It’s a mistake to make men feel as bad as women do
News Review & Features
here is a brow bar opening around T the corner from us next month. What’s a brow bar, I hear you ask? You’ve probably been in one without even realising it. Increasingly, they just shove them in the middle of train stations, or shopping centres, so that you can’t go about your daily business without having to dodge a queue of women waiting to have their eyebrows threaded – or, in layman’s terms, have stray hairs pulled out with a piece of cotton that is twisted around the follicle by a woman who holds the other end between her teeth.
Anyway, this new brow bar is specifically for blokes. It comes with a beer bar (geddit?) and men can also avail themselves of a “beard service”, or get their hair coloured. I know, I know, you’re holding your head in your hands, despairing at the state of modern man, and wondering if you need to do your nails. Just a little file and polish while nobody’s looking. It’s important to appear groomed, after all.
(Incidentally, why is “male grooming” a thing that puts people in mind of Mayfair barber shops, whereas the term “female grooming” makes us think of paedophile gangs in Rochdale? Can’t we just ban the word altogether, except in relation to the upkeep of pets?)
This was the week new figures from the Home Office’s crime survey revealed that steroid use has quadrupled among young men in the past 12 months. Ian Hamilton, a lecturer in addiction at the University of York, said that “in some ways, young men have been catching up with young women over the last few years. They are more sensitive and vigilant about how they should look and this is becoming more acute.” Hamilton said that programmes such as Love Island were contributing to this body obsession among young males. And speaking of Love Island… I just read somewhere that Kem, the male half of the couple that won the reality show, spends 45 minutes blow-drying his hair. “I get sweaty doing it, getting the volume,” he revealed, before adding that he uses Moroccan oil for a wavy look.
Meanwhile, David Gandy, the closest thing there has ever been to a walking, talking, living Ken doll, has become Britain’s highest-earning male model and the only bloke to make the top 10 of the models’ rich list (modelling being one of the only industries, bar eyebrow threading, where the pay gap is reversed).
Now I’m all for men wanting to be women and women wanting to be men. If a man wants to dab on a bit of fake tan and spend valuable football-watching time doing his hair, that’s totally cool with me (unless of course he happens to be married to me, in which case, can he learn how to hang a picture and use a screwdriver?)
I just have trouble equating brow bars and blow-dries for boys with progress. It’s as if, in the fight for equality, someone, somewhere, gave up and decided to go down the pub instead.
“We could make things better for women,” said the big equality tsar, over a glass of sauvignon blanc in the Rat and Parrot, “but wouldn’t it be easier if we just made things really rubbish for men, too? Instead of trying to please narrow the gender pay gap or tackle the discrepancy in maternity and paternity leave in any meaningful or serious way, we could subject young men to the same ridiculous aesthetic standards that women have been held up to for centuries. Then nobody will notice and us middle-aged blokes can get on with ruling the world!”
Equality is something that will benefit us all, but instead what seems to have happened is that both genders have been handed the worst bits of the opposite sex and told to run wild with it, like a sub-standard consolation prize.
So men are offered crippling self-esteem issues, as if this might somehow placate us ladies, while women are told they can drink as much beer and have as much sex as they want, because obviously that will make up for being discriminated against in the workplace.
People often talk about “feminism gone wrong” – witness the female postie suspended this week for leering at a builder – but really all that happened with us ladettes is that we happily took all the horrible bits of being a man under the illusion that it would eventually lead to some of the better ones. Silly girls!
I think what is needed now, to stop this race to the bottom, is some meninism. Blokes need to put down their hair straighteners and demand that the world gets serious about equality, instead of offering up some poisoned version of it. It is not enough to emasculate males; to tell them that the infertility crisis is their problem because of a decline in sperm quality, and make them feel worthless for failing to adhere to a plastic notion of masculinity.
The feminists and the meninists need to get together. Then, and only then, will we all be able to live happily ever after.
‘I have trouble equating brow bars for boys with progress’