Thursday, May 02, 2013

The Chest Hair Problem


What follows is a parody of this article.



In case you haven't heard it, the hairyfying initiative is affecting men in the UK.  Some men spend thousands of pounds having hair planted on their chests.

This could be a passing fad.  After all, Western art has always preferred bare-chested men.  Think of the statue of David.

To be sure, the bare male chest is subjective,  even silly, given that no two men have exactly the same number of chest hairs.  But artists, poets and chest-obsessed women alike have been drawn to this ideal for centuries.  The Platonic Pectoral Idea.*

That's not to say some women and men aren't turned on by hairy chests.  They clearly have an audience, just not in the mainstream.

“I don’t think the  gorilla will ever be in vogue,” says Cruella Feminazi, a British-born aesthete and creative director. “Like any good design, it’s all about balance,” she says.

Bare chests may not be de rigeur at the moment, but there’s something about the statue of David and the glistening chests of famous actors that never gets old.   Indeed, we have been ogling bare chests recently, perhaps because they are revealing, muscular, gloriously shiny and both proud and defiant of our voyeuristic gaze.
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Credit to this term goes to ReadMeGravatar at Eschaton.