This weekend I took my boyfriend to a salon for the first time. The goal of this trip was for my roommate and me to take my boyfriend and his roommate on a journey through self-care. We decided the best way to start was by getting their eyebrows waxed at a salon. Neither had ever experienced it before, and this is seen as a staple of self-care to many, so we decided they needed to experience it. It was while I was walking to the salon in Rice Village that I realized that I had been asking my boyfriend to let me shape his eyebrows for months—it was only after his roommate decided to go that he agreed. As we have said many times in this class, the longer you study it, the more you see the application of masculinity everywhere. For some reason, my boyfriend was more comfortable doing something typically seen as non-masculine when another male was present. Doing something that goes against masculinity is seen as acceptable when done with another man and as a bit of a joke. But even more important, why is self-care seen as specifically feminine?

 

When you search for self-care for men, what comes up is the male equivalent of treating oneself. By that I mean it’s the absolute least a person can do to not die of stress. An article entitled 25 Self-Care Ideas for Guys is the first thing that comes up when you search self-care for men, and the suggestions all have one thing in common, they’re not too feminine. The article starts off with a great first sentence, “Self-care isn’t just for women.” This beginning is automatically starting off with the assumption that men who read it need to be ensured that taking care of themselves will not decrease their masculinity. It then goes on to give a list of acceptable self-care routines for men. The list includes things like “Go for a run or do a workout”, “Update your wardrobe” or “Treat yourself to a professional close shave”. They never say vague phrases like female lists of the same kind do. In a self-care for women list, you see things like “Go to the salon”, “Go shopping”, and “Exercise”. Even the choice of language when they describe the activities is highly gendered.

Additionally, something else I noticed when bringing my boyfriend to get his eyebrows done is that he and his roommate immediately made the decision to get the most painful form of hair removal. When the beauty technician explained to them the difference between threading eyebrows and waxing them, she said that the only reason to really thread is if you have sensitive skin and can’t wax. They last the same amount of time, look the same, and threading hurts more. Upon hearing that last part, both of the guys decided that if they were doing this, they would get the most painful way possible. This astounded me. Why would someone purposefully cause themselves more pain? Then I realized. In order to allow themselves to participate in such a traditionally female experience, they had to make sure it in some way affirmed their manhood. The best way to do this was to make it a competition to be able to endure the most pain.

After they were done and saw the dramatic difference shaping one’s eyebrows makes to their face, one of the first questions they asked was, “How noticeable is it?” After all they went through to make sure that the experience would not hurt their masculinity in the eyes of others, they couldn’t get away from that nagging feeling that they should be embarrassed. The thought of others seeing them with such a dramatic difference, physical proof of their efforts to better their looks using more than just a comb, was overpowering all the previous preparing they had done to ensure it would not make them less of a man. That is one of the clearest examples of masculinity being performative that I had ever seen. The making jokes and enduring pain was for themselves so that they didn’t need to question whether or not this hurt their masculinity. But the fact still remained that their faces were proof of the fact that they did something un-masculine. The idea that there would be people who saw it that they could not explain it away to, friends in passing or strangers, meant that there would just be people out there who saw them as less masculine. And that was threatening.

Soon enough, they got over it, and when I called them on it, they agreed to do better. But the fact that they had no idea they were participating in such a problematic portrayal of masculinity is exactly what makes it so dangerous. It is ingrained in us from our self-care to our portrayal of the self, and it is going to take way more than trips to the salon to stop it.