Enby AMAB with a bun, yeah I remember and still hear it occasionally even now, and each time it makes me really quite uncomfortable and sad
It's only ever from women who I haven't came out to so I don't hold it against them, but it's still a difficult brush to get tarred with and it always makes my heart sink
Don't forget "Man purse" or yuppy white people calling it a "murse".
it was just popular with a lot of urban white dudes in their 20s-30s, so people dogged on it with some easy stereotypes linking it to common urban white dude behaviors.
like full beards today or chin strap beards in the 90s.
people just critique the thing once it reaches critical mass and becomes predictable.
the white on white racism continue unabated 😔
i unwoked my manbun by turning it into a womanbun
I think it is an attempt to discredit the idea of men being normal decent human beings by having prominent examples who are in fact mega creeps.
Justin baldoni
Russell brand
Both still I beleive tangled up in their recent SA done on the job while pretending to be allies to women. Justin bladoni got himself in charge of a movie about intimate violence which he maneuvered to abuse women.
There is something about the way the slight touch of femme seemed to be deployed as a distraction or disguise of the underlying bad vibe. Added some plausible deniability that he is too girly/compassionate/enlightened to do harm.
Just one part of overall camoflauge. This is also associated with wealth and whiteness, or perceptions thereof. Not all men who have what could be described as a "bun" are implicated.
There is something about the way the slight touch of femme seemed to be deployed as a distraction or disguise of the underlying bad vibe. Added some plausible deniability that he is too girly/compassionate/enlightened to do harm.
This makes sense. If done to disarm women, to trick them into letting their guard down, then it becomes sinister
At the same time, taking the idea of "femininity as a distraction/disguise/plausible deniability for harm" to the extreme and you get the whole TERF idea of bathroom stalkers and whatever, right?
Yes its a fair point of mysogyny. Could also remember out that men can have all sorts of styles and therefore its expected to have all variety of abusive men. Are these people really over represented?
As a counter counter point, it could also non-sexistly be compared to men who perform/preach religious virtue to obscure their behaving at total odds with it.
I still think the whole "man bun" discourse was likely some kind of op jinned up to discourage this most minor transgressing.
yeah, i think you're right. taking this to its logical extreme is TERF shit IMO. like, "anyone AMAB who rejects their default conditioning or feels it's fundamentally not who they are is secretly doing predation" is a narrative that clearly leads to a lot of ugly shit.
it's kind of like performative male/softboy misogyny discourse. the part people should hate is the misogyny (which can be delivered by men of all shapes, sizes, presentation styles, etc (getting intersectional with it, can be delivered by anyone, but men do the majority/worst of the harm)), not the softboy aspect/unconventional "performative" presentation style. though i do get how those dimensions add to the feeling of betrayal, to a feeling of being duped by someone who should supposedly "know better" and be above such harms.
(been daydrinking so if i didn't phrase the point i'm trying to make well or wholly inclusively plz go easy but also lmk so i can learn)
Like the few serial killers who had wives and girlfriends, they would bring them out with them to lure in victims
This is all going to be very specific stereotypes, but what I understood is that there were a lot of men of a particular archetype sporting that haircut and getting overly represented in social media. The archetypes being someone who spends a lot of time around beaches, liked to do yoga in public and post pictures of themselves on Instagram doing it with quotes from Asian philosophers they haven't read, greeted people with 'namaste' and liked to roleplay as a spiritually enlightened person no matter how toxic they may or may not actually have been in relationships. Most of the time pretty chill in demeanor, but without any authenticity.
They make fun of it a little in the Boy Boy video about the North Korean haircuts, pointing out how many people they interviewed had the same hairstyle.
I can definitely tell you I met some of the people I described and didn't especially like them, but I have also met people with the haircut who are cool, just like any other hairstyle. I can see how it might have became something of a red flag for women though, beyond just longer hair being feminine if they lived in an area with an abundance of that type of guy. Like some places around California. I think the pony that Erika3sis posted about is kind of the reflection of that.
I also remember the manbun thing being about that granolla faux-spiritualism where I live. I also remember some tinge of people in other places using it in a homophobic way with me thinking "wait your problem is that they're gay????"
I think it was definitely all over the place like you're saying.
When people have a hair-trigger on bigotry (no pun intended lol), the smallest thing can unleash it. I don’t doubt there were some guys with man-buns who were annoying, but it seems exaggerated, yknow? In a Freudian, subconscious way:
People were uncomfortable (more or less consciously) with a man being beautiful, so when that man does something wrong which is acceptable to criticize, then all of that frustration becomes fixated on the haircut, as if the haircut precipitated the entire thing. Similar story in the workplace: woman managers are called misogynistic slurs and “bossy” because people have unchecked misogyny which vents out disproportionately on the smallest wrongs. Or a black man shoplifts, then every suburbanite gets kirked up about black people in general, resulting from the suburbanite’s alienation but channeled through their latent racism.
I can't say there wasn't an element of what you're talking about to it. I just didn't personally experience it or see it. Most people I know just had the association of the behavior I was talking about with that kind of hairstyle. It wasn't really the hair itself and might well have been dudes who shaved their heads bald like monks acting the same way. Which I don't think is entirely wrong depending on the context, because I have a similar red flag reaction to anyone sporting Hitler-youth looking hair like Thomas Shelby. Sometimes it's a deliberate choice for someone to be perceived a certain way or fit into a crowd/trend and lean into whatever stereotype is associated with that hairstyle or dress.
Yeah, because the "man bun" hairstyle was influenced by topknots historically or presently worn by men in South and East Asia, right? So it figures that the "man bun" hair style would have a lot of overlap with that whole yoga and pop Asian philosophy crowd.
