Harden the f**k up!

Poofters, pansies, soft cocks, fairies, metrosexuals, pantyhosers…these days there are a myriad of terms to describe the iffeminate amongst the male species. With growing acceptance of homosexuality and a slow but unstoppable requirement for men to be more sensitive in relationships we are moving further away from our pillaging, mutton bone chomping ancestors. Not a bad thing of course. I’m only a little fella and the thought of being banged up by my hairy cousins over a vat of pig fat scares me senseless. But there are limits to the march of manlessness surely?

Last week I went into the local hairdressers for a quick shave and cut. Here in India the hairdressers are amazing. You get a head massage, a shave and a good cut for 10 usd in the more expensive places. But it’s what surrounded me that shocked me. Next to me were not a number of young blokes getting their noggins chopped…oh no…instead the scene before me was something akin to my cousins bridal party getting done up before her wedding.

To my right a man with zucchini slices over his eyes smiled contendedly as a foul mixture was plastered over his face with something that looked like it was once used to mix brick mortar. Next to him a fat young bloke cooed as his attentive masseuse knelt before him massaging the gunk out from between his toes. To my left (and I’m not shitting you here) a guy was getting his underarms trimmed! With the benefit of the mirror I could see the other side of the room was no different. Tweezers, oily fingers, weird coloured moisturizers and gels swished and flicked into a gooey nightmare. AARRRRGGGHHHH!

Hyperventilating from the shock I paid up and got the fuck out of there. What had I just witnessed? Had something happened in the past 25 years that I’d missed? I get my hair cut on average 8 times a year and never had I come across such a display of male preening. It was like watching some weird pre production make up set for the stage version of ‘Manoirs of a Geisha’.

There had to be an explanation and in an effort to find out what was happening to my perceptions of masculinity I asked around with a few friends of friends (I’m pretty sure none of my mates have had this done but then again Johnno does have extremely nice skin).

It turns out that I’ve missed the boat completely. Somewhere around 2003 there was a show called ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’ in the U.S where flannelette wearing men with takeaway food stains on their shirts got showered, shaved, manicured and moisturized until they morphed into David Beckham wannabe’s. The poor blokes dutifully underwent their torture at the hands of a bunch of gay blokes and the message was clear – unless you were groomed and well dressed in this brave new century you weren’t worthy of a girlfriend, boyfriend or many friends at all for that matter.

But the conspiracy has worked. (I’m not sure who’s behind it yet, maybe some strange coupling of the moisturizer companies and Al Qaida). A lot of my male mates now openly admit to using moisturizers on a bi-daily basis. One of them even takes a moisturizer pump to work and squirts his way through the day! Another puts so much shit in his hair that I’m not even sure if it’s his hair or a recently recovered sea bird from some oil spill in the North Sea.

Sure a lot of it has to do with the nature of work these days. We no longer slave away in pits all day to find a few kgs of coal returning home to collapse on the bed. Now we’re ‘marketers’ and ‘traders’ and ‘consultants’ who supposedly need to maintain our looks and fresh image for all those bullshit presentations to people we actually despise. Apparently image is still more important than actual content.

Stuff it I say. I’m going to wear my smelly track pants down to the supermarket without worrying about the disapproving looks. I’m going to listen to the horse races on my 1996 make walkman and yell out in the street when I (some day) win a race. I’m going to spill beer on my chin and not even wipe it off. I’m going to get wrinkles and squint all the time to make them more pronounced. I’m going to….

Shit, it’s 11.30am…better run or I’ll miss my appointment for the Brazilian.