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
There’s something to most body shaming that’s inextricably tied to gender production, performance, and reinforcement imo. And of course its intersections with race, class, etc.
“Misandry” implies a social orientation that uniquely disadvantages men, though, when it’s more realistically gender ideology (and all its intersections) that suppresses/warps each individual’s pre-gender or non-gendered essence. “Patriarchy” as a term can easily encompass harms experienced by masculine people in gendered society.
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)
Yeah hair is an annoyingly impactful signifier wrt femininity, more than it is for masculine expression. And the beauty standards angle of gender expression is much harsher on femininity than masculinity
I mean, it’s body-shaming regardless right? Don’t do that.
edit: commented before reading the thread i gotcha 👍
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
I’m the opposite I started taking finasteride when I had a full head of hair.
That could be the move.
Shaving your head while you take finasteride for 6-12mths and then regrowing it full long and thick. “Oh I wasn’t balding I just wanted to try the smooth look”
Oh damn. That is some next level tech.
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.
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.
fucking thank you
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.
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
Baldness is the n1 worry of my male friends regardless of age or amount of hair :(
lmao “experience baldness”
2 Kings 2:23-24
How can you make in fun of baldies when Captain Picard is so smexy?
Are we forgetting about a very important bald chad in history?
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.
