Do better Hexbear smdh 
Edit: I am currently balding folks, it’s happening right now. It’s still not misandry if someone makes fun of me, even if it’s not very nice and hurts my feelings
No it’s not misandry, and I don’t know if ridiculing bald people should qualify as “sexual harassment” per se… but it does kinda feel like making fun of bald people is sort of socially acceptable when it shouldn’t be. It’s something that negatively affects the self image of a lot of men and woman quite badly. I worked with a guy who was going bald and another coworker would frequently give him shit about it, and I could see how it hurt him.
Fwiw I have actually used male pattern baldness as a way to try and explain gender dysphoria to a couple dudes IRL and they actually connected with it.
Edit: I should clarify that I used MPB to help some guys I know empathize with gender dysphoria more than try to explain it, if that makes sense.
The other day I went to some family celebration, and my one aunt, who had cancer way back when, she was there with her kids. And she noticed that I was very conspicuously wearing a beanie indoors, and she asked me, “Is it a beanie day today?” — and I said, “Yup.”
And she asked me, “Is every day a beanie day?” — and I said, “Yup.”
And she said, “Yeah, I know what that’s like.” — and thus ended that brief exchange.
It was on the on the one hand “nice” to get a remark on my hair loss that came from a place of empathy, and didn’t emphasize the hair loss as anything “masculine”; on the other hand dealing with hair loss feels like a bit of a catch-22 as long as I’m closeted, like no matter what I do, even the most empathetic acknowledgement of my hair loss is going to sting a little and make me feel silly and pathetic regardless.
Other people can much better explain the exact deal with baldness and how it interacts with gender in multifaceted ways, or explain how “the fruiting body is not the whole mushroom” wrt the things that people might point to and call “misandry” — I guess I just wanted to chime in and say that shit sucks, and making fun of literally anyone for experiencing (or how they choose to deal with) hair loss, shouldn’t fly.
But being against body shaming shouldn’t be a controversial stance, anyways.
Other people can much better explain the exact deal with baldness and how it interacts with gender in multifaceted ways
I think I’ve realized recently that my receding hairline is… gender affirming for me? That’s not a way I’m used to thinking about things tbh, cishet dude that I am, but I sometimes catch myself in the mirror and it’s like “oh that’s how it is huh? I’ve seen older guys like this and I’m actually pretty cool withtending up like that”
If this is the wrong time/place to drop this comment just say so, I don’t mean it at all as questioning your experience but an expansion on that one point.
Hey if you enjoy it I’m only happy for you
Wouldn’t wish it on anyone who doesn’t want it, all the best to you
And now I’ve got the concept of “sin eater but for baldness” in my head, that’s gonna be rattling around for the rest of the day lol
I mean i guess? Male pattern baldness is highly gendered and baldness is to some extent treated as shameful in society. If you’re bullying some guy over hairloss then yeah, that’s gendered harassment.
Trans women are also affected by baldness and as somebody who’s close friends with several who suffer massively from that particular fact, it’s kinda gross to have to read this. Cis women who suffer from alopecia will also be treated very differently than a bald man.
What we’re talking about here is body shaming. It’s not ok, it’s particularly not appropriate “workplace banter”, but we already have a term for it and it’s definitely not gender-based harassment. Gender-based harassment relies on a gendered power hierarchy. Gendered power hierarchies in our society place men above women, cis people above trans people, binary people over nonbinary people, endo people over inter people and gender conforming people over gender nonconforming people. A trans woman being bullied for wearing a wig counts as gender-based harassment when we use that term to encompass transphobia, because people are actively using the characteristic of baldness to invalidate her gender identity and enforce a hierarchy that places trans people below cis people. A cis man being made fun of for being bald is not that. It’s still cruel and not ok, it is way too accepted socially and if it happens in a workplace environment, it’s perfectly appropriate when his coworkers get sanctioned for it because it’s just shitty behavior. But it’s not the same thing as the experiences of women in the workplace in a patriarchal society.
fucking thank you
I’ve got a whole effort post which is mostly just paraphrasing bell hooks, but I still need to chew on it, but I want to restate something real quick
so-called Male Pattern Baldness, which is properly called (I just looked this up) androgenetic alopecia, is highly gendered in the sense that society perceives it as a problem that primarily effects men. pattern baldness is not in any way exclusive to cis men, but that is how it is largely perceived by society and discussed within our culture.
Well, I wanted to link the whole text of The Will to Change since why try to paraphrase bell instead of putting her forward in her own words, but some dorkasses are DDOSing the internet archive right now. : (
But I highly recommend The Will to Change. bell analyzes her experience in the feminist movement in the 70s, 80s, and 90s to better understand how Patriarchy works as a holistic system of violence. Based on her experiences she examines how in order for patriarchy to perpetuate itself it must use violence against men to force them to conform to patriarchy and force them to act as soldiers of patriarchy. It puts forward the argument that to end patriarchy the means by which patriarchy uses violence against men to coerce men in to enforcing patriarchy must be understand as an integral part of the system and that the liberation of women necessarily requires the liberation of men; To destroy patriarchy me must disrupt the cycle by which it recruits boys in to the patriarchy and makes them in to violent men, and doing so is an integral and necessary part of the struggle against the entire system of patriarchy.
