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malkaI 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. ("Butmalka," 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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-12 05:54 am (UTC)He claims he does not get his ideas about what men should look like from the models in men's health magazines, but I've noticed that he removes the hair leading down from his navel, and I don't know where else that would be common. Swimmers, maybe.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-03-14 06:42 am (UTC)Most people (and I am including myself here) are far more affected by advertising and related pressures than we think we are. It could be men's magazines, or TV actors (I'm off-and-on watching Angel by way of Netflix, and I'm 90% sure they had the main actor depilate his chest.) or any of a hundred different things.
I would love to see a world where the people who remove body hair and the people who remove some body hair and the people who dye body hair blue and the people who ignore body hair and the people who plait little bells into their body hair can all be considered fine and normal. And where people switch what they do over time not because they feel like they should, but because they feel like doing something different