Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

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?

In comments to my previous post about pubic hair and prepubescence Heather Corinna said “you might also bear in mind that when it is women who are saying that, what women’s view of female genitalia most frequently is. In other words, it’s from the top down, without seeing much more than the mons and outer labia.”

Doh! My apologies for any accusations about denial.

If the way you usually look at yourself then I can see how it might look a lot more similar than it would to one’s partner. But the usual assertion is that men want women to remove pubic hair so they’ll look prepubescent. In which case literally from men’s point of view it doesn’t really work that way.

That doesn’t mean men don’t make entirely unreasonable, oppressive, squeamish, or juvenile demands on their partners. And so neither does it mean that women should reflexively comply with either requests or, especially, demands from partners or to peer pressure (to shave or to not shave or, really, anything) from anyone else.

Instead its just that time spent imagining that men want women to look prepubescent is time spent not critically deconstructing the demand as, say,

• feeding men’s voyeurism or visual oppression
• adding yet another area for exacting beauty-standard conformity, assumptions that hair=male with its attendant overtones of intrinsic homophobia
• perpetuation of a two-sphere or yin/yang model of gender in which anything men are women can’t be or anything women are men can’t be
• standard demands for ever more default service and submission
• exploitation of women’s indoctrinated anxiety about appearance

• a manifestation of all those notions of uncleanliness

Oh, and of course,

• the relentless and obsessive, sexuality-alienating sexualization of women’s bodies, period…

• in a way that no amount of political, sartorial, military, or employer pressure on men to shave our faces will ever really compare to.

All such analysis, though, tends to go by the wayside if people just toss up the prepubescence argument anytime the question arises. And since all of the preceding is stuff that men need to confront, and since the prepubescent thing is maybe the single reason that isn’t why men might expect or demand hair removal I think it’s counterproductive and not just mistaken to repeat it.

Photo from Filmofilia.com

Seriously, about this recurring pubescent/pre-pubescent meme about pubic hair and shaving: with or pubic without hair both men’s and women’s genitals look as different from children’s as men’s faces do with or without beards.

There are plenty of perfectly good reasons not to shave or trim but the “pre-pubescent” thing says more about denial and unfamiliarity with grownup bodies than anything else.

For instance (since they’re frequently photographed together) Google around for images of George Clooney and Brad Pitt and tell me that a) Clooney looks immature without a beard and b) Pitt looks mature with one. It’s the same with people’s genitals.

On the other hand… here’s a a follow up on my previous, possibly overoptimistic post. Laura Woodhouse of reviewed a British TV program allegedly intended to contrast sex education and pornography and turns up… well a whole raft of issues. Some of which are not just wrong but (just from my privileged, future-dead-white-hippie-male perspective?) sick and wrong.

Last night’s first installment of Channel 4’s The Sex Education Show Vs Pornography focused on the way in which pornography affects young people’s attitudes towards and expectations of the female body…

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The programme’s findings were unsurprising: boys find big, fake, firm, round breasts most attractive; girls want big, fake, firm round breasts because ‘that’s what the boys want’. Boys preferred hairless genitals; girls felt pressurised to shave because they ‘want to make the boys happy’.

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Well, aside from showing them photos and real naked women and telling them that porn bodies are not natural (making the mistake of claiming that being slim with big boobs is unnatural – way to further alienate girls who get picked on for being just this shape), not much. She didn’t challenge the boys’ sense of entitlement to porn style bodies, simply laughing when a boy said that if he came across a girl with pubic hair he’d tell her to get rid of it. She didn’t actively tell the girls that it was perfectly OK not to shave all your pubes off, that they shouldn’t feel pressurised to conform to what boys want, and instead gave them advice on reducing shaveburn and ingrowing hairs and suggested that they shave ‘for themselves’ rather than for the boys. Considering the series is supposed to be challenging the ‘pornification’ of our culture, it seems rather ironic that the presenter is using the typical anti-feminist backlash tactic of convincing women to do things men want by persuading us we’re doing it for ourselves. Yes, some women do like to shave it all off, but this is hardly the most empowering or helpful advice for teenage girls.

In general, the programme stank of repressed British, seaside postcard style boob-enduced hilarity…

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[I]t completely failed when it came to actively recognising the clear sexism and gender divide here and challenging it: the main solution being put forward is simply to prevent kids having access to porn by persuading PC companies to install child block software on their products. I hope to see boys in particular actually being asked about how they feel men and women are presented in the porn they watch, but it looks like subsequent episodes are focusing mainly on the body, orgasms and performance.

She said it here.

I gotta say, while totally acknowledging my privileged-hippie standpoint it baffles me to no end that grownups would imagine telling girls how to avoid fucking razor burn instead of maybe that what boys want (or say they want… or even cluelessly imagine they want!) isn’t the only possible frame of reference in the universe.

I mean… there’s loss of power, sure, but there’s also surrender of power. And not to put too fine a point on it, in the case of letting 11-year-old boys (the average age, according to Woodhouse’s sources, that boys are getting their exposures to porn) have the power to dictate feminine standards is… is… what the fucking hell moron universe does anybody let an adolescent child, of any gender, establish beauty standards?

I mean… Shiva up the stovepipe, of course little boys are going to want women to have no pubic hair — boys don’t start getting pubic hair till they’re maybe 13! They don’t even go into puberty on average for two years after girls their age! It’s… it’s… Dick Cheney on stilts! Ask an 11-year-old boy… even a 13-year-old boy what he thinks girls ought to look like and he’s going to say they ought to have an exoskeleton and a compartment for their favorite Magic™ card decks and a spigot for grape soda! And not to get overwrought or anything but at least when I was growing up boys started playing with their father’s or grandpas old empty safety razors and pretending to shave from… pretty early on. And searching our faces, with generally increasing anxiety, through 5th, 6th, 7th, and sometimes later grades for the first hint that finally we can start… not to grow a beard or mustache but to begin shaving.

So of course we’re going to be totally, utterly, and (literally!) juvenile-y wiggy, conflicted, and just generally to-the-bone not the people to be cool-hunting what women ought to look like!

Not to put too fine a point on it but… I stumbled across my URL by accident, but I chose to use it when I started sex-blogging for absolutely intentional, purposeful reasons. Children are a lousy source of standards for human sexuality. If we designed cars to suit children’s driving habits they’d need big red rubber bumpers and windshield-wipers on the inside because when children drive they stick out their tongues and go “blpblpblpblplpblpblpt!”

But we stand by and let children… unsupervised boys (because I’m pretty sure that by-definition 11-year-old-boy porn-viewers, or 13-year-old, or 16-year-old, are not being supervised) or girls establish, let alone dictate, what’s supposed to be “normal” adult appearance.

And for adults to let this happen? Or just mope about it? Or, worse, enable it either by suggesting restricting access is sufficient (criminy!) or by offering (to girls, natch) “helpful” suggestions like how to avoid flipping razor burn, or by shrugging helplessly and saying “woah, even 11-year-old hot-wheels-decal Y chromosome-rays are just so Teh Powerful how can we fight it?” Or, worst of all, not getting in there and raising your fucking children by maybe, y’know, making sure their first (and second, third, tenth, and 87th) exposures to information about sexuality from sex education instead of porn… or peers… or possibly well-intentioned but otherwise ill-prepared magazine editors and television programmers.

Seriously! It’s obviously not benefitting boys. And it’s sure not empowering girls. It’s abdication in the worst possible, lest responsible, most thoroughly non-real-adult way possible.

Sheesh!

No, really, WTF, OMG, !=LOL sheesh! I… I… At this point I need a windshield wiper on my laptop screen!