Not Wild About Hairy

Or: Last summer, a guy named Brett Marut in Santa Monica, Calif., came out with a thing called Mangroomer. It's essentially a shaver on a stick, designed to enable you to reach around and shave your back. He priced it at $39.95, looking to appeal to guys in Flyover, America, who were too self-conscious to go to a salon to get it done, or even let their friends know they were trying it out. He didn't have much money, so he just put a couple of ads on Internet search engines. It was an instant hit, blossomed at online retailers and, 10 months later, Mangroomer is in every Bed Bath & Beyond in the country.

"Chest hair -- waxing, shaving it -- it's like an option that some guys like and some guys don't," Marut says in a telephone interview. "But who goes around saying, 'I really like my back hair'?"

There's also Nair for Men, which sells for about $5 and promises to get rid of hair in four minutes by rubbing a cream on it.

Waxing, shaving, depilating, lasering men's body hair: It's all part of the beautification of the male animal, an aesthetic that genuflects before the ancient Greeks. The surviving statuary shows highly idealized men, with hair on the head, perhaps the face and an appropriate patch at the genitalia, but entirely smooth-chested. The beauty was in the muscle, the tone, the curve of the triceps of the extended arm, the triple cords of the abdominal muscles. Hair obscured the clean-lined beauty of it all. This idealized image gained permanent Western footing in the Renaissance, when paintings and sculpture -- right down to Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the very first man -- was pictured as devoid of chest hair.

In real life, it is boys, not men, who are devoid of body hair, and for ages one sign of adult male virility was chest hair. To be devoid was to be effeminate. This continued in Western and American pop culture right through the last century. Men never considered grooming below the neck.

Nobody has an exact beginning point, but bodybuilders, starting with, say, Jack LaLanne in the 1940s, would hearken to that Grecian ideal, shaving their bodies for competition, the better for judges to appreciate every oiled and sculpted pec. There's a picture of LaLanne posing beachside about 1950. He looks like he's made out of marble. The only hair visible is on his head.

By the early 1980s, the hairless chest and back was catching on with gay guys. Like earrings, it began to cross over to fashion-conscious straight men, athletes and celebrities, and then into the mainstream.

"When it comes to vanity, gay men have been at the forefront, the trendsetters," Boyé says. "But now, with all the celebrities, magazine covers, the movies, it's appropriate and acceptable for anyone who wants to go bald to do it."

It's also driven by dames. Girlfriends and wives. Everyone interviewed for this story said one of the main reasons guys were doing something about their body hair was because their significant other had requested it. Philips Norelco says 57 percent of Bodygroom consumers surveyed said they made their purchase because they "or their significant other" prefer the hairless look. (We also duly note that Playgirl magazine reported in 2005 that of 2,000 women surveyed, 47 percent approved of chest hair, 53 percent did not, and 73 percent said they wanted a man who is "rough around the edges." Go figure.)

Also, it was universally agreed by everyone interviewed that back hair for anyone younger than your grandpa has gone the way of the uni-brow and ear hair -- it's gotta go, dude. A social embarrassment. Keep it at your own peril.

Chest hair is a matter of choice.

O'Brien offers this guide:

"If your chest hair alters the way your shirt fits, it should be reduced. If your wife or girlfriend complains about it, it should be reduced."

This is good advice. This is sensible. This is something to keep guys looking like they've got a little something going on, that they're up on things, which is sort of what style is, which is sort of what guys want to have without looking like they're trying to have it.