I think we all know where this is heading.
A quick scan of anthropological literature shows that, in fact, not only were many ancient men preoccupied with trimming their bear-hair, they also invented every supposedly modern way of doing so hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of years before we did. South Australian Aboriginal men in the nineteenth century, for example, initiated their young men with an all-over hair-stripping—using beeswax.16 Shaving, also, was employed by numerous groups, among them: the Polynesians, who denuded themselves with the aid of sharp shells and sharks’ teeth; and the African Nuban men, who shaved themselves all over with iron razors to achieve the blank canvas needed for their extravagant body painting. Roman men had their armpits, beards, chests, backs, and legs tweezered by slave attendants in public bathhouses. Even chemical depilatories were occasionally used by ancient and tribal metrosexuals. German anthropologist Martin Gusinde, for example, wrote that the Papuan Ayum Pygmy men he visited in the 1950s:
…get rid of their beards by rubbing the juice of a certain herb into the areas of beard growth. This loosened the hair roots, enabling them to be plucked singly with the nails of the thumb and middle finger.17
But if Beckham clearly has nothing to teach these prehistoric preeners, then, depilation-wise, it also turns out our estimate of the relative agony of our “back, sack, and crack” procedure is way off. Anthropologists’ reports of those waxing Australian Aboriginals, for example, make it plain that the procedure was excruciating. That, in fact, was its point: it was an initiation ordeal. Waxing, Australian Aboriginal style, involved the unfortunate youth being held down while an older man plucked his pubic, armpit, and body hairs out, one by one, with a lump of wax on his finger—the older men swapping shifts as they tired. Aboriginal boys were, however, only slightly worse off than ancient Greek metrosexual men: they stripped their pubic patches by burning them with an oil lamp. If the depilation was applied as a punishment (which it sometimes was for adultery) the procedure was even more severe, being carried out by harsh rubbing with a handful of fiery embers.18 Roman soldiers used almost as harsh, if not quite as hot, a technique in removing their beards—they ground them off with abrasive pumice stone. Then there were the astonishingly dangerous chemical concoctions medieval Turks used to depilate themselves at the baths—arsenic mixed with extremely caustic quicklime and water.19 Considering quicklime is often used to dissolve human corpses, I think it is fair to say the dreaded “back, sack, and crack” is, by comparison, about as scary as putting on the wrong color eyeliner.
* * *
Sins of the foreskin
It might seem surprising, given the ancient Greeks’ blasé attitude to male nudity, that they still held some notions of modesty. Self-respecting Greeks were quite happy to shed their clothes for nude symposia (“drinking parties”), so long as they didn’t suffer the mortifying embarrassment of appearing psolos (“with glans penis exposed”).20 Greek men so idealized the posthon (“long foreskin”) that covered the head of the penis that appearing with a short one—leaving one’s…ahem…tip exposed—was considered seriously gross. The playwright Aristophanes, for example, ridicules one character as “an old man who’s filthy, hunchbacked, wretched, wrinkled, bald, toothless, and, by God, I think he’s psolos too.”
It was to avoid this shame that naked Greek partygoers, and athletes, tied their foreskins shut with the leather kynodesme, “dog leash.” For those unfortunates either circumcised or born deficient, a variety of remedies was prescribed: the physician Dioscorides of Anazarbus suggested soaking in honey; his fellow medical man Galen recommended stretching with a hanging lead weight, the antilipodermos; or, as a last resort, the philosopher Celsus suggested a brutal surgical procedure in which the skin of the penis was sliced open on the shaft and yanked forward to provide an artificial posthon.20 And to think, all we have to worry about is whether our fly is up.
* * *
It’s not looking good for our metrosexual champion, David Beckham. His narcissism apparently wouldn’t qualify him for the job of backstage testicle-taper in the Wodaabe gerewol beauty parade. What about the second leg of the metrosexual trifecta, then: feminization? Coad describes the conventional definition of a feminized male as one who “was comfortable with women and feminine ways” and who “explored the feminine side of his nature.” We have Beckham’s quote about his feminine side to indicate that he certainly sees himself as quite feminized. But what are his actual girlyman (to quote Arnold Schwarzenegger) qualifications? Sure, he’s comfortable plastering his face with womanly cosmetics, but as we’ve seen, in that contest he’s a poor second to the Wodaabe and other tribal men. What about his habit of draping himself in female clothing—the famed sarongs, sequined tracksuits, and so on? Well, for starters, the sarong is not actually an inherently feminine piece of clothing. Even in the place that gave the garment its name, Malaysia, sarