ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, October 17, 1996 TAG: 9610170002
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TED ANTHONY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BURT REYNOLDS, now he was one hairy guy. He strutted through the hirsute '70s in unbuttoned shirts or no shirts at all, his thicket of black curlicues forming a veritable Sherwood Forest of fuzz for the world to see.
But today, celebrity chic - from Calvin Klein ads to Hollywood Beefsteak-of-the-Moment Matthew McConaughey - is dictating a different pecking order: no hair at all. And even Reynolds - et tu, Burte? - is sporting a shiny dome for a new movie.
In the changing American male chesthetic, men aren't so wild about hairy anymore. Fuzz, for now, is defunct; waxing, shaving, even the occasional furtive Nair bath are in.
``It used to be gay men doing it. Now it's all men,'' says Lia Schorr, who runs a Manhattan grooming salon and has written a book about men's skin care. Forty percent of her customers are men, and many want chest hair removed.
``The rules of the road with what men are and aren't supposed to do are gone,'' Schorr says.
Through much of time (Greek statuary notwithstanding), the Western male ideal has been hair - head, facial, body - that symbolized sexual prowess. Who among us doesn't associate virility, or at least lampooned virility, with a bearded Cossack or a shirtless Burt? And fathers exhort sons: ``It's good for you; it'll put hair on your chest.''
But now we have celebrities, models and slacker musicians appearing in magazines with nary a chest lock. And we have Schorr and her compatriots across New York and the nation - essentially depilatorial wholesalers.
``A new Darwinian era is upon us,'' writes Guy Trebay, a columnist for the Village Voice. ``After aeons of mutation, the male of the species has shed his protective pelt.''
Yikes! How did this happen? Two words: ambiguous sexuality.
Virtually everyone traces the appearance of bare chests to urban gay communities, especially New York's, aided by what Terence McFarland, Details magazine's fashion editor, calls ``L.A. plasticization.'' And the proliferation of gay images in the media isn't hurting, either.
``I think there's a desire for gay men specifically - the muscle culture of New York in the last half-decade - to form this idealized version of the male body,'' McFarland says. ``A lot of gay guys had their coming out experience and looked immediately to the pornography world, and much of porn is hairless.''
Eric Silverman, a DePauw University anthropologist who studies body image in various cultures, describes an aesthetic that might be called Bijou Phillips Syndrome - androgyny mixed with simmering pubescent eroticism to form ``somebody who looks like a well-manicured boy.'' It's a tabooish ``middle look,'' he says, between traditional male and female images.
``The ideal image - for both men and women - is a pre-pubescent woman who basically has the body of a boy,'' Silverman says. ``So what I think's going on is a combination of androgyny and images of children or very young teen-agers.''
Mainstream androgyny is nothing new in this century; it's usually the women, though, who move toward the men: from 1920s flappers with short haircuts and taped breasts to Annie Hall in a shirt and tie in the 1970s, and Annie Lennox in the 1980s in close-cropped hair and a suit. Of course, there was Ziggy Stardust, but thankfully that passed.
``We seem to be moving to a very hermaphroditic culture. The roles have blurred in terms of what guys do and what girls do, particularly among teen-agers and college-age kids,'' says Anne York, a trend analyst and expert in male body image. ``And the lack of body hair, I think, translates to youth.''
But how to achieve hairlessness? Shaving may be rather innocuous, if itchy, but waxing - a popular alternative - is not exactly comfortable. Anything but, actually.
At one body care parlor in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, a Ukranian waxer ushers customers into a small room with a physician-like table. She rubs talcum powder into the client's chest before using a tongue depressor to swab molten wax onto his breastplate. (My breastplate, actually, truth be told.)
Then: A strip of fabric is pressed onto the waxed chest. Rip. Yell. Bite lip until it bleeds. Repeat for 20 minutes until hairless. Fork over $18. Feel little needle pricks in upper torso for hours.
'Nuff said.
No trend, of course, ever lasts. There are already signs that waxing may be waning, that Samson may not be willing to let those Delilahs of the torso at him much longer.
A few designers have staged shows that have ``celebrated masculinity'' and chipped away at the ``Ken doll stereotype,'' as Details' McFarland puts it. Among the images: models wearing sheer nylon shirts printed with pictures of hairy chests and backdrops that feature giant depictions of hirsute torsos. McFarland himself, no small player in the pipeline between the fashion world and the mainstream, says he prefers hairy-chested models to stay that way.
Still, those on the cutting edge will always find ways to shine.
``The body's becoming an article of clothing. It's like your car: You don't like it, you change it around,'' Silverman says. ``They used to say that `the body is a temple.' No longer. Now the body is The Gap. You go in, you pick something and you leave.''
LENGTH: Long : 102 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. Bye bye Burt: Actor Burt Reynolds showed off hisby CNBhairy chest in a scene from the CBS series ``Evening Shade'' in
1991. 2. Some trend analyzers believe that the lack of body hair is
a symptom of the culture's emphasis on youth. color. 3. But in the
changing American male esthetic, the preference is for sleek,
hairless bodies, along the lines of body builder Arnold
Schwarzenegger.