#in musk's case i'm inclined to think he cares about masculinity

[liskantope]

Okay, this is really interesting, and I may be learning something important here. Credit also to @intimate-mirror for bringing this up in the comments by pointing out that going bald is considered by many to be emasculating.

If that's in fact how our culture is, then that's just a fact which -- strange as I find it on multiple levels, and however little sense it makes -- does make the set of memes I was criticizing make more sense in context than I was giving credit for. It also sheds light on the (from my perspective, extremely confused and confusing) way we talk nowadays about gender altogether.

So, I've always assumed (and you may think naively or over-simplistically) that traits which are culturally considered masculine or feminine do ultimately have their roots in biology even if they take on a life of their own and become ridiculous generalizations, much like cultural stereotypes which usually (with a few exceptions I suppose like "black people love watermelon") have some sort of ultimate basis in truth but have gotten distorted and strengthened far beyond whatever factual correlation they originated from. For instance, the notion of short hair as masculine and long hair as feminine come from the on-average visual preference (perhaps very statistically weak) for faces with more male proportions to be framed by shorter hair and faces with more female proportions to be framed by longer hair. There was cultural pressure to be more visually appealing and even an assumption that everyone tries to be classically according-to-the-average-gazer more attractive, and eventually it turned into its own thing where if you have long hair you must be less masculine (perhaps through a subconscious impression that the long hair implies you have a more female facial bone structure).

This does not apply to male-pattern baldness! I can only imagine that the concept of baldness being un-masculine comes from the trend towards bald guys being less confident (which in turn comes from baldness being generally considered less attractive despite being a sign of testosterone and evolutionary advantage for females to be attracted to more testosterone, I suppose because it's a sign of aging and seems like a sort of anti-development and more hair elsewhere is a sign of testosterone?), and boldness/confidence is considered a masculine trait. In fact, the word emasculating half the time just means "making one look/feel weaker", and baldness can certainly do that.

If this is the most common cultural assumption about balding, then it's a weak enough one that I've barely noticed it in my lifetime (thus, why I needed people to point it out to me here). It's not really apparent in modern fictional media, for instance, where (to take the two examples right from the top of my head right now) bald characters like Hank Schraeder from Breaking Bad and Terrence Fletcher from Whiplash are super aggressive and masculine. This may be a fairly modern development -- indeed, shaving one's head, a bold move that serves to show that a man is "owning" his baldness, is a fairly modern development that I know wasn't around until pretty late in the 20th century. And I suppose bald men who still grow out the back part of their hair tend in our culture to come across as having a quite masculine but not hypermasculine/aggressive "dad energy" (e.g. Tim Walz), and maybe in some parts of our society a "beta male" vibe (a bald man has a harder time finding a mate, after all).

(Of course it's patently idiotic to imagine that long hair is directly a symptom of low testosterone -- rather than indirectly a reaction to low testosterone causing a more female-shaped face -- since growing long hair is a choice not dictated by chemistry! But there's no lack of not-too-smart people in the world, I guess. It's almost just as idiotic to imagine that male baldness is a sign of low testosterone. You know what type of human has really low testosterone? Female humans! How many of them are losing hair in that way in those particular parts of the head?)

Anyway. These trends are important for me to acknowledge, but at the same time I suspect that the association of male-pattern baldness with reduced masculinity may be much weaker than some are assuming. I was only aware of it in the vaguest way, and on a personal level, as a man myself who is gradually losing the hair from the front of his head and unhappy about it, I don't think it has ever once crossed my mind until this conversation that it makes me less masculine (in fact, if anything it's kind of made me feel more masculine)! I'm unhappy about it partly because I've always prided my hair on being especially nice, so it's a shame to lose it, but more to the point because it makes me feel like a less attractive man. (Like, a bigger / more prominent forehead feels less nice to look at! And I'm considered less conventionally attractive altogether because of it.) For me that has nothing to do with being more masculine or less masculine; it's a totally different thing! So I've probably been somewhat typical-minding all this time but not considering that for some men it may be about wanting to not feel emasculated. But, by the same token, people shouldn't assume that men (including Musk) seeking treatment to restore hair are doing it mainly for the sake of restoring their masculinity or their "gender feelings" or whatever -- that may be a lot less of a universal feeling about male baldness than some are assuming!

And, I'm not in a position to be knowledgeable about this, but I can only imagine that male-pattern baldness feels far more devastating to a trans woman than it will ever feel for me, but that a lot of trans men might feel pretty okay about experiencing male-pattern baldness.

All right, so memes showing a younger Elon Musk with visible male-pattern balding next to a present-day Elon Musk with a thick head of hair, and using that to claim that Musk is a hypocrite for opposing gender-affirming care since he has clearly had gender-affirming care, are a thing. A... bizarrely confused thing. Isn't medicine to restore a man's hair from male-pattern balding closer to the opposite of gender-affirming care, if anything? There's nothing more gender-affirming for a man than getting thin in the front part of his hair (or starting on the crown of his head)!

Anyway, trying a little harder to engage with what memes like that are getting at kind of leads us to a place where we're saying that gender medicine is comparable to cosmetic surgery/treatments for looking younger / "better" / more conventionally attractive. Which I'm not sure is the message anyone defending gender medicine actually wants to be going for? (It's not 100% not valid, but it would seem to be overall the wrong take, I would think.)

Sometimes it feels like every day I see a new cultural snippet floating past me that reminds me of how uniquely confused and confusing this whole cluster of issues is to us collectively.