While bell is very much making a compassionate appeal to understand the ways in which boys and men are themselves victims of patriarchal violence, there’s also a purely cold-blooded and pragmatic analysis; To defeat an army one must deprive it of soldiers.
I believe bell’s theory relates to this article as baldness in men is part of a very complicated way that men build hierarchies among themselves using intra-masculine violence. A young balding man is shamed, an older balding man may be respected. Balding in middle age is treated as a shameful failure of masculinity. Women participate in this aspect of violence by enforcing masculine beauty norms while men use it to harm each other in order to establish hierarchies of dominance. As part of those intra-masculine systems of dominance men harm women in order to assert their masculinity both to themselves, to other men, and to women around them. All of it becomes part of a holistic system of violence that enforces gender norms and constantly re-creates and re-produces gender violence in society.
Understanding how men use patriarchal violence against other men to enforce and maintain patriarchy is necessary to bringing about the ultimate defeat of patriarchy. A theory that does not exactingly analyze this phenomena cannot be complete.
Oh, I didn’t realize that baldness is male coded, guess I’ll let all the women struggling with hair thinning and balding know that.
I most social groups mocking a woman for being bald is perceived as a bad thing because it is understood to be something she is probably sensitive about. This courtesy is rarely extended to bald men.
Sure but that isn’t misandry
I did not say it was. I responded with something I found relevant to the thing you commented.
Fair enough
glad I went bald in my 20s, back when everything felt like a personal attack on me so it was lost in the noise. I’ve been bald most of my life at this point, so bald jokes amuse me.
I see these guys losing it in their 40s who feel like it’s their mortality and connection to youth, vitality, etc that is fading and it’s so cringey. the ones with a few bucks get taken to the cleaners for the latest surgeries and snake oil, none of which reconnect them to youth or vitality.
Everytime I look at my freshly shaved head, I feel like I have teleported from 1000 years in the future, ready to fuck shit up.
I love my long luscious curls. I love my hair. My head is shaped like an egg and I do not like how it looks bald or short shaved.
I was AMAB and I don’t enjoy being super masc. I don’t want to be bald and it has nothing to do with youth or vitality.
I mean, it’s body-shaming regardless right? Don’t do that.
edit: commented before reading the thread i gotcha 👍
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I know a few women who were balding from a pretty early age (20s or earlier) and uh… Let me tell you, women have it worse on that front (albeit less frequently)
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How can you make in fun of baldies when Captain Picard is so smexy?
How can you make in fun of baldies
2 Kings 2:23-24
Elisha Is Jeered
23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.
Better be nice to me or my pal Mr. Bear is gonna eat you
And that’s why nobody makes fun of Picard because he got way more violence at his fingertips than just two bears. Also he’s pal with Klingons who probably killed at least one of their gods over the joke about their forehead hairline.
“Computer! Turn off all the holodeck safeties and start producing she-bears. I’ll tell you when to stop.”
I will continue to maintain that 40+ boys and young men wandering around on the roads with no clear purpose were likely to be understood as bandits or similarly dangerous, and casting Summon Animal VII was reasonable given the circumstances.
Like, 40+ teenagers surrounding an old man and harassing him is a potentially very dangerous situation for a vulnerable elder. It’s usually portrayed as ridiculously out of proportion to summon bears on them but I think Elisha was in real danger.
Are we forgetting about a very important bald chad in history?
lmao “experience baldness”
2 Kings 2:23-24
It’s not misandry because that isn’t really a thing, and I get that ‘bald’ is sort of a political shorthand in some corners of the internet, but I started going bald in my teens and in my experience not only is verbal abuse completely accepted in normal society, but many people feel entitled to slap your head, hard, and then act like you’re the one who’s out of line when you tell them to fuck off. And I’m talking about young adults here, not just teens.
‘bald’ is sort of a political shorthand in some corners of the internet
I’ve… never heard about that, is it about skinheads or something?
“mald” is a portmanteau of mad and bald
It was a thing on UK Left Twitter, particularly during the Corbyn years and their aftermath. I think it was just supposed to describe a certain stuffy, fragile male ego typical to serious centrist media types. It was that and calling everyone ‘nonce’. Incredibly stupid cultural moment in hindsight.
But seriously this thread made me scratch my head, both grad and hex usually drop on people making fun of baldness, but it is acceptable now?
no one’s saying it’s acceptable, we’re just saying that it’s not the same as misogynistic harassment. body-shaming is still bad and we are against it. read AcidSmiley’s comment.
Making fun of people purely for physical reasons, whatever the reason, is generally “bad” (with my own personal caveat of "if they’re a shitty person, they deserve it, and I no longer care. But don’t go overboard ie don’t be racist, etc.)
