Ok, so I read an article in the paper yesterday, ah, ok not
quite in the paper... I read it on the news app on my phone...yes, what a
thoroughly modern millie I am. The article was about a study that revealed that
women prefer this men clean shaven. We do? I may be alone in saying this, but I
really really don’t like freshly shaven men. I love a bit of stubble. I love
beards. I like men to look like men.
This got me thinking, you see, I like men to be men, but
there is such a shortage of manly-men. You know the type, the type that drink
beer, do DIY, ride motorbikes, have beards and have rough hands. Men today
drink cocktails, get their eyebrows plucked, have smooth soft hands and
hairless jaw lines. They sing to pop music, and have massages. Hims used to
joke about the oestrogen in the water making men more effeminate, and do you
know what, for whatever reason, he may be on to something.
I was in the office on Monday, and the radio was on. Whitney
Houston’s ‘I wanna dance with somebody’ was playing, and people were singing
along...when I say people, I don’t actually mean the women – the men were the
ones singing along, and it was at that point in time, that I thought ‘yup,
modern men are most certainly not manly’.
I’m not a Gurley-girl (despite not owning or ever wearing
trousers), I spend most Saturdays with my dad doing up my house, wielding hammers,
climbing up and down ladders and putting up shelves. Hims was never into DIY,
so it was always me to do home improvements, and since hims’ exit last year, I
have met a steady stream of men, all equally adverse to hammer wielding. I don’t
understand when men stopped doing DIY. When you look at Fathers Day cards they are
all related to hammers, nails and wood glue...so why do modern men have such a
lack of home improvement skills?
I have a friend who is a plumber, he knows a builder, and
the two of them are what I would call ‘menly-men’. They work hard all day with
pipes and plaster and they don’t fuss about their nails breaking, they don’t
have hand massages and when one of them recently fell off of a ladder and
dislocated his shoulder...he carried on with plastering the ceiling. You could
begin to argue – there you go, modern men who are manly...but these examples
are Generation X not Y. Modern men yelp if they get a paper-cut!
So when I see articles stating that men should be clean
shaven, is this not just another down grade of men and their manly-ness? Stubble
and beards are an attribute to males, why are we turning our men into women?
I know that psychologists say that daddies-girls choose men
like their dads, and I guess in this respect, it’s true. I want a man to be
active, to do DIY and to not moan about it if I ask them to help me dig a hole
(which, for all my feminist beliefs, I do concur that men are better at hole
digging than women).
Oh and if you haven’t seen Mel Brooks’ Men in Tights, this
is to what I was referring: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lUjhEHlh7s
...and slightly less interesting, this was the article:
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