body hair (this post brought to you by procrastination and church spam)

[malka]

I get a fair amount of strange church spam in my physical mailbox. Some of it's being strange deliberately to get attention (and thereby demonstrating a close cousin to "the failure mode of clever is asshole"). I'm pretty sure some of it's not. I think it's either tin-eared or aimed at a very different audience from me.



One of the more recent spam items had some alterations to generic plastic Jesus that I'm still pondering, because I think they are an accurate indication of societal shifts. The generic plastic Jesus depiction that I'm used to seeing has pale skin, smooth and straight/wavy medium brown hair kept long, Western European features, facial hair, and soulful eyes. This one had shorter than average hair (long enough to show the shine and the wave, longer than current men's fashions, but still shorter than his collar would have been). He was also wearing no visible clothing (shown from short ribs up), and in one of the pictures was in a very tortured dungeon-y strung-up-by-the-wrists pose. ("But malka," I hear you protest, "dungeons and handcuffs are not part of this mythos." To which I can only reply that other recent church spam items have involved flying lions and picking one's romantic partner's nose; dungeon chains fit right in. I get strange church spam.)

The thing that caught my eye, though, is that he had no armpit or chest hair. He had thick head and facial hair and absolutely no visible body hair. It is unlikely that this particular combo came from an actual live model, so it was probably a (conscious or not) choice.

I think this is part of a consistent pattern. The anti-body-hair social pressures have been ramping up for women and also for men. I think the Jesus depiction had no body hair because of a combination of what is increasingly considered attractive and some sense of earthiness or non-purity associated with body hair. (Clearly, these are not orthogonal concepts.)

This also interplays strangely with gender. For quite some time, I thought the body hair norms were yet another artificial widening of gendered differences to maintain the fiction that there are two crisp-edged and widely-separated gender categories. That was consistent with what I understood the norms to be: that men had body hair and women did not. (This has increased over the time I've been paying attention from leg and armpit hair to include arm, mons, and outer labia hair.)

I think part of it might be that the body-hair removal market for women is pretty well saturated, while it's not in men. Another part might be that body hair is being presented so hard as gross on women (and not just unwomanly, but very specifically gross) that the perception is slopping over onto body hair on any body. Another part might be that we seem to be slowly swinging out of the time period where men were assumed to be not looked at.

I don't think that's all of it, though. I can't tell what I'm missing, but I think there are other factors leading to no-body-hair pressures for men. I understand the pressures on women; I'd like to also understand the pressures on men.

Comments

[vlion]

There's definately an anti-body-hair thing going on for men.

I have a rough idea that there are at least three separate men's culture ideas.

One is - for lack of a better word - 'metrosexual' - very urban, trendy, men's model, etc. This idea doesn't have much hair; possibly a 5'o clock shadow ala the latest Hollywood style.

Another men's idea is the blue collar workin' man. He is the prototypical guy in commercials with a hard hat; he's the guy at walmart, he's the listener to Joe Foxworthy; he's the main market for Cabela's. This idea has hair, but relatively trimmed.

Another men's idea is what you might call 'hipster', or "Iron & Wine". Words like 'authenticity' hang around this idea. It's not particularly well-defined, but gigantic beards are almost a signature of this idea.

---

I *think* the metrosexual idea peaked around 2010 or so. I am seeing a lot of small beards today on guys in profession endeavors. I do not remember seeing such apparatus for a long time.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=metrosexual&year_start=1980&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=

[malka]

Hmm. Beards on hipsters vary by locality, I think. Either way, though, the hipster look is a young and sort of sleek look. (I'm having trouble finding the work I want. I don't mean sleek like a dolphin, but... it's very not fleshy or floofy. Big swirling skirts or broad shoulders don't fit it well.) Body hair seems to increase in most people until something like late middle age, so removing it would go along with a young look.

I see the three men's cultures you're identifying, but I think there's a fourth: the "I don't have a culture" culture. There's a general perception of there not being rules in it, so you'd better not be perceived as following rules. There are a bunch of rules set up around not being perceived to follow rules. I have a hard time reasoning about it, though.

[vlion]

Well, you're right. But the "Mountain Man" is the image of hipster to me. I do live in the Pacific NW, so it has likely a bit more appeal around here. The classic Moscow, ID hipster is someone with scarf, beard (varying lengths), and thick glasses. Probably plays in a band at a coffeeshop on the weekend. It's not improbable he has a fat tire bike and smokes a pipe.

http://www.portlandhipster.com/2011/04/evolution-of-hipster-httpping.html

I do see a distinct 'masculinity' thing showing up these days. E.g., http://artofmanliness.com/ . Notice the mustaches on the header guys. There's also - I kid you not - an American Mustache Institute. So I think it's a Thing.


ANYWAY.

Umph. The Not Following Rules culture. Hrm. Once you get that untangled in your head a bit more I'd like to hear more about that.

[malka]

There's definitely a mustache thing going on. One non-hipster datapoint: I see a number of men growing mustaches in November for prostate cancer awareness (although the number of confusing things about that concept gets longer the more I think about it).

I don't have the Not Following Rules culture untangled in my head, but I have it differently tangled. Let's see...

There are a lot of rules about what people are supposed to do, but there are also a lot of rules about what people are supposed to put effort into, and the sets of rules aren't consistent with each other. The Not Following Rules culture is simultaneously obeying a set of rules about what men wear (men wear dull colors; men wear pants; men wear shirts with sleeves that pass the middle of the upper arm; etc) and obeying a meta-rule that says that thinking too much about clothing and presentation is not manly. So, by rationalization, these clothes must be the most practical, or the easiest, or the something-like-that. Even if they're not (for instance, black T-shirt that is uncomfortably the wrong size versus Hello Kitty T-shirt that fits), they must be, because it's not okay to admit to caring about one's visual presentation, because that's a feminizing thing.

I don't know if I can do more than wave at this from various angles.