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There was even a minor character in My Little Pony with a "mane bun", first introduced in June of 2016, so pretty much exactly ten years ago. Zephyr Breeze, Fluttershy's younger brother, based on the younger brother of writer Michael Vogel.
Zephyr Breeze's whole shtick was that he was a slacker/freeloader who gives up on everything he tries, is broadly useless and annoying and causes problems for others, has an overinflated ego, and makes uncomfortable romantic passes at Rainbow Dash when it's clear that she does not care for him in the slightest. At the same time, he was training to become a mane therapist/stylist, and his voice and mannerisms were sort of flamboyant or gay-coded, so there was definitely a Gender element to it. Hate for man buns definitely has a lot of overlap with anti-"metrosexual" or anti-"hipster" type "imagine cleaning your ass" sentiments.
The end of the first episode Zephyr Breeze appears in has him get over his crippling fear of failure, and he becomes independent and finishes his education and all. The only other episode Zephyr Breeze prominently appears in was in 2019, where he's become a member of the royal guard, but still makes uncomfortable passes at Rainbow Dash.
So yeah, there were definitely stereotypes around "man buns", if they even showed up in kids' cartoons.
it is just gender essentialism / toxic masculinity / “boys have short hair and girls have long hair” ridiculous gender norms.
Yeah that was a lot of it. I had long hair in the late 00's/early 10's and maybe it's because I lived in a more conservative area in the US, but I used to get lots of stares, hateful comments. threats, slurs. etc aimed at me. I think the weirdest was cis women coming up to unprompted and telling me they "hated me" because I had long hair? I think it was meant in jest in a kind of "I'm jealous" way, but it happened so many times and weirded me out that I would've just preferred being called a slur.
While that is a thing and I'm not discounting you experienced that, I don't think that is where what OP is referring to when people were making fun of man buns came from at the time to be honest. The criticism came from it being associated with shitty men like Russel Brand and was not a general "long hair bad/femme"
People weren't shaming Russel Brand for being feminine, they were shaming him because he is an asshole and was teaching other men to be shitty.
They gave the lib strawman in Mr. Birchum one lol
There was definitely a period of juxtaposition between high-and-tight (Hitler youth) haircuts and man-buns. This was coincident with bacon-flavored everything trend and old-timey facial hair trends.
Yes I do. I have long hair that I often have up, sometimes in a bun. It still gets brought up but the dumbest chuds you'll meet
Hexbear and online leftist spaces use the word discourse too loosely i think
I'm discovering things I never even considered to be possible, like Eurobeat Brony. Is there a New Wave Brony putting out OMD-style tracks about MLP. Is there a Kendrick Lamar Brony doing concept albums about growing up in the....(hold on let me google 'dangerous MLP locations')...the Crystal Empire??
That's a really good question, honestly. I can't recall hearing any new wave brony music, but the brony music scene in its {hayday|(rimshot)} had a lot of talent in all sorts of genres from pop to classical, although it was absolutely dominated by eurobeat and dubstep type genres — a few prominent artists and an ocean of mediocre copycats. I did definitely hear some brony rap music back in the day, though, and it was… bless their hearts, they tried, they really did.
...the Crystal Empire??
Very funny to imagine, to be honest. Pre-show events notwithstanding, I can hardly think of a location in MLP:FiM less like Compton. The Crystal Empire is more like… I dunno, Tromsø? Reykjavik? Something like that. Which is to say that the Crystal Empire is "dangerous" because it's in the middle of the Frozen North, and relies on a singular-point-of-failure magical doodad to avoid being consumed by a giant blizzard; and in one of the episodes, said magical doodad was shattered by a baby crying particularly loudly.
I met her at this house party on El Jaca and Chaosville
She had the credentials of pegasi in Yakyakistan (actually crazy to name any place that in a show about ponies but go off MLP creators)
Ass came with a hump, from the jump she was a camel
I want to ride like Arabians, push an '04 Twilight Sparkle
"Hello, my name is Hitch Trailblazer," she said, "No, you're handsome"
Whispered in my ear, disappeared, then found her cloppin'
Fluttershy had played in the background
The parade music we made had us all wearin' shades now, cool
then found her cloppin'
[SPIT TAKE, LOUDLY CHOKES ON DRINK] Are you aware of what "clopping" refers to in brony slang?!
(actually crazy to name any place that in a show about ponies but go off MLP creators)
Yeah, the mane characters are all ponies (Spike the dragon notwithstanding), but there's also a bunch of non-pony characters from non-pony countries, like Yakyakistan, the Dragon Lands, the Changeling Hive, Griffonstone, Seaquestria / Mount Aris, and probably more I'm forgetting. There's also a tribe of buffalo with Hollywood Indian names who wear feather war bonnets, who fought against the encroachment of pony settlers on their traditional lands in a pretty infamous season 1 episode. The non-pony characters in MLP are pretty consistently analogous to racialized people, which makes the evolution of the show's handling of the non-pony characters pretty interesting to witness. For instance, at the start of the show, one of the most striking gimmicks of its writing was the consistent substitution of the word "everybody" with "everypony", but in the last two seasons (out of nine), they start switching to saying "everycreature" instead, because there's more of a focus on the non-pony characters, and the fact that the ponies have basically been going around saying the equivalent of "everywhitey" is starting to seem pretty damn weird.
💿 🐴
I feel like every year we get a weird discourse on some crap hip urban white dudes are doing. Like we had that whole thing with "performance males" reading books in cafes (how dare they!). Before that it was man-buns and before that there was dudes with ukuleles.
Dudes with ukuleles? When was this?
i remember ukulele rap covers were a fad
Idk I vaguely remember it from my college days. Maybe it was just a local thing.
there was a (not entirely unfounded) stereotype of men with buns being sex pests
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