Manscaping: our man hits the wax

You’ve heard of man-bags and manorexia. But manscaping, the extreme grooming trend, drags men across a whole new frontier

On the whole, the modern male has put up a rather pathetic defence against the process of enforced feminisation that began about two decades ago. Indeed, our primary response has been simply to mock ourselves — most recently by finding new and ironically humorous ways to combine the word “man” with the everyday nouns of our post-emasculation existence.

Thus a briefcase is now a man-bag; going down the pub with a friend is a mate-date (especially if one of you has a man-crush); the act of greeting said friend is a man-hug; the holiday you might discuss while supping on your mint-infused vodka would be a man-cation (on which you would almost certainly lounge poolside in a man-kini). And of course if you were ever to lose weight — rather than just obsess over calorie counts — that would make you a manorexic.

The variations on the man-word theme are of course endless and constantly evolving. The other day I found myself asking a supermarket employee where I could find the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Light — For Men”. And the most fashionable Hollywood genre of the moment is the bromantic comedy (the latest example of which being I Love You, Man).

Which brings us to the final frontier, the last taboo, the great capitulation: “manscaping”.

When I was first asked to write about this subject, I initially assumed that this was a new term for landscape gardening. As amusing as that sounded, wasn’t digging up soil a bit, well, manly in the first place? Wasn’t the whole point of the man-word phenomenon to poke fun at our surrender to all things poncey? Wasn’t it now getting a little confused — a tad off-target? Then my wife explained it to me.

“They don’t mean gardening,” she said. “They mean, um, ‘gardening’.”

“Say again?”

“Tending to the garden, Chris.”

“Like, flowers and stuff?”

“No. ‘Down there’.”

“I don’t under-” “Your pubic hair, for God’s sake.

Ah.

For the next several minutes I steadfastly refused to believe that any self-respecting member of the hairier sex — no matter how metrosexualised — would engage in such nether-region shenanigans. Then I thought about it for a while. Swimmers do it, sort of. Cyclists almost certainly do it. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger does it. (He described his decision to run for governor of California as “the most difficult decision I’ve made in my entire life, except the one I made in 1978 when I decided to get a bikini wax.”) So why not the rest of us?

Then I asked around a bit, and discovered that a truly alarming number of my male friends were already tending regularly to their dark and musty backwaters. “Crack, sack, and back,” said one LA-based mate. “Get it done every month. I want my girlfriend’s to be as clean as a whistle, so I can hardly go around looking like the Beast of Bodmin, can I?” He then proceeded to inform me of a trimming device he had purchased from Amazon, which he described as the Ballmaster 3000. Never in my life had I ever felt so, well, married.

A quick Google search confirmed my worst fears: manscaping is one of the fastest-growth sectors of the beauty industry. Manicures, pedicures, waxing, trimming, massaging, facialising, steaming, scrubbing, ionic detoxing, even Botoxing — all are now considered normal procedures in the reformed male’s vanity routine. Clearly, further investigation was required. So I headed for the top-rated gentleman’s grooming club in Los Angeles: the Gendarmerie.

Owned by the ex-music industry boss Topper Schroeder — who looks 50 but is in fact 72 — the Gendarmerie is located on a quiet West Hollywood side street in what the locals would call a “craftsman-style cottage”. Inside, and in spite of this being WeHo (aka, Boyz Town), Schroeder has gone to great lengths to make the heterosexual male feel as though he’s in his natural habitat: heavy rugs, leather chairs, and a suitably enormous flatscreen, tuned to the ESPN sports channel. They’ll even serve you a drink, although the suggested lemon Martini somehow gives the game away. They might as well set off a Klaxon.

Well, here goes, I thought.

“There’s something about being groomed, it’s good for your self-esteem,” declares Schroeder — one of the friendliest, most hospitable people you’re ever likely to meet — as he gives me a brief tour. “Everyone’s human. To me, there’s nothing more gratifying than to see a construction guy coming in here and getting a pedicure and falling asleep halfway through it.”

