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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

Do better Hexbear smdh soviet-huff

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

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[-] CleverOleg@hexbear.net 77 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 44 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] NephewAlphaBravo@hexbear.net 21 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] Erika3sis@hexbear.net 16 points 1 month ago

Hey if you enjoy it I'm only happy for you

[-] NephewAlphaBravo@hexbear.net 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Wouldn't wish it on anyone who doesn't want it, all the best to you rat-salute-2

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

[-] Frank@hexbear.net 30 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] AcidSmiley@hexbear.net 54 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] Kuori@hexbear.net 14 points 1 month ago

fucking thank you

[-] Frank@hexbear.net 10 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] Frank@hexbear.net 9 points 1 month ago

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. : (

https://archive.org/details/the-will-to-change-men-masculinity-and-love-by-bell-hooks-z-lib.org.epub/page/n1/mode/2up

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.

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[-] came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net 27 points 1 month ago

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.

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[-] Tom742@hexbear.net 27 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] REgon@hexbear.net 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

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[-] NephewAlphaBravo@hexbear.net 26 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I mean, it's body-shaming regardless right? Don't do that.

edit: commented before reading the thread i gotcha 👍

[-] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 22 points 1 month ago
[-] rhubarb@hexbear.net 20 points 1 month ago

lmao "experience baldness"

[-] SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 20 points 1 month ago

How can you make in fun of baldies when Captain Picard is so smexy? picard-excited

[-] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

How can you make in fun of baldies

2 Kings 2:23-24

[-] SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 22 points 1 month ago

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 smuglord

[-] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] Frank@hexbear.net 7 points 1 month ago

"Computer! Turn off all the holodeck safeties and start producing she-bears. I'll tell you when to stop."

[-] Frank@hexbear.net 7 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] DragonBallZinn@hexbear.net 8 points 1 month ago

Are we forgetting about a very important bald chad in history?

lenin-shining

2 Kings 2:23-24

[-] Andrzej3K@hexbear.net 15 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] NephewAlphaBravo@hexbear.net 5 points 1 month ago

'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?

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[-] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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?

[-] khizuo@hexbear.net 23 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] Justice@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 1 month ago

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.

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[-] Diuretic_Materialism@hexbear.net 12 points 1 month ago

lenin-sure : "I agree"

[-] Cherufe@hexbear.net 12 points 1 month ago

Baldness is the n1 worry of my male friends regardless of age or amount of hair :(

[-] SpiderFarmer@hexbear.net 12 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] Eldritch@hexbear.net 11 points 1 month ago

As someone who is assigned bald at birth I give everyone here the pass

[-] StalinStan@hexbear.net 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I started shaving my head when I had a full head of hair. there will be no difference when I bald. No one will ever know. Like how Bruce Willis looked the same for decades. It is one of the few honorable paths

[-] ComradeMonotreme@hexbear.net 6 points 1 month ago

I’m the opposite I started taking finasteride when I had a full head of hair.

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[-] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 10 points 1 month ago

One can be balding without being malding.

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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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