Manscaping – Part 1

06. May, 2010 Categories: Men Body by Sarah Baron 15 Comments

Definition and Categories of Men

The Male Version of Grooming – In all Places

When we started discussing Hair Down There at a dinner on night, one of the women said, “And what about manscaping?” What about it, I thought? What is it anyways? Pause. Fast-forward 9 months. The site has been up for about 3 months and we receive a question from a male reader. The question? ”I’d be interested to know a womans perspective on what men should do. Including pubic hair, chest hair, underarms.”

Okay, I’m thinking that here’s an easy topic – manscaping. I start researching the subject. I poll the Anonymous8 and beyond. I read up on the subject online. And guess what I found? This is a pretty hairy subject (sorry for the obviously bad pun – couldn’t resist). It is not so easy. That’s why we divided this into a series, again. Plus, men are entitled to a series about their hair as long as we spent so much time on the subject ourselves, right?

Definition, Please

First, there is no one definition, but to sum it up, manscaping involves a man grooming his bodily hair from the neck down, and it can vary from some minor trimming of chest hair all the way to taking all of it off – everywhere. On men, aside from the face, there is underarm, arm and leg, chest and back, and hair down there, all of which come under the definition of manscaping. The urban dictionary site lists nine separate definitions for the term – nine. And like for women, there are tools for different types of hair trimming/removal needs – specialized razors, waxing (except it is not advised in some places – the really sensitive ones), laser treatments (for back and back of neck), and all sort of variations in between. AskMen.com has a complete series of articles on it here.

It also seems that it is certainly more of an issue with younger men, because manscaping is much more accepted now than when we were in college. This has a lot to do with the history of manscaping, which we’ll cover next post. A friend told an A8 member that the rage at their local high school is that the boys are going Brazilian. Huh? As a mother, after taking a deep breath to reduce my initial shock, I realized that this wave is coming, so we’d better be prepared. Better to know about it than be surprised, right?

Manscaping Categories

Based on discussions with several women about the men in their lives, there seem to be two basic categories of manscapers and several subcategories. Basically, this is easy. Category 1 – men who do. Category 2 – men who don’t. Simple enough, right? It just seems that of the women I’ve spoken with, their guys either believe in it or just don’t and would never manscape.

Let’s start with the simple category, Category, 2, those who don’t. They are their hairy selves – take it or leave it. These are the men who practice the same sort of grooming that men have traditionally been doing for the last century – shaving of the face and taking care of some other things around the face. Period.

Now, Category 2 guys can be further defined. There are the athletes (like swimmers) who shave to gain speed and reduce drag, those who go all the way (I’m talking Brazilian +), and those who dabble (I’ll refer to them in the future as the dabblers) by doing some basic grooming to neaten thing up or maybe take care of their back hair, but that’s it.

So, are we missing any categories here? We are definitely going to need your help on this one, because the information out there is so spotty that we need reader input to put together as comprehensive a series as possible.