Akshay Kumar

If yesteryear heroes such as Amitabh Bachchan and Vinod Khanna took off their shirts to reveal their hairiness, today’s macho men Shah Rukh Khan, Hrithik Roshan and Salman Khan fling theirs off to flaunt their hairless torsos.

Fashions change — and how. Today, men consider body hair — traditionally a symbol of masculinity and virility — an unwanted feature, reports a research team at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. That perhaps explains contemporary media portrayals of the ideal male body — lean, muscular and hairless.

Body hair removal, thought to be a women’s practice, is common with men too, say the researchers. And it is not to do with just back or chest hair — more and more men are opting for hair removal in the buttock and pubic areas. The researchers chose 106 gay men and 228 heterosexual men and queried them on their hair removal practices. They were asked to mention if they ever engaged in hair removal (back, buttock and pubic hair), identify the methods used (waxing, shaving, creams, laser treatment or any other), specify the frequency of the activity and give the reasons for removing these types of hair.

The results indicated that many gay and heterosexual men remove their back, buttock and pubic hair regularly and that their primary reason for doing so is to maintain or improve their appearance. The researchers also found that the former were more likely than the latter to have removed such body hair. “The work makes an important contribution to the male body image literature by investigating an increasingly prevalent behaviour among men… It explores body image concerns beyond weight and muscularity,” they write in Body Image.

The researchers think there are many reasons for the shift towards hairlessness, but one that has received empirical support is that both women and men are simply becoming more disgusted with any type of body hair. “Subconsciously, this may be a reflection of the desire to limit the reminders of our animalness,” Yolanda Martins, the lead author, told KnowHow.

Hairiness seems to have been replaced by brawniness as a symbol of masculinity. No wonder aspiring models are flocking to salons and skin specialists for silky smooth skins. But hair removal in the buttocks and pubic area? “Certainly not a practice here,” says dermatologist Sachin Verma of Apollo Gleneagles Hospitals, Calcutta. “It may be a Western phenomenon and the report an isolated one,” he says.