I’m in the monthly rotation for the popular “Wise Guys” column at Em & Lo. This week’s question for their rotating panel of single, and married straight men and married or committed gay man was “What’s the deal with manscaping? We’re talking both genitals and chests.” Here’s how I answered it.

Straight Married Guy (Figleaf): Great question! It’s a great irony to me that, at least in Western Civilization, we don’t think anything of the original “manscaping” — men who shave their faces. For instance, you never hear debates about how shaving makes grown men look “prepubescent” even though technically that’s exactly what it actually does. As for the recent trend in straight men trimming or shaving pubic hair, I think you could make a case that it’s driven, at least a little bit, by the same things that drive women to do so: porn and advertising. The two come together in a recent razor manufacturer’s ad campaign with shaved kiwi fruit and hints about the “optical inch” of penis length that comes from trimming away an inch of pubic hair.

There’s also the point that it just feels nicer being kissed on bare skin than on hair… and, for many partners, it feels nicer kissing bare skin than hair. As for men grooming hair on the rest of the body, I think there are two big reasons. First, because it makes us look younger. Not so much “prepubescent” but, since body hair increases with age, not middle-aged or older. Second, because when it’s long it can be itchy both to ourselves and to our partners. Of course the other side of all that is first that a lot of women and/or men think body hair on men is very sexy, and second that stubble can be even pricklier than if we left well enough alone.

I said it here.

No sense analyzing my own writing (heck, I can’t even proofread my own writing!) so I’ll point out that the quality of comments is pretty different on the post at Em & Lo’s vs. their reprinted version at Yahoo Shine.

A number of Yahoo commenters are pretty down on manscaping because they see it as one kind of unmanly or another. Which makes the “Gay Engaged Guy,” Joel Derfner‘s answer priceless

I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter, because manscaping is, for all intents and purposes, dead. Gay men are manscaping less and less each year, which means that in a few years straight men are going to be manscaping less and less each year, and then our national nightmare will be over.

Yup, just let straight America get the notion that not shaving is Teh Gay!

Gillette and Schick stock will skyrocket and we can all go home. Oh wait! Scratch that last bit about stocks. Nearly all American men already own shaving products.

But getting back to the shaving makes you look less manly bit. Shaving makes men look less manly? Which is a riot because of course beginning to shave one’s face is often one of the first outward acknowledgments of manhood for boys.

Which makes the cultural perception gradient even weirder: shaving is supposed to make men look more womanly, meanwhile shaving is supposed to make women look more child-like. If there was any logic to gender conventions, since shaving is one of the first signals of manhood shaving ought to be seen as making women look more manly! I get so confused!

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Gender-neutral rhetorical question: do shaved armpits make everyone look pre-pubescent?