“Nice wig Janice, what’s it manufactured from?”…“Your mum’s chest hair!” This iconic one-liner (from the now-canonical 2004 film, Mean Girls) is indicative of just how far chest hair, be it your mum’s or your individual, is loaded with cultural connotation.
In terms of body hair, a sort of ‘all or nothing’ politics abounds and chest hair is not any different. In fact, there was a time when humans were completely covered in body hair but, as our ape-adjacent ancestors migrated to warmer climes, and eventually indoors, we began to shed this coating through a technique of natural selection. Over time, any body hair that did remain became encoded in deep sociocultural associations.
Due to chest hair’s correlation to higher levels of testosterone,...
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