HOME / the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Natalie Angier and Jonathan Weiner

the breakfast table:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

The Science of Bad Hair Days

By Natalie Angier
Posted Monday, Feb. 21, 2000, at 11:39 AM ET

Hello, Jonathan,

RSS

I hope you and your hair are doing well today.

I say this because yesterday I attended a symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, and by far the most amusing bit of information I heard was that men report a greater drop in self-confidence than women do when they feel they are having a "bad hair day."

This does not entirely surprise me, because, although I have spent a Rick Rockwellian fortune over the years in the search for magic shampoos that would lend me the occasional mirage of "good" hair, I've mostly grown accustomed to my baby-fine, unmanageable, silly hair; while my husband, whose hair is thick and ungraying and important, suffers terribly on those rare days when his hair gets tired of being so damned good and decides to pouf up a little bit in front, Ronald Reagan-style.

The factette about male-female esteem issues came up during a conference on the subject of sociobiology in the New Millennium (isn't it over yet?) when the primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hardy, author of The Woman That Never Evolved and Mother Nature, pointed out that with women now able to accrue their own resources, apply for their own credit cards, and file their own bankruptcy applications, they no longer judge men solely on their wallet width. Instead, they may expect their mates to look good, too, or at least to feel self-conscious when they can't.

I know what you're thinking--or somebody is thinking: What about that Rick Rockwell and his gold-digging bride, Darva Conger, on Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? Didn't the nauseogenic spectacle of the two of them exchanging their Hymen's kiss before an audience of millions of mostly young women prove that the old verity still applies--men want youth and beauty, while women want cash up front?

To which I say, ooh, I love the Rockwell-Conger saga. Now we learn that Rockwell was a stalker who was placed under a police restraining order when he threatened to kill his fiancée when she broke off their engagement in 1991. The one point that was neglected during all the tisking and woe-is-meing about how a woman could wed and bed a man she had never seen and knew nothing of beyond his financial assets is that the entire transaction in fact resembled the venerable tradition of an arranged marriage. In this case, Fox Television served as the in loco parentis, and the unspoken assumption was that the whole business was guaranteed safe and effective, that the show's producers had checked out this guy's background with at least the assiduity of prospective in-laws, if not of the FBI and the FDA.

Now that it turns out otherwise and that Fox appears to have done a less-than-meticulous advance screening, I wonder how many women will be eager to take the plunge on a future episode and risk marrying a fellow who not only may be a potential lady-killer but may not even have the fortune he claims to have? I also wonder how Darva Conger will react, upon finishing her Caribbean cruise and learning of her groom's past, for, as an emergency-room nurse, she very likely has seen a battered woman or two in her time.

At the same time, I'd be disappointed if the show were cancelled forever. I really wanted to see the promised segment when they switched the sexes and had men competing to marry a rich wife.

So I ask you, Jonathan, as a sensible man with a Darwinian sensibility, the following:
a) Do you know any guys who'd sign up for the chance to marry a woman, sight unseen, if they knew she was loaded?

b) Who does their hair?

With naturally selective cheer,

Natalie Angier