‘THAT COULD do with a trim,” said my wife, as I stepped out of the shower. “What?” I asked, following her gaze downwards. “This?”
For a brief moment we stood and looked at my nether regions, like a couple of landscape gardeners eyeing an unruly herbaceous border.
Her interest was recently piqued by a pub conversation with a divorced friend of ours, back in the dating game for the first time since the early 1990s. What had changed, enquired my wife, a bit too keen to know.
There was the obvious stuff, said our friend – texting, email, internet dating sites. The effect of this, she said, was the men she’d met were more emotionally open, or at least felt able to put down in writing what the previous generation had often struggled to articulate. But of far greater interest was another revelation: the apparent disappearance of male pubic hair.
Women have been doing this for years, of course – some trace it back to a Sex in the Cityepisode when Carrie's decision to go "bare down there" took the Brazilian mainstream.
Last month, the ‘Muff March’ was organised via Facebook, protesting on Harley Street about the pressure to conform to the designer vagina aesthetic. Time will tell whether men will follow suit, as the tyranny of the razor carries with it the promise to make the goods appear a little bigger.
But there is one thing that makes the whole anti-hair movement noteworthy. It’s new.
This is significant because we live in a period of cultural stagnation, according to some commentators. In a recent essay in Vanity Fair, the writer Kurt Andersen put forward the argument that the last 20 years had witnessed technological miracles while culture – music, film, literature and fashion in particular – has hardly changed at all.
The appearance of the world, he writes, has altered less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. No significant new music category has emerged since hip hop in the late 1980s. Hollywood movies have discovered CGI and 3G but the final product itself, the films, have become homogenised.
Fashion is an endless rehashing of the past.
“There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972 – giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes,” writes Andersen, with images from 1992.
Keep repeating this experiment – compare 1972 with 1952, then 1952 with 1932 and so on – and “the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising-all of it”.
Yet it doesn’t apply to the last two decades. There are plenty of theories as to why this might have happened. The huge economic and political upheaval of the past 20 years may have made us want to grab hold of the familiar. We’re taking so many giant steps in other areas of our lives that, culturally, we don’t want more risk and disruption. While technology flies forward at a rate that tests even the sci-fi genre, it’s comforting that Lady Gaga is rehashing Madonna.
Today, style is not practised only from influential niches; everyone aspires to be cool. And when everyone’s cool, nobody is. “There is more music around today that is just okay,” said music journalist and publisher David Hepworth recently. The democratisation of music and film is one of the great innovations of the past 20 years, but that is about distribution. Given a laptop and Garage Band, most people can make an okay sound – but it has flattened musical innovation.
The other factor is economic: style is now a multi-billion euro industry, from Living Etc magazine to Ikea superstores, from Gap to iTunes. Tastefulness, says Andersen, has become homogenised.
The demand for a financial return on this money has a chilling effect on innovation, there is just too much to lose from huge, genre-defying step changes in taste.
Is this how great societies end, asks Andersen, trapped in a vicious cycle of economic progress and cultural stagnation, constantly looking backwards for inspiration and leaving genuinely new thinking to those with most to gain, the developing economies for example.
As I walk to the bathroom, electric shaver in hand, I am, at last, at the cutting edge.