might have been pushing the idea of curves, and the other masquerading as a lifeline to Posh, but all of them were focused on the same subject, which is the bigness or smallness of the female body. You can be sure that none of the stars photographed at red carpet events or on the beach or grabbing coffee from Starbucks in the pages inside had anything on them that would even remotely resemble curves. They were all bone thin and they always have been.
You don’t see bald heads on the covers of magazines with headlines like “Such and such is bald as a badger” or “Ooops, there goes my luscious mane”, because men are not judged by their looks to the extent women are.
The weight thing is not just a female issue, of course. Men have it too but, I have to argue, not with the same intensity or obsessiveness. There’s not a single man I know who would say no to a Cherry Ripe or a bucket of chips if they really wanted them. The one I live with eats whatever, whenever, without guilt. He may put on a kilo or two every now and then, but it doesn’t cause him agony. Not me, and not the women I know. Just yesterday I was chatting to an acquaintance about calorie intake, diet apps and step counters because she said she’d gained weight over Christmas. She is 72.
But he says the struggle to lose weight is nothing compared to the threat of baldness, because baldness is permanent, weight is always in flux. You can control it. You.can.control.it. Words from his own mouth. Words I will use against him one day. Words that are so irritating in themselves, because control is central to the issue, and a big and complex part of the problem.
Anyway, clearly the discussion is ongoing because it’s impossible to conclude. You can’t compare apples with oranges. And no-one can win this one.