Schroeder and his business partners opened the Gendarmerie five years ago as an adjunct to their already successful department store fragrance business. (Schroeder quit the music industry to concentrate on selling his Gendarme scent and the decision paid off when Sharon Stone told a reporter that it was her preferred fragrance, even though it was intended for men). “There were 50 places for women around here, and nothing for men,” said Schroeder. “We still get lots of women, but about 60 per cent of our customers are male, and probably only about half of them are gay.”

Now clearly, for the sake of research, I had to undergo some kind of manscapery. “How about I get my nails done?” I suggested.

Before I had time to raise a convincing objection I was being led into a dimly lit and pleasantly scented outhouse by a 37-year-old Mexican named Everardo, who promised to relieve me of the unsightly tufts of manliness on my upper arms along with the fine layer of hair that for 20 years had kept my beer belly warm.

“Women notice these things,” reassured Schroeder. “It makes it a whole lot easier to like a man if he likes himself.” He then asked if I was absolutely sure that I didn’t want to do anything more radical. It was on the house, after all. “You won’t believe what people get waxed,” he said. “Men have this thing, it’s called ‘visual enhancement’. When you trim, it looks bigger.” He raised his eyebrows. What about the Ballmaster 3000? “Sure, you can buy a trimmer. But you can’t always reach, can you?”

Bloody hell, I wondered, what had I done?

An hour of extraordinary agony followed, during which a great deal of shouting took place and an even greater number of profanities were uttered. At one point I pledged to buy my wife flowers next time she paid a visit to her Russian bikini-line enforcer.

Suffer? I literally bled. From every follicle. I drew a line, however, at anything below the belt. No crack, thank you. And absolutely no sack.

“It’s always worst the first time,” reassured Everardo. What surprised me the most, however, was how weirdly satisfying it all was. Satisfying in the way that getting your car waxed feels. Satisfying in the way that putting up a shelf using a complicated type of Rawlplug feels. As an added bonus, the pain of having my body hair ripped violently from its roots eliminated any psychological unease over being manhandled while almost completely starkers by a member of the same sex.

At last, it was done. “You look like a giant bearded baby,” observed The Times photographer, Jeff, marvelling at the sight of my infant-smooth (and still bleeding) belly, which I hadn’t set eyes on since the late Eighties.

I sat up and exhaled, loudly. It was then that Jeff helpfully pointed out the obvious pitfall of waxing selected parts of your anatomy only. “It’s like you’re wearing a hairy bra,” he said, photographing my remaining chest hair as though it were crime scene evidence.

Overall, however, I was rather pleased with this manscaping lark. Besides, how poncey could it be, when such immense physical endurance was required?

Granted, I immediately began to miss my belly hair — my stomach didn’t even feel like it belonged to me anymore — but I was definitely glad to bid farewell to my “trucker arms”. I felt so good about it, in fact, that I briefly indulged a dangerous fantasy of sleeveless T-shirts.

Finally, at the very end of the session, which would have cost me about $90 (£60) had I been paying, I took a steam shower, lathered myself down with some kind of soothing lotion (on Everardo’s advice), then went and got a manicure. I felt so relaxed (or perhaps relieved) I almost passed out at the table. And then, after finally accepting one of Schroeder’s Martinis, it was time to leave.

“Don’t be surprised if you get a bit of a rash,” warned Everardo. “It’ll go away in a few days. Your skin gets used to waxing the more you do it.” Pah. I thought. Like I can’t handle it.

After a rather uncomfortable night, I awoke the next morning to what could only be described as a horror show. Every newly hairless follicle on my entire body now played host to a furious, hospital-grade rash, which gave me hideous flashbacks to teenage back acne. Far from improving my self-esteem and revitalising my love life, my adventure in manscaping had essentially rendered any contact with the opposite sex impossible. For a married man, this is annoying. For a bachelor, it could be a catastrophe. The rash didn’t just last for a few days, either. Try a month.

Did my wife prefer the hairless me? Hard to tell, because by the time I dared reveal my body to her, the fuzz was already halfway back. If I was truly committed, of course, I would have immediately returned to the Gendarmerie to go through it all again, allowing my skin to get used to the process. As it is, I think I’ll save any future waxings for my car, and leave the sessions at the torture chamber to those who qualify as the tougher sex these days — the girls.

Courtesy -Timesonline