I believe this specific topic falls under similar to “making fun of white people” territory. Basically there’s no historical precedent of white people ever being enslaved or oppressed by colonial powers purely for being “white.” And yeah Ireland was occupied/colonized, Eastern Europe has suffered under western colonialism, that’s not really the point here, it’s not the same as chattel slavery, and I think people understand that so saving my fingers and moving on.
Similarly, men as a gender don’t have a history of being dominated and treated poorly for being men.
So in a similar way that calling a black person the n word is accepted by everyone sane as far more harmful than calling a white person a cracker, etc. you can apply that to the genders women/men.
Saying a woman “Is ugly. She has small boobs and her face is bad.” (Whatever, just trying to do real life things people say all the time) versus “That man is ugly. He’s short and bald.” call back to different things.
The comment to the woman has deep roots throughout history and even today where women are judged as “worthy” based on their appearances. This has changed, slightly, in recent decades in “the west” (backsliding a bit now… or a lot…), but still everyone implicitly knows that insulting a woman’s appearance is, in a way, saying she isn’t worthy of whatever. Status, wealth, success, whatever.
Meanwhile men suffer no such downside. You can be a physically attractive man, or not, and it doesn’t matter. Calling them names doesn’t carry the same historical baggage because men haven’t historically been seen as objects and only worth their handsomeness, or whatever.
And of course this is all generalizations because it has to be. And people shouldn’t be mocking random people for being bald or whatever.
CW: disordered eating
STG this is not a “But what about men?” but rather an attempt to analyze how capitalism uses the beauty standard, how it can change over time, and how it’s fake and that means we can put an end to it eventually
spoiler
I would like to say that this is changing very rapidly as beauty standards evolve. A specific example is eating disorders in boys and young men. The prevalence has skyrocketed in the last twenty years and continues to climb as men’s beauty standards becomes more unrealistic, more rigid, and more commonly enforced. The strict adherence to a highly regimented diet that many gymrats do is increasingly being analyzed in terms of disordered eating.
I’m going to drop this healthline article because I’m struggling to find solid numbers, but the lede is that 1/3 people suffering from an eating disorder right now is a man. The article also points out that nearly 1/4 young men are taking some kind of performance enhancing drug in hopes of gaining muscle mass.
https://www.healthline.com/health/eating-disorders/eating-disorders-in-men
The clearest example of how rapidly things are changing and how extreme it’s getting is would be looking at Hugh Jackman’s portrayal of wolverine over the last twenty years as he transforms from a strong man to a freakish caricature of strength, dehydrated to the point of injury with bulging veins and muscles. The beauty norm was built deliberately by advertising companies to sell weight loss pills and they’ve never stopped trying to convince people that there’s something wrong with them so they can sell more creatine and skincare products.
Again, this isn’t a “what about the men?” thing, rather I’m hoping to illustrate that there’s no real basis to the beauty standard, it’s artificially constructed and changes over time, both organically and when capitalists deliberately manipulate it. Men are not currently held to the same standards as women, but as capitalism and patriarchy continue to evolve that may change, bringing the harm inflicted by the beauty standard down on more and more people.
Another illustrative example are these images of Steve McQueen and James Dean. These guys were the undisputed sexiest and most handsome men of their age. Their bodies look nothing like Jason Momoa or Chris Hemsworth in super-hero mode. I really like this example because the appearance of the most desirable men of the 60s and 70s is so radically, obviously, indisputably different from the norm expected of actors in the 2020s.
Compare with Jason and Chris
Jason’s picture is noteworthy because it highlights just how completely unattainable the appearances being pushed on young men now are. Jason Momoa doesn’t even look like Jason Momoa except right before he needs to shoot a shirtless scene, where he fasts and drinks no water for a day or more to achieve the ultra-shredded appearance that only comes with severe dehydration. Whereas James and Steve are just reasonably fit men who maybe do some pushups and curls.
By contrast, Marilyn Monroe and Sydney Sweeney;
Marilyn could walk side-by-side with Sydney down the red carpet and she’d fit right in. The makeup and clothes have changed but the overall expectation of beauty remains just as unrealistically demanding.
To me this clearly, visually illustrates how much the beauty standard is fake. It’s an artificial machine that has to be maintained and repaired constantly. Capitalism, advertising, patriarchy, created this thing and they’re the ones who protect it and keep it running. They also change it; Capitalism always demands new markets and over the last few decades it’s begun trying to enforce unrealistic body standards and the anxiety that goes with that on young men in order to sell pre-workout, steroids, and whey protein.
The take away is that if they built it we can smash it up. There’s nothing natural or inevitable about it, it’s a system within capitalism and like any other capitalist system we can tear it down and build something better.
Fuck, I’m liking this misandry discourse. Whether accidental or not, it’s actually being used to address some issues affecting men in a productive manner.
Baldness is the n1 worry of my male friends regardless of age or amount of hair :(
