Last weekend a male friend of mine spent a good ten minutes telling me how he refuses to buy moisturiser. He was pretty fired up about it, and kept shouting about how men are under increasing pressure to look good and buy unnecessary products.
We’ll skim over the fact that he kind of glazed over when I tried to say women have been the target of this sort of rubbish for decades. He seemed to think it was natural that we buy beauty products, and he didn’t really listen when I gave him my best Beauty Myth lecture.
He had a point though – instead of things getting easier for women when it comes to appearance, they’re getting harder for both sexes. There are more adverts for beauty products aimed at men, more fashion lines aimed at men, more standards for them to adhere to. You can tell some of them feel increasingly insecure about their bodies, and are taking to spending hours at the gym, pumping themselves full of horrible protein shakes and capsules. I have no idea why, or how they ever got the idea that aspiring to look like Hulk Hogan is a good thing. But I do think it’s a negative direction for us to be moving in.
Much as I would love to, I don’t wander about looking like a hag all the time. We all have to make some effort on what we look like – whether you’re male or female, appearance plays some part in how people perceive us. It’s unrealistic to expect this to change. I just think it’s counter-productive for looks to matter as much as they do. Worrying too much about your appearance can make you cripplingly shy, insecure and unhappy. It means you expend large amounts of energy, focus and money on buying and doing things to make you look better, when you could be out spending your money and time on brilliant stuff like cake and beer.
I understood my friend’s frustration and I hope for their sakes men are more able to ignore the marketing campaigns and pressure than we have been - it's not fun spending your teenage years obsessively staring at pictures of models and wondering how it's even possible to be that thin. I hope men even have a bit of a light bulb moment and realise how much more rubbish it can be for women.
But things aren’t looking great – cosmetics companies have realised men’s insecurities can be exploited in the same way as women’s, and they have the money and power to push adverts on them, airbrush pictures and generally manufacture a need for grooming. I’d advise men everywhere to run for the hills, but I don’t think there’s anywhere to hide.