Quick story: My stepmother once gave me a bottle of moisturizer she bought in Paris that promised, in small-print French sentences that I understood every third word of, to make my skin basically perfect. I placed it in my medicine cabinet dead center on a lit shelf—where it looked extremely handsome next to the Tom’s toothpaste and Speed Stick and ReNu—like an exchange student who’d stumbled into a Rite Aid. A small dollop on my skin after a shower made me feel elevated and improved in some ineffable way.
Loved that moisturizer. Loved having it. I recently ran out—after two years. Six and a half ounces gone. Which means I must have barely ever used it. Was it more important to my sense of self than to the health and texture of my skin? Setting that question swiftly aside, I found another tube on the Internet for the price of a Midtown porterhouse, and clicked “Buy.”
That was Tuesday. Yesterday I read Andrew O’Hagan’s half-bravura, half-daffy meditation on men and maleness and the neutering effects of over-grooming and self-love for the New York Times. It’s one of those strenuously written trend pieces that almost certainly identifies nothing that could be called a trend. “Over-grooming is now a mode of hysteria common to every other man I know,” he writes. (Every other man? How many is that?) “It has made the men of my generation into emotional shadows of their former selves.”
Save us from such argumentative banalities, right? And yet to give O’Hagan credit: The guy knows how not to hold back. Here he is at delightful full throttle: “But surely there is only room for one oscillating microdermabrasion brush in any happy heterosexual bathroom. I don’t care if you think it’s sexist: It’s not a man’s job to pluck his eyebrows or plump his lips. People must do as they wish, of course, but to my mind (and according to my prejudices) male beauty loses its essence with premeditation. It’s a failure of natural elegance for a man to seem beautified, and the pressure on him to be so may be the biggest sexual category error of our times.”
I’m not sure how many sexual category errors there have been in our times—or what an oscillating microdermabrasion brush looks like—but whatever, stipulated: A certain class of privileged urban straight men has become a little obsessed with gluten and coconut water and we routinely burst into tears while ferrying our kids to water polo class in our Ford F-150s. (Hang on, O’Hagan: What?) Are these problems—strictly speaking—problems?
Second quick story: My wife and I and our two kids recently met two other sets of Brooklyn parents and their kids at Prime Meats in Carroll Gardens. The total was six adults and six children for dinner. Disaster. Mitigated only by the fact that this was something like 3:45 p.m. Still, we were a sight. The children busied themselves with their parents’ iPhones and crayons and the adults huddled as far from them as possible. Our conversation—particularly that of the three dads—revolved around the horrors of age, the desperate attempt to stay thin, and what remained of our former exercise routines. We discussed recent renunciations of sugar, alcohol, gluten. My friend described the euphoria he felt not eating carbs for a month. Meanwhile, this is what we ordered: cheeseburgers, fries, gin, beer.
Which is to say there is the hysteria of self-image, of imagined perfection, of pledges of self-improvement and beautification. And there is what we actually are, what we do, what we follow through on. I don’t know. About male narcissism perhaps the less said the better. Where’s my French moisturizer?
Taylor Antrim’s novel Immunity will be published by Regan Arts in May.
The post In Defense of Men’s Grooming: One Vogue Editor on Why He’s Not Giving Up His Moisturizer appeared first on Vogue.
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