The question,” the heavily-bearded actor Jim Carey said on a TV chat show recently, “is not why my beard so big, but why I am still shaving my balls?” The comment got a big laugh, perhaps one of recognition. Men in the audience may well have pondered: ‘what would my father have thought of the fact that I now regularly sculpt my pubic hair?’
More than that too: according to the only large scale study to date, by market research company Mintel, some 46 percent of men now remove at least some hair from their bodies (face excluded). And, it seems, the younger you are, the more likely it is that you will have embraced this grooming routine: some 57 percent of those under 24 remove at least some of their pubic hair. Remarkably, 42 percent remove their underarm hair.
That may not be a new idea: body hair has always had the potential to somehow offend, such that even Clark Gable—the very Hollywood definition of manhood during the 1940s and 1950s—shaved his armpits and chest to appease film censors. But what explains the recent upshot in the ‘Kenification’—after Barbie’s smooth plastic pal—of the male body? How has the very association of body hair and maleness gone in just a few generations from Sean Connery’s James Bond, for example, to Daniel Craig’s beefed-up-but-denuded bod?
We have just missed celebrating the 50th anniversary of a momentous moment in masculine display: Burt Reynolds posing nude for a Cosmopolitan centrefold in 1972. He is laying on a bearskin rug. And where rug ends and man begins is not easy to tell.
Like Reynolds, Tom Selleck—the original ‘Magnum PI’—was totemic of a similar pro-body hair look throughout the 1980s. Now, both seem relics from some follicular golden age.
Fashion is one driver of this shift, of course. Even in 65AD the Roman philosopher Seneca was moaning about shifting tastes in male hairiness, complaining that while the older generation of men wouldn’t even shave their armpits, the younger generation was going too far and shaving their legs. And he didn’t have mass-media to contend with. Perhaps ever since Mark Wahlberg posed for Calvin Klein in 1992, the expectation has been that male models will be hairless.
And, latterly, reality TV shows and social media, with its imprinting through repetition of the latest notions of ‘acceptability’, has driven male body hair underground.
But blame it too on a rise of meticulously groomed sportsmen often walking around post-game with their shirts off. In the 1990s it lead the rise of the term ‘metrosexual’ as a way to define the kind of man who took an interest in then fledgling notion of male grooming—while the 2000s saw rise of the less snappy, but more graphic, ‘spornosexual’. If competitive body-builders have always shaved their torsos (all the better to show off all that gym work) and cyclists have long shaved their legs (arguing that it makes massage easier) now it’s more vanity than practicality that leads the way: it’s a combination of the hairless, shirt-removing Cristiano Ronaldo and Robert Lewandowski meets our need for big bushery not to obscure our view in the bedroom. Much of what is viewed online and via our screens is mis-shaping our ideas of how we should look in real life.
As research by Patricia Obst, associate professor of psychology at the Queensland University of Technology, suggests, men need a little encouragement and visual culture provides it. “Young men who feel a similarity or identification to some ‘prototype’ male that removes their body hair are more likely to do the same themselves,” she notes. “They have increased men’s positive attitudes towards hair removal, which over recent history has not been seen as a particularly masculine thing to do.”
Of course, underlying both of these platforms is the drive of commerce. And that’s no less true of the purveyors of hairlessness. Women may have scraped, plucked, cut and tweezered for millennia in pursuit of style or status, but as those of the 20th and 21st centuries know, if there is money to be made in shaping the habits of half of the population—by making them buy the potions, lotions and accoutrements required to maintain that habit—then business, and its helpmates advertising and the media, find a way to remake reality.
When, in 1915, Gillette created the Milady Decollete, this, the first safety razor targeted at women, came with an advertising campaign positing underarm hair as suddenly being “unsightly”, “embarrassing” and “objectionable”. Change came gradually and, well, patchily: there is a glamorous publicity shot of the Italian actress Sophia Loren, taken in 1955—when she was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world—which befuddles today for her unabashed display of armpit hair.
But by 1964, 98 percent of American women shaved their legs. And much as the invention of the safety razor initially did for the beard, so the Decollete was just the first technology looking for a female market —with fresh takes on waxing, depilatory creams, bleaching, sugaring and lasering all following.
Certainly one idea that the beauty and now grooming industries appear keen not to disavow us of is the association between body hair and hygiene: that the more we have of it, the dirtier we are. Indeed, hair removal is arguably one of very few beauty traditions —like tooth-brushing—to have crossed some invisible line between being a matter of aesthetics to a matter of perceived cleanliness.
