Note: This post started out as a fairly light-hearted entry on the myriad assumptions we make about other people's body hair, but the more I thought about it the more I started wondering if there might be an appearance-based "absolve the accused" reflex similar to the better known "blame the victim" one.

According to the NCBI ROFL curators at Discoblogs

Mock jurors’ perceptions of facial hair on criminal offenders.

“Two studies were conducted to measure whether mock jurors would stereotype criminal offenders as having facial hair. In Study 1, participants were asked which photograph belonged to a defendant in a rape case and which photograph belonged to a plaintiff in a head-injury case after they were “accidentally” dropped. The photographs were similar in appearance except one had facial hair. 78% of 63 participants (or 49) identified the photograph with facial hair as being involved in the rape case. In Study 2, 371 participants were asked to sketch the face of a criminal offender. 82% of the sketches (or 249) contained some form of facial hair. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that criminal defendants are perceived as having facial hair.”

Source: Discover Blogs

I know I keep bringing up stuff like this but the anthropology of body and facial hair is totally fascinating. We just have so many assumptions, prohibitions, mandates, biases, fetishes, and stereotypes related to class, race, religion, sexuality, and, evidently, criminality. All of which, of course, vary from country to country and sometimes year to year.

To be honest, though, this one surprised me. Poorly-shaven faces have been a stock icon for criminality in America for decades, of course, and that in turn has derived from ethnic and class stereotypes. E.g. "the poor" have always been assumed to look shabby and to be criminal; 19th Century WASPs believed Mediterranean immigrants had a propensity for five o'clock shadows and criminal violence; 20th Century America was deeply suspicious of communists, beatniks, and hippies, all of whom were believed to have beards and, once again, to be inclined towards both crime and violence; and here in the 21st Century pop-culture America seems to associate beards with both Islamic and American-loonie violence. So that's not the surprising part.

What is surprising about the study's results, at least to me, is that bearded men would be associated not just with crime in general, or even violent crime in general but violent sexual crime.  (Remember, the research subjects were asked to guess which violent crimes were committed based on photos of men they believed had all been accused of crimes of violence.

Meanwhile if you look at the demographics of the people who really are most likely to commit rape they have a decided tendency to blend in very smoothly with the rest of the male population.

Hmm... You know, as always, that studies, and especially small-scale ones, are best taken with grains of salt at least until corroborated with further, more substantial studies.  But to the extent this study suggests implicit but substantially incorrect assumptions about rapists I wonder if there there might be a social "perpetrator absolving" reflex very similar to the "she must have asked for it somehow" victim-blaming reflex where not only are victims judged on their superficial appearance but so are the accused.

It's not at all cool to assume that a victim "deserved" sexual assault based on something she wore.  It would be equally uncool if it turned out that similar assumptions were made based on the appearance of the accused.

Might be a good question to ask Constable Michael Sanguinetti

Echidne of the Snakes, riffing on anti-feminist angst over women’s armpits, says something deep and true about what the “shaving” wars say about the effort required to construct gender from the mostly-undifferentiated material of corporeal humanity.

I would love to stop discussing the “to shave or not” topic in feminist circles and to start focusing more on what the ridiculing opposition is really saying. Just think about it for a few seconds. Their message is that it is not nature that defines what a woman is, but they, the namers and deciders. And they have decided that a woman in this culture should be without body hair but with very large and perky breasts and basically no hips. It is not some historical or theological concept of womanliness but a purely cultural one, and it is based on the accentuation of gender differences, with a few cultural quirks thrown in.

I see an analogous case in the discussion about cognitive differences between men and women. The anti-feminist point is always to try to make women and men into two quite different species, two “opposite sexes” as the saying goes, whereas the evidence I’ve studied and my life experiences all suggest that men and women are like two overlapping Venn diagrams in almost everything. Partly different and partly the same. This messiness, like armpit hairs on women, is unacceptable to the patriarchal mind.

She said it here.

Once again it’s not that there are no differences between men and women. It’s that the real differences are enough. Oh yeah! And hooray for all of our respective orientations and our shouldn’t-be-surprising discernment of those we’re drawn to. By which I mean there are enough differences that it’s foolish, willful, conceited, and fundamentally insecure about or orientations and of those around us to require more than nature gives us.

And once again it’s not that there’s no need nor interest in decoration of ourselves, others, or our environs. Quite the opposite — decoration appears to be a fundamental quality of humanity!

But while referencing the expectation that we participate in gender construction, Echidne puts the problem in context (even more emphasis mine)

...we all know how a real man will not wear pink (in this culture and time period) or lace (in this culture and time period) or skirts (in this culture and time period).

Sticking with hair for the moment, the classic example being that in some cultures in the world today men can be punished for having a beard on the one hand (in most of the U.S. military, for instance) yet be punished for not having a beard in others (in most of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance.) Another being that for women to have no body hair is considered sexy in some parts of the world (white America for instance) because of its association with high-status femininity while in other parts of the world (white/European South America for instance) women’s body hair is associated with high-status femininity because “native” South American women are believed to have relatively sparse body hair.

In each case, in each culture, in each time, in each location, gender might be constructed, yeah. But if it’s constructed differently in different places…

Sigh.

You know what’s most peculiar of all? For roughly 99.999% of the .001% of cases where for whatever reason someone else’ biological sex really matters, but where for some reason you’re not able to tell, you can usually ask.

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.