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Comment by birriel | Hacker News Reader

Those encouraging folks to "just shave it off" fail to realize that it's so much more than a vanity issue. From an evolutionary standpoint, baldness is perceived in the female brain as a sign of poor sperm quality [0].

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S102781171...

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True, but they are also encouraging to instead invest in other parts of your body which can more than compensate for this negative effect on female humans. Muscles…

....and money, and not being a douche.

Let’s not forget smelling like a dog (or having a strong body smell) ;)

That's weird, because women these days seem to really love dogs. There's a stereotype about women loving cats (which do not normally have a strong body smell at all), but these days women seem to greatly prefer dogs over cats. I think it has something to do with the fact that dogs require far more maintenance than cats, so they basically act as surrogate children. Cats are independent and don't need to be bathed (you do have to clean their litter box, but that's about it) or walked 3x a day so you can pick up their fresh poop in your hand, so they don't take any time out of your day, or force you to adapt your schedule to theirs, the way dogs do.

I meant that a specific strong body smell in men has been shown to be attractive to a lot of women, it doesn’t specifically smell like dog, but the study also showed that men dislike this odour – unless it’s exactly theirs ;) hence me calling it “dog smell”, but it’s inaccurate.

Oh sorry, I misread that and thought you meant that women don't want strong-smelling men. I'm rather surprised it's actually the opposite.

Well it was one specific smell, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. “Old sweat that closes your throat because it’s so unbearable” is definitely not that =)

Cats are far more maintenance than dogs. I went over a decade just buying food and toys for my dog. I got a cat (a very laid back cuddle monkey) and he eats more than the dog, loads our HVAC filter with fur, requires daily cat box maintenance, and has been to the vet more times than I can remember and now has a prescription.

>Cats are far more maintenance than dogs. I went over a decade just buying food and toys for my dog.

You never took your dog on a walk for 10 years?

"Because all of the included participants were from infertile couples, this appears to be a limitation of the study..."

Pretty big limitation, and their discussion really is just there to justify publishing anyway. Both groups, bald and shaggy, may as well have been shooting blanks.

I don’t find any mention of this on the study. But even if there was you realize how insignificant that signal is compared to everything else right? From personal anecdotes to any married bald man it’s trivial to show it’s irrelevant. Like others have said work on what you can improve, like getting fit, and obviously confidence and empathy first by getting female friends and in the process realizing they are not cavewomen. If you are seriously looking at studies for what is attractive then that’s 100% the problem, not your hair.

It's totally possible to both acknowledge its something that can be surmounted or is only a single factor in attraction while also acknowledging it's almost always a negative, the same way being short, being stupid, being poor, having bad style, being fat, being awkward etc. would be.

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