Paul Tran, founder of Manscaped—a US-based grooming brand specialising in ‘three-blade groin razors’, ‘groin exfoliant’ and ‘groin shaving gel’, among other non-groin related body hair management products—argues that while what drives this connection is unclear, it’s a real feeling nonetheless. “It’s that sense of feeling clean after you’ve cut your nails, or after you’ve got a haircut – and I think the same applies after your shaved your balls,” he enthuses. “My hypothesis is that men have always paid some attention to their body hair but have been too shy to talk about it. But that now there’s more tolerance of the idea of grooming beyond the face.”
A 2016 survey of US women found that 59 percent said they removed their body hair for “hygiene reasons”—men, it would appear, are following suit. This may be illogical—if hair was in some sense dirty we would shave our heads too; and contrary to biology—actually body hair plays a part in regulating not just our temperature and, through odour, our sexual attractiveness, but also our skin’s ability to repair itself. Yet it seems hair has been co-opted as the latest expression of the ickiness felt about the human body and its very human functions. Hair removal has been lumped together with more generalised notions of health, wellness and—for an increasingly narcissistic age —the potentially problematic over-enthusiasm we have for ‘self-care’.
“I think men removing more of their body hair is about aesthetics but, more than that, a response to the fact that so much of what we do in life is captured in images now and we want to give the sense to others that we’re looking after ourselves, because that’s deemed attractive,” suggests Ben Rivers, founder of men’s hair removal cream brand Baldape Parlour. “The effort you put into your body hair suggests the effort you put into the rest of your lifestyle. In some sense it’s performative rather than strictly necessary. Really [the psychology] behind it all is complex.”
Clearly our feelings about body hair are somewhat prone to inconsistent thinking. Why is it that hair is acceptable on some parts of the body but not others? Why is chest hair—or at least some chest hair—okay but not back hair? A 2021 YouGov poll found that a third of men think a “somewhat hairy chest” can look alright but that nearly two-thirds of them think back hair is unattractive. It’s as though it has crossed the brink into something excessive and so, bizarrely, evokes genuine disgust.
Likewise, why is chest hair only okay so long as there is a clear demarcation between chest and shoulders? Hairy legs? Okay. Hairy hands or feet? Questionable. Could it be that we’re battling with a sense of our humanity in opposition to our sense of the animalistic? Is that why a particularly hairy man gets dubbed a ‘gorilla’? In the late 1700s Thomas Jefferson noted how Native Americans plucked their body hair because, they told him, otherwise it would be to liken themselves to beasts.
Indeed, one theory has it is that ever since Charles Darwin proposed our evolutionary descent from the apes in 1871, the pursuit of ever more hairlessness has been one way us humans have sought to separate ourselves from the animals. After Darwin hairiness came, unfounded, to be associated with crudeness, with disease pathology, with lunacy and even criminal violence, especially in some.
But, the seismic shock of Darwin’s insight long since having dissipated, it nonetheless still has real world psychological impact. A 2017 survey suggests that 55 percent of men feel embarrassed about their abundant body hair—especially the body hair that’s in the wrong places—with a third never going swimming as a consequence, and one in five saying it has a negative impact on their life in the bedroom.
It’s too soon to say what the long-term outlook is for this embracing of the razor blade: whether men will always retain the freedom, within certain boundaries, to explore more or less hairiness—which is to say that current favoured hair quotients will be a question mostly of changing style. Or whether this is the beginning of men being railroaded into what will become a new norm for cutting back that, as women have found, can be extremely hard—a political, even subversive act—to reject.
For women removing body hair has become a process so deeply ingrained—as part of a wider control through body-shaming—as to now be considered the norm. It’s just what women do. Might men go the same way? Resistance to hairlessness—from the hippies of the 1970s to Instagram body-positivity campaigners—is either short-lived or at personal cost: the vitriol targeted at women who dare to show their preference for not shaving (targeted often by other women) is verging on psychotic.
Perceptions may be changing very slowly— and not all cultures have embraced hair removal so enthusiastically—but when, in 2017, Adidas ran a social media campaign featuring a female model with leg hair, she received threats. Might men who prefer a tuft here or there ever face the same crazy vilification, as if they had broken some deeply revered social contract? Might reluctantly going hairless—adopting the ‘Boyzilian’ as much as the ubiquitous ‘Brazilian’—just be easier than dealing with the judgment fallout? As a concerned Paul Tran notes, “I think there’s always a chance that this kind of [male body hair] grooming becomes obligatory for men.”
