This morning, as I was preparing my daughter’s breakfast, the landscapers were in my backyard mowing the lawn. Upstairs, in my washroom, my boyfriend was mowing his face (and other parts of his body).
He’s not the only one. It seems like every man in town is manscaping. It’s just that, with the dudes I’ve dated, unlike professional landscapers who cut my grass into neat little rows, I have issues with style and regularity.
I didn’t want to tell “the boyfriend,” when he decided to trim his chest, that the hair on the left side was longer than the chest hair on his right side. There’s really no way of saying nicely, “I know you shaved your chest hair but it’s lopsided!” Don’t get me wrong. I STILL told him that he didn’t do a very good job. If he were my landscaper, I’d fire him.
I also told him that, when he manscapes his chest hair, it’s kind of prickly, and I don’t really feel like hugging a guy who feels like a cactus. But that’s just me. I like my guys to have hair. God put hair on their chest and legs and arms for a reason and that reason is to make us women look better by comparison. A guy I used to date used to make me shave the back of his neck and his back. Gross, I know.
Now, as a female, I didn’t find this attractive at all. I would have to stand in my bathtub with him and shave his back, and if I left one errant hair, he’d act all disappointed. I told him I’m not a hairdresser. I also told him I didn’t care if he had back hair, but he clearly did. But, I will admit, he was very hairy. He’d book off an entire day to shave off all the hair on his body that he could reach.
One of my male friends I asked said, “Manscaping is now the norm regarding pubic hair. Guys do it primarily to make their penis look bigger. A tall tree in a forest looks taller if the forest is trimmed. Pubes are important.” Yikes.
He went on to explain that, in his opinion, manscaping the chest or the back is only for looking more sculpted, for men who are very into working out … or metrosexual. Otherwise, he says, it’s frowned upon.
I tend to agree. As I said, I like a guy with hair.
But I can understand why men want to manscape. I feel much better having no hair on my legs and underarms and getting bikini waxes. The difference is, I go to a professional. Men, however, don’t like to go to professionals when it comes to, ahem, personal care.
When I suggested to my boyfriend that if he wanted to shave his chest that he just go to get it waxed and he wouldn’t have to worry about it for months (and he wouldn’t feel like a cactus), he reacted as if I just asked him to go out in one of my skirts or wear lipstick to work.
Trust me, fellas, you get used to it. But, just like when men don’t ask for directions after being lost for an hour, they don’t want to take directions when it comes to personal care. All I can say is that if you’re going to manscape then you should do it well. I don’t trust my landscaping to an amateur, and it is the same with my hair, wherever that hair might reside.
With Father’s Day coming up, it might be the perfect time to introduce my guy to the wide world of the man spa where he can get anything and everything plucked, prodded and poked to his heart’s content.