fur on film

Last evening I saw a TV advertisement that followed a trend that is mostly annoying, but mildly disturbing for me. I didn't catch what the ad was selling, but in it a young man pulls off his shirt to have a beautiful young woman apply suntan lotion, and not only is his front side covered with thick fur, but so is his back side. It was not his actual body hair of course. It was comically applied fake fur à la the werewolf movies of the 1950s and designed to make viewers go "eeuuwww" right along with the beautiful young woman recoiling on screen.

Body hair has taken a blow in the media recently. Movies like Hitch and 40-Year-Old Virgin have made comic clippings of body hair, getting audiences to roar at the inevitable slapstick of quick painful hair removal, while preaching the subtle message that a man will be more appealing if he is completely smooth skinned. Both movies portray a nerdy, chubby, complexly stunted simpleton as unable to get a date with the right woman, and waxing is presented as a big part of the solution. It is great material for comedy, but it sends a lousy message. Body hair is now automatically up there at the top of the list of unlovable traits for men, right behind halitosis, flatulence, and prison records.

This is, of course, old news. Clipping, waxing and plucking have been trends in men's fashion for the past decade, starting, as every trend does, with the gay leading edge and moving through the metros to the suburban heteros. Now even the Long Island and Bay Ridge boys on the streets of Brooklyn look like morning-after drag queens, with eyebrows plucked down to perfect Joan Crawford arches. As with any trend there is some hope when it works its way down to the plebes, but I fear this one won't let go too quickly.

On a regular basis I get photo submissions from guys wishing to model for me, who have trimmed their body hair down to one even length, top to bottom, like zosia grass. When I suggest that they let it grow out for the photo session, some get nervous and ask if they can trim during the photo session; some get down right defensive. They believe clipping shows off their muscle definition better (though nice natural body hair can often accentuate the lines of a well defined torso). They even believe trimming their pubic hair down to stubble will make their dicks look bigger (but, um, unfortunately they simply look like guys with a little Velcro mustache above their small dicks). The same guys would wince if I suggested that they shave their heads bald, wear black army boots with biking shorts and turn the brim of their baseball cap backward, the Chelsea uniform that they conformed to religiously circa 1995, but they can’t recognize today’s waxing and clipping trend as just that, a trend.

Now I’m not a total wolf-man fetishist. I can take or leave back hair, and I’m not a strict adherent to "the-more-the-better" beliefs of some fur fans. But I do think nice natural body hair is sexy. I grew up in the 1960s and '70s with the furry likes of Sean Connery, Robert Redford, and Burt Reynolds whipping their shirts off gratuitously in every film they made. Advertising, from the Marlborough Man to RC Cola to Johnson's Baby Oil, relied heavily on hairy-chested models back in the day. And, as nature would have it, at least half of the men I saw shirtless around me had some nice frosting on their cakes.

It's not that I think everyone should be hairy, but I do think there's room for variety. Let the trends swing toward depilatories for a while, but don't send a message that body hair is unlovable. The variety in tastes out there is what makes the world go around. Just as Kate-Moss-style emaciation isn't everyone's preference in women, neither is Aaron Carter the ultimate man. I'll take Jason Lee or Patrick Warburton over Justin Timberlake any day, as long as no one convinces them to shave it all off to make themselves more lovable.