Hey Actually Can We Stop Treating Hair Loss Or Absence In Media Like Its Either A Huge Joke Or A Horrible

hey actually can we stop treating hair loss or absence in media like it’s either a huge joke or a horrible tragedy? please? because i’m getting really sick of hairlessness (whether partial or total) constantly being depicted like it’s unnatural and strange—especially when it comes to afab or feminine people, but also just in general! and this applies to short hair, too, or generally ‘weird’ haircuts, by the way.

stop using a person’s hair (or lack thereof) as the butt of your jokes or the basis of your tragedy. until mainstream media starts accurately and explicitly depicting people with conditions like alopecia (something which should be normalized but has been made shameful by the standards media and society perpetuates), it should not and does not have the right to decide the narrative of their lives.

Sometimes us chronically ill/disabled folk will make the choice to have a day out when we know what the end result will be. We'll go out and have fun knowing we'll be stuck in bed for the next several days.

Even if we take it slow

Even if we only do low-impact activities

Even if we're mindful of our bodies and super duper extra careful

We'll still be recovering for a while.

That doesn't mean it wasn't worth it. It means we weighed the risks and rewards and made a choice. Most of the time I'm at home. But sometimes I'll go out and return with a flare up and some good memories. And that's okay too.

“but it wasn’t that bad”

did it hurt? did you feel scared? unsafe? were you embarrassed? humiliated? terrified? did you feel confused on why? does it keep you up at night? do you avoid being in a similar situation? did you cry? did you want to cry? who told you it wasn’t that bad?

The Huffington Post

Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong

For decades, the medical community has ignored mountains of evidence to wage a cruel and futile war on fat people, poisoning public percepti

"For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.

The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people."

A surprising article to find on the Huffington post. I think, especially towards the end, there's still a saturation of healthism and diet talk (just of the "clean eating" variety), but the information about weight discrimination is absolutely on point, especially within the medical field ignoring decades of research.

Not only do we know that weight loss isn't sustainable or possible, we also know that weight discrimination kills, in a myriad of ways. If you actually care about "health" then start unlearning your weight bias NOW and realize that fat people are just people who are a different shape.

And this article doesn't even touch on "the obesity paradox"(the fact that fat people survive heart attacks and injuries BETTER THAN thin people) or the fact that dieting, especially "yo-yo dieting," is a better predictor for heart disease than weight, and that many of the fat people who have cardiovascular diseases have a long history of dieting that (understandably) didn't work.

encouraged to rb but fatphobes will just be blocked.

Mobility aids are a good thing. They exist to help people. That's why they're called aids.

legitimately begging you guys to stop using bald as your ‘none of the above’ answer (and I do not want to hear about ‘what if I’m doing a hairstyle quiz?’ you KNOW that’s not what I’m talking about here) bc I don’t think anyone realizes that like. at best in context it’s taken as a joke about default avatars or whatever. at worst, you’re playing into a long history of just being a fucking asshole.

baldness is just a trait its not a joke. I made a post on this a while ago but no one’s hair should be a joke unless the person who styled it intends for it to be. you think of being balding/bald specifically as being funny because popular media has convinced you it is so no one gets bothered when they make fun of bald people. But despite popular belief, hair is generally not a fashion trend, it’s a trait, and the thing is that baldness (like many hair types) is not always a choice. some people chose to be bald. a lot of people do not. people become bald for various reasons, but specifically stuff like various kinds of alopecia or cancer treatment or tension baldness can be incredibly traumatic experiences that are only added to when people treat their hair loss as a funny joke.

please think about it. what is actually funny about other people’s baldness. is there any kind of humor about it which isn’t punching down? because if there isn’t, the joke isn’t funny, it’s just mean.

what happened to vanilla extract? what happened to just saying ‘none of the above’? can we please be normal about balding/bald people for once