Photo by Flickr user stevegatto2, who I’m sure looks perfectly presentable with or without back hair. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors has a thoughtful analysis of body-hair removal in the face of increasing marketing of shaving products and services to men. (She reports one Gillette tagline goes “you might say when there’s no underbrush, the tree looks taller.”)

While I strongly disagree that shaving one’s pubic hair makes one look prepubescent (when was the last time you heard that description of a man who shaves?) I agree with Crawford that body-hair removal for both women and men is closely associated with the culture of youth.

Example A? The “problem” of back hair. Back hair doesn’t really start to sprout in men till middle age. And so ads for back hair removal (either temporary or permanent) are a staple of aging-youth-oriented alt-weekly newspapers, where such ads are at least as common as ads for “bikini line” waxing.

Crawford says, sensibly,

[H]airlessness — obtained naturally or by grooming — is a sign of youth (the pre-pubescent look), body-consciousness (I can see those abs glisten!), self-care (when you trim your nails, trim your hairs) and other-regarding (how thoughtful of you to anticipate that I wouldn’t like hair up my nose — wait a sec, did you assume I’d be visiting this part of your anatomy on a first date?).

A marketing technique will be a sure winner if it appeals to men’s desire to feel, um, large. There’s a reason that Trojans don’t come in size “small.”

The hairless look? Shows off a guy’s “equipment,” in Gillette’s lexicon.

Anyone who’s eagerly looking forward to her or his partner sprouting those tufty little middle-age patches of hair on his back, shoulders, and the backs of his upper arms pipe up.

But if, as I suspect, anti-ancillary hair bias is as strong against men as it is against women, an even more effective marketing strategy would be to taunt men for looking like skeevy old men.

Also, her sentence “how thoughtful of you to anticipate that I wouldn’t like hair up my nose” can be read two ways for anyone over 40, for whom lushly abundant nose hair may be “perfectly natural” but is rarely greeted by partners with any hint of enthusiasm.