One Utah

Some months back, Hugo had a post in the great feminist blogswarm about hair. The basic situation: a group of feminist bloggers found themselves in a complex debate about the relative merits of removing or keeping one’s body hair.

Hugo posted on the debate then added his own interesting take here. The upshot of Hugo’s observation was that for men removal of body hair is different than for women in intent. He observed that for weightlifters, for instance, removal of one’s chest hair allows one’s muscles to appear much more impressive - hair conceals the muscles. I googled at the time and found an interesting research study describing the disgust factor - a huge majority of women described their discomfort with female body hair while a majority, a slightly smaller majority of males, described the same disgust factor with female body hair. I didn’t find a similar research study concerning men’s bodies.

The adult human creature by virtue of nature has hair on its body - arms, legs, pubic region, chest, shoulders, face, and yes, back. Body hair is a secondary sex trait that appears with puberity and continues through the rest of life. Discussion of human body hair is fraught with emotion, it causes tremendous anxiety. Something about awareness of our own hairy state touches a deep nerve in the human psyche. Perhaps it reminds us we are animals and we’re not at all comfortable with that awareness. Perhaps (and I’m on thin ice here) our discomfort with body hair is an expression of our discomfort with aging and sexual maturity - the adult human animal has hair on his/her body; removal of that hair suggests to me a discomfort with out adulthood, with dealing with maturity. Perhaps there is a cleanliness factor - many women are known to cite removing their hair, including pubic hair, as a cleanliness issue. But it’s difficult for me to think about the removal of one’s body hair, especially pubic hair, and not wonder. Hairless genitals are not an adult trait. I’ll let you ponder the the implications of that on your own.

Issues in and around hair discomfort us and disarm us. Hugo had this great passage:

. . . though I found that some women liked a bare chest, I found — and here I step into dangerous territory — that the women I was most likely to actually want to be with were those who liked men with hair. Somehow, there was something suspicious to me about women who liked their men too smooth. Perhaps it was — and here I psychoanalyze without a license — a sense I got that women who were turned off by chest hair were in some sense intimidated by or frightened of certain aspects of male sexuality. (Bring on the flaming, but so help me, that was my experience. I agree that my anecdotes, no matter how numerous, do not in any way constitute data!) I will note that when my teenage girls in youth group talk about what they like and don’t like in guys, most are enthusiastic about hairless, smooth chests. Given that those are what the chests of most of their peers look like, it makes sense. But the connection between eroticising hairlessness and a kind of adolescent view of sexuality does seem to be logical, if nothing else.

With men, even in our cultural setting where more men are waxing, plucking, depilating, shaving and so forth than before, for men it remains a much freer choice than for women. A rite of passage for young men (say those in their early twenties) seems to be growing a beard at least once. Based on my casual observation around town, most 20 something men will go without shaving for lengthy periods just to “see how it looks.” For men, removal of body hair is optional. Even the most hirsute man can choose to let the fur grow if he chooses. At the gym a while back, I was changing and watched in amusement as a man walked from the showers to the sinks, lathered up his chest and proceeded to shave it.

But I also think the state of a man’s hairiness can be connected to his sense of being attractive. Our culture treats hairy backs as immediately and immensely distasteful. A hairy chest is a sign of virility. A full beard often brings strong responses from people that affirm one’s masculinity.

Growing a beard is not as simple as not shaving, however. In grad school, I had a professor who had an extremely weak chin, had grown a bearb to cover it up and it just looked weaker. A beard (full or goattee or mustache or even just a soul patch) requires maintenance, trimming. It is hair which means it needs shampooed, conditioned, combed. Beards, fwiw, itch like crazy. But they remain a fashion choice - you can beard or not beard as you wish. I know several men who almost always wear a beard. Every few years, they’ll shave it off for a week or two then immediately grow it back. By contrast, my trainer at the gym complains that he can barely grow a goattee.

Within the gay community, there is the bear subculture which nearly fetishizes male body hair. Sometimes calling themselves “girth and mirth” the model bear is a larger man, bearded, hirsute. Tom Colicchio, judge on Bravo’s Top Chef, apparently has a following among the bears. In its broadest sense, the bear is a man whose male characteristics are exaggerated - his virility demonstrated by an androgenic sex trait. I don’t think that is accidental in a culture that continues to characterize gay men as effeminate, nelly, screeching queens. It is an assertion of one’s male identity in a way which is undeniable.

In the short-lived TV show Popular, they produced an episode about body anxieties, exploring it from both the male and female perspective. In one poingnant scene set in the locker room after gym class, skinny, unmuscluar Harrison, was staring at another character, the muscular athlete, Josh. Harrison’s friend Emory bounded up and delivered a short monologue about how it was okay fantasize. Harrison replied, “I don’t want to do him. I want to be him.” Emory said (more or less) “I can imagine how hard it must be on you being hairless and pigeon-chested.” Harrison gaped at Emory who was, if possible, even skinnier and more hairless. Male body anxiety seems summed up in the statement - “I don’t want to do him, I want to be him.”

In Our Whole Lives, one of the boys asked when he was ever going to get muscles. Another boy expressed his fear about getting too hairy. Another about having no body hair at all. Puberty is a difficult time and we often don’t get any guidance from the adults around us. It is the time at which our bodies suddenly take on lives of their own and we change. Suddenly hair appears that had not been there before, and it means that childhood’s end is coming. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps the lack of adult guidance on issues of sexuality deepen our anxiety about our bodies. Most adults, harkening back to our own experiences of adolescence, are often overwhelmed by obscure pain and can’t bring ourselves to say a word.

I analyze without a licence here, but I wonder if our response to hair speaks to our own comfort with our own maturity and sexuality. To fetishize either hairlessness or hairiness is perhaps an adolescent characteristic, one arising from our own unresolved adolescent experiences. A mature sense of the physical self would seem to suggest that the body is what it is and we do not ignore its care and upkeep, we exercise, we eat right, but we don’t obsess over its faults, imagined or real, we accept the body as it is - that hairiness or hairlessness, rounded hips or straight hips, small or large breasts, small or large penis, bald head or not, tall or short, the body is what it is and we learn to accept other people as they are and ourselves as we are. That acceptance seems to me a primary goal of maturity and relationship with the physical self.

This entry was posted Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 7:11 am and is filed under Sex, Society. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.