When I was a child, I nerdily subscribed to 2000AD, a comic, starring Judge Dredd. It was set in a future world – as the year 2000 was back in the 1970s – where everyone looked the same: plastic surgery ensured that both men and women all had perfect skin, thick, lustrous hair and slim, toned bodies.
As a reaction to this, the comic depicted a world where the more fashionable would pay for designer scars and other facial disfigurements in order to stand out. In a homogenous society, where everybody looked the same, the cool and beautiful sought to be different, and ugly became attractive.
Last month, in 2009AD, I attended the 40th birthday party of a successful television producer at his house in west London. All the guests looked the same, especially the men: almost without exception, they had 31in waists, skinny jeans, fitted white cotton shirts, shiny tans and Botoxed foreheads. It looked like a convention for Barbie and Ken dolls.
This has been the decade of the metrosexual, the well turned-out breed of man who likes to look after his appearance and isn’t afraid of moisturiser. But he has become asexual; buffed, plumped, primped and coiffed to within an inch of his manhood (in some cases, literally).
How did it come to this? How do we live in a society where, as was revealed this week, Simon Cowell thinks it acceptable to wax the backs of his hands and around his neckline, to have his teeth turned into a neon light show and to sport an expression unable to depict anything more than mild surprise? Men have come a long way in 10 years, but, please, no further.
Who actually finds this kind of “manscaping” attractive? Certainly not women. I had lunch yesterday with two very beautiful, exquisitely dressed women who work for a luxury goods company. Both said that they had hirsute husbands and wouldn’t have it any other way; one even said she found it unattractive if she caught her husband checking himself out in the mirror. They did not want a partner who stole their eyecreams, left hair shavings in the bath or sported a rash where there should be chest hair.
A man without body hair looks wrong, like a plucked chicken – which doesn’t rate highly on the phwoar factor, as far as I’m aware. Remember the lukewarm response Frank Lampard and his Chelsea team-mates received in 2005 when they were pictured topless after a match sporting shiny, waxed torsos, like those poor poodles that have their hair clipped off for Crufts shows?
There is a happy balance, though. While manscaping may be a tad too much, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of “taming”; think of it as good housekeeping. If chest or back hair becomes a little too unruly, and starts to peer through shirt buttons and above collars, just trim it, much as you would a privet hedge. Your partner won’t mind you spending time and money on your hands and feet, either: gnarled toes, callouses and yellowing nails are inexcusable. The Lord of the Rings trilogy should not be viewed as a style statement.
Luckily, there are signs that the emasculating, manscaping era is drawing to a close. The smooth-bodied, baby-faced images that adorned advertising campaigns and men’s magazines are being replaced with men sporting beards, moustaches and body hair. Even the wan star of Twilight, Robert Pattinson, has a few tufts on his pale, vampiric pecs.
We’ll carry on with the moisturiser (as long as the packaging is masculine), we’ll keep using the SPF sun protection creams (we don’t want to look like George Hamilton), keep going to the gym (cardio, not weights), and buy new batteries for the nose and hair trimmer. But we won’t do a Simon Cowell and look as if our hands have been dipped in a vat of acid. Who wants a tidemark on their wrists?
And the occasional cougar aside, how many women want to a date a weedy, hairless boy? When the world is uncertain, the economy in tatters, terrorists on the rampage and Jedward on the television, it’s a real man that is needed; one who looks strong and masculine enough to take on the baddies, protect his loved ones and keep hold of a job. Where’s Tom Selleck when you need him?
Jeremy Langmead is the editor of 'Esquire’ magazine
