Exploring a Baldness Fetish Taught Me About Myself and Others

The cartoon that launched a journey of bisexual discovery

Realizing in my 40s that I might not be entirely heterosexual was an experience that made me question a lot of what I thought I knew about sexuality.

I believed what I’d always heard, that people who were LGBT always knew it, always felt it from childhood. Yet here I was, entering middle age and practically stumbling across feelings that seemed increasingly homosexual.

I say “increasingly” because it didn’t happen all at once.

Let me explain. I’m a 49-year-old, married, closeted (for now) bisexual man, an identity I’ve only recently come to recognize and appreciate. To understand how I discovered I was bisexual, you first need to know that I’ve inhabited other metaphorical closets. I have another sexual desire that I’ve hidden and only shared with a handful of people. I have a fetish, a genuine paraphilic attraction. Specifically, I’m attracted to bald women, and have been for as long as I’ve been sexually attracted to anyone.

Now, you might think that should have been a clue to my sexual orientation, but it’s not. I see nothing inherently masculine about a bald head. A lack of hair, for me, has much the same effect as a lack of clothes, in that it just reveals more of what’s there, male or female. I respond to bald men differently from bald women. Bald men are interesting to me, but there isn’t necessarily a sexual response unless I find a man attractive in other ways.

My wife has known about my fetish for bald women since before we were married. I told her about it when we were engaged, and she was fine with it. She even let me shave her head once. Still, it’s not something she’s into, so we mostly just have an understanding that I will indulge that particular interest as I always have — privately, using pictures and videos. That was how I discovered I was bisexual.

It started several years ago, with a single picture. I was searching online when I came across it on an amateur hentai site.

For those who don’t know, hentai is a type of erotic cartoon for adults, similar in style to manga or anime. You might know it as “tentacle porn” but that’s just one variety. The artist who created the image I found was also an admirer of bald women, but he had combined that fetish with a form of hentai called “futanari.” The women he drew were beautiful, curvaceous, naked, completely bald… and hung like a proverbial horse.

Futanari is basically hermaphrodite porn. The women depicted are not typically seen as transgender, but cis women with a penis. They sometimes have both male and female genitalia, with a vagina behind a fully functional (and often exaggerated) penis. As something of an anime geek, I’d seen hentai before, but this was new to me, and I was fascinated.

My sexual exploration might have stopped there, except that curiosity soon compelled me to see just how far the attraction went. If cartoon women with penises turned me on, what about real women with penises? I decided to check out male-to-female transgender porn.

As you’ve probably guessed, that was a hit with me as well. At this point I was clearly expanding the boundaries of what turned me on, but I was still safely in heterosexual territory. Aside from their genitalia, the performers had all of the characteristics of women. Even with a huge erection front and centre, I found it impossible to think of them as anything but women. And when some of those beautiful women shared stories of growing up as awkward, nerdy boys who didn’t fit in, I also found I could relate to them. It was at that point I became an ally to transgender people. Go figure.

It didn’t stop there. While most transgender porn stars are extremely feminine, a few are more androgynous, and I was finding some of them compelling as well. The next logical step was to see how much more masculine a person could be. I knew by this time that I wasn’t straight, but I didn’t know if I was bi or just “heteroflexible.”

I started checking out gay porn, and figuring out what sort of men excited me, what I most enjoyed watching them do with each other, and what I most liked to imagine myself doing with another man. I was exploring the boundaries of my sexuality in ways most men never do, and that makes me wonder just how unusual I really am. Who’s to say what any straight man might find if he did the same thing?

I think most of us learn, in adolescence, what reliably turns us on and we keep doing it. We never ask whether anything else might excite us, and we close ourselves off to other possibilities. We might try a few common kinks to spice things up, but if straight sex is working for us, we don’t go looking for anything really different. Those other attractions are either strong from the beginning, or subtle enough to ignore until something makes us pay attention to them.

Would I have discovered my fetish if Gene Roddenberry hadn’t gone against conventional standards of beauty, and prominently featured a sexy bald woman in a big-budget Star Trek movie when I was 8? Who knows? But that’s where I think it began, as a childhood fascination that turned sexual later.