“I think men will always have more flexibility when it comes to their body hair,” argues Gareth Terry, senior lecturer in rehabilitation studies at the Auckland University of Technology, who has studied the culture of hair removal. “I remember when [French President] Emmanuel Macron turned up to an election photoshoot with his shirt open and this really hairy chest on display, there was a flurry of recognition that this was unusual but it was still acceptable. It was something he could do without being tainted by it. It would be very hard for a female politician to turn up with hairy legs. The backlash would be intense. And I don’t see men crossing that threshold because of the naturalised difference in the way gender presentation has played out and its emphasis on the binary.”
But, he concedes, that doesn’t mean men won’t face some pressure to tame those chest forests, given the power of marketing. Yes, it’s conspiracy thinking maybe, but we have been here before with women’s experience. What a boon it would be the global male grooming industry – now valued at some US$80bn and predicted to be worth US$115bn within the next five years – if all body hair was to be considered unnatural.
“Now that commercial enterprise has captured a particular market [for male body hair removal] in the way it captured women in the early 1900s I don’t see us going too far backwards,” predicts Terry. “It pushed the idea of smooth legs for women being an ideal and it will push the idea of [body hair] grooming for men. It will be framed around the idea that you’re a good citizen by removing at least some hair, not looking ‘too messy’. In the absence of clear rules men who are uncertain will err towards greater hair removal.”
Maybe it’s women who will get to decide—and, given the pressures they have faced to join the constant fight with their fur, it would be hard to blame them if they wanted to cut back on the double-standard too. After all, as with women’s perception of themselves, men and especially younger men, studies suggest, have already been indoctrinated into regarding less hairy women as more attractive.
While it would be more coherent to think of body hair as a welcome indicator of sexual maturity—like fuller breasts and wider hips – go figure that instead we prefer women to actually look pre-pubescent and infantilised. A 2021 research paper by Ligia Azevedo at Brandeis University, US, found that a whopping 95.2 percent of her male subjects rated a photo of a woman without body hair as “significantly more attractive” than same one with some body hair.
Curiously though, while many of these men suggested women also looked appealingly younger without body hair—there’s that dodgy over-sexualisation of youth again—85.7 percent of them explained their preference by complaining that body hair on women made them look more masculine. That, at the same time, as increasingly removing their own body hair.
So is the problem that has hairiness lost its currency, to men and women alike, as a means of expressing male virility, a connection Burt Reynolds so impressively underscored?
This would perhaps explain the ascendance of a more visible, more ‘cut’ musculature in hairiness’s place, or, as Jim Carey suggested, the return of compensatory beards and moustaches. Are all those typically more middle-aged men who insist on wearing their shirts undone a button too far to give everyone an eyeful of their impressive pec carpets outdated in their notion that this is still some kind of power play?
Studies suggest that while the majority of men are more conscious of the limitations of gender norms and are cool with the idea of removing some of their body hair, temporarily take it away from where they still think it should be—legs and armpits in particular—and the same men find it challenging to their sense of male identity. Remarkably, men undergoing chemotherapy are more likely to express concern over losing the hair on their body than that on their head.
“I think body hair has come to be seen as the opposite of femininity but body hair and manliness are at least still co-aligned,” suggests Virginia Braun, professor of psychology and a research colleague of Terry’s at the University of Auckland. “Body hair is always available as part of masculinity in the way it’s not part of femininity. I think that’s the fundamental difference. We haven’t, yet, seen a response of disgust to male body hair [as we have to women’s].”
Perhaps this is why, so far, the data suggest that most women still rate men with hair on the chest and abdomen as more attractive – and these, like a beard, being indicators of sexual maturity, that makes sense. At least women are being consistent with our evolutionary roots. But if men can over time be programmed to think of hairlessness as more attractive in women, vice versa may happen too. The tide may already be turning: much as many men, apparently, prefer that hairlessness in women, so the social critic Camille Paglia has expressed her worry that what younger women increasingly want “is not a man but a malleable boy. It’s some weird, cryptic mother/son dream”.
It may look as we’re on the pink path to both men and women being more sexless Kens and Barbies together—though, blink and you miss it, jarringly one Ken in the Barbie movie does have armpit hair, whether because he’s embraced the patriarchy or because the actor refused to get out the clippers. Facing off against him, the shiny shorn Ronaldo, licensed-to-Brazil Daniel Craig and all the rest of the New Smooth Crew, now constantly in our faces, if not yet demanding that these are like a baby’s bottom too.
Hair today, gone tomorrow, as the old joke has it? Life at the cutting edge only looks set to
get more complicated.