Men Tag
Women have long been pressured to remove their body hair, often scary feelings of shock and disgust once they don’t. In 2013, a Mintel study reported that an awesome 95 per cent of girls aged 16 to 24 said they removed hair from their underarms, while 92 per cent shaved their legs.
Previously, men have passed through the body hair conversation relatively unscathed. Nevertheless, recent research from Mintel suggests that that is changing, with increasingly more young British males embracing hair-free bodies.
In 2018, the study reports, 46 per cent of men removed hair from their bodies – up from 36 per cent in 2016. Fifty-seven per cent of men aged 16-24 have removed hair from their pubic region, up from 40...
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Perhaps it’s because Burger King wasn’t a thing back then, but in Michelangelo’s historical depictions of man, everybody looked as if it would have a very fire bod. In his sculptures and illustrations, a bloke’s pectoral muscles, topped with tweakable nipples, protrude out over a wash-rack torso; their knife-sharp V-lines pointing down towards to their bits.
It’s a picture that has, for therefore long, dominated Western culture’s perception of archetypal masculinity and male beauty: the final word, almost unattainable look. And yet some 500 years on, we’re still obsessing over it. Now though, it manifests less within the art world – where frailer frames usually tend to be fetishised – and more on our TV screens every summer, as we tune in...
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