Give me a bookshelf of romances, virtual or real, and I’ll show you dozens of manscaped men. Naked torsos totally devoid of hair, sometimes gleaming with sweat, almost always sculpted.
When did this happen? Where did all the hair go? Is it being knitted into sweaters? Is it clogging our drains?
The other day I saw a romance cover where the guy on the front actually had a chest of hair, like most men do. It looked unnatural.
I read some of these books with manscaped men on the front, and someday I’ll probably have a book with a hairless guy on the cover too. But I’m not sure I always like it. Sometimes a bare hairless chest is hot, and sometimes it screams “newborn gerbil” to me.
Ladies, can I get an amen? Or would you rather I pass your boyfriend a razor?
Because, if the prevalence of these covers is any indication, it’s just me sometimes bemoaning the loss of all that hair. Whatever happened to a hairy chest being equated with virility?
Perhaps younger and/or cooler people reading this can inform me. Maybe in the ebb and flow of cultural trends (wax and wane?) male body hair is going out for good. At least on our book covers.
You may be thinking, women shave and wax and pluck; shouldn’t men be subject to the same standards and torture? To which I’d respond: Is this really a new step in equality? Must we now fight our men for spots at the salon?
Sometimes we need to draw the line. I recently saw a nearly hairless man on the cover of book about a werewolf. If any man should have chest hair, it’s certainly a man who turns into a dog.
AMEN! Also “If any man should have chest hair, it’s certainly a man who turns into a dog.” – hahahaha!
I stand by my dog-men-needing-chest-hair belief 🙂