We may as well give up. It's all over. The Internet has lost its damn mind.
We're going to preface this by noting that it's highly unlikely that Hugh Jackman reads his Instagram comments. The man's got other fish to fry. Quite possibly literally, in this case.
Not to mention a family to cherish, scripts to read and weights to lift.
But since other people read the comments posted on Hugh Jackman's Instagram account, we now know that a picture he posted yesterday sparked the kind of "concern" that usually is more popularly reserved for his female colleagues. Namely, every actress ever, whether she's on social media or not.
See, what happened is, the relentlessly fit actor posted a pic that had commenters and then, in turn, some headlines noting that he looked "dramatically aged" all of a sudden. "Actor appears to look older in photo he shared, reports say," noted Facebook.
Here's a sampling of the comments:
"What happened to you x men ? was shocked when ? saw this photo are u good you look so tired the time had changed you i am so soryy." "He's doing Old Man Logan, man you ppl are clueless." "Sooo he was wearing prosthetics in this right?" "#skincancer."
And then there was the detective of the bunch: "First of all it might be makeup, second he is getting older and third he has skin cancer soo..."
The more comments you see like that, the more we looked at the photo, wondering what the fuss was about, and became convinced how not that big a deal it is. Kinda looks like a guy on vacation to us.
Captioned, "Now that's what I'm talking about!" in response to a tempting looking platter of grilled fish on the counter in front of him, a bearded, untouched Jackman, in a T-shirt, jeans and warm-up jacket, is giving a thumbs-up to the camera. His head does look bigger than usual atop his body, in the way all of our heads look bigger when snapped from a certain angle, accounting for what looked to some like a slighter-looking frame.
We'll go out on a limb and guess there aren't as many negative comments as there are on the women's pages (a bunch of guys did seem really excited that Jackman might have been in character to play an older Wolverine). But this isn't an "Aha, the tables have turned!" moment.
Making cracks about someone's appearance, particularly flippant remarks about the potential effects of skin cancer (which Jackman has spoken out about to spread awareness), is just all-around poor, shameful form.
"Too skinny, too fat, showing age, better as a brunette, cellulite thighs, facelift scandal, going bald, fat belly or bump?" Renée Zellweger wrote in a Huffington Post op-ed just last week, itemizing the form of appearance dissection still rampant in headlines about women. "Ugly shoes, ugly feet, ugly smile, ugly hands, ugly dress, ugly laugh; headline material which emphasizes the implied variables meant to determine a person's worth, and serve as parameters around a very narrow suggested margin within which every one of us must exist in order to be considered socially acceptable and professionally valuable, and to avoid painful ridicule."
But though men haven't had to deal with this issue to anywhere near the degree that women have, it doesn't make what amounts to the same treatment any less OK when it's directed at a guy.