And if I didn’t have that fetish, would I have gotten in touch with my bisexuality? If not for Gene Roddenberry’s bald woman fetish (trust me), it’s possible I might still identify as straight.

Once we’re set in our ways, we don’t think about what else turns us on until something does, and if it’s too different, we’re inclined to ignore it or push it away if we can.

Growing up as a typical homophobic youth of my generation, I avoided anything remotely homoerotic. Honestly, the way we were conditioned to flee in terror from any sight, activity or personal contact that might be perceived as gay, I have to wonder how many straight men are aware, on some unconscious level, that they are less straight than they think they are. Perhaps there is something to the idea that homophobia is really a fear of facing your own repressed homosexual impulses.

I’m not saying that you can change your sexual orientation if you put your mind to it. If you really feel no attraction to your own sex, being exposed to homosexuality will not change that. And if you do feel a strong attraction to your own sex, you can’t make it go away by ignoring it or suppressing it. Both of these myths are the basis for a great deal of oppression, abuse and unhappiness, and I want to be absolutely clear that I don’t subscribe to either of them.

I’m talking about bisexuals like me, who lean toward straight. The Kinsey Scale is not the greatest way to measure sexuality, but it’s easy to understand and it illustrates a point. Between 0 (heterosexual) 3 (equally bisexual) and 6 (homosexual) there is room for other people. I’m now comfortable placing myself as high as 2, and no lower than 1.5 on that scale. It’s possible for people close enough to either end of the Kinsey Scale to overlook thoughts and feelings that might place them a little bit closer to the middle. That’s especially true if they’ve been taught to believe it’s wrong to feel those things.

How many men are bisexual and don’t know it, because they simply haven’t opened their minds to the possibility? Is anybody really completely straight? Given that the majority of bisexual men are still in the closet, do I know people personally who, like me, have figured it out and not told anyone?

I’m sure some bisexual men are uncertain whether they really are bisexual. It took me years to get comfortable applying the term to myself. It wasn’t that I wanted to deny it. I just wasn’t sure I qualified. I’ve never actually had sex with another man, or any sort of intimate contact. Does that matter? As a newbie, I didn’t want to carelessly co-opt someone else’s identity. For a while, I wasn’t sure I deserved to be called bisexual, but I now believe that it’s really the attraction that counts, and how much attraction is up to you. There’s no sign that says "You must be this queer to enter."

Hearing other bisexual men tell their stories, I’ve come to understand that my situation is a common one, being at first unaware of my bisexuality, and then uncertain of it before finally accepting it.

As to whether many bi men go about discovering their sexuality as methodically as I did, I really don’t know. However, I found the experience enlightening, and I highly recommend it.

Enlightenment aside, the question remains just what practical benefit this knowledge has, aside from diversifying my spank bank. I do find myself noticing a cute guy now and then, which is pleasant, but it’s not any more significant than seeing a beautiful woman. As a married man in a monogamous heterosexual relationship, what use is it to know I’m bisexual? So far, it’s just given me a secret I’ve never quite found the courage to share with anyone I know.

One thing it has done is make me more concerned about LGBT issues. It’s not because they suddenly affect me, because they don’t. They affect people I understand better, and identify with. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have been necessary to discover I was LGBT to gain that understanding.

So, is there any benefit for me personally? Perhaps there is. My wife was never into the baldness fetish, but it turns out we both like guys. I kind of like the idea of sitting down together with some of that gay porn, watching two men pleasure each other as a prelude to some heterosexual lovemaking of our own. Not every time, but once in a while. I’ve read that some straight women enjoy gay male porn, not just because there are more men, but also because they’re bothered by the depictions of women in straight porn. That sounds like my wife.

I don’t know if she would be into it, but I’d sure like to find out. I suppose I just need to come out of this closet and ask her.

Related posts:

If you were born in 1966, you hit the sweet spot because you will reach your full retirement age of sixty-seven in 2033, the year the Social Security Trust Fund is supposed to run out of funds. If…

Coming to assignments, we are reminded of the killer alternatives that each question has in store for you. But before you take a flying leap into the opportunity of your life, here are our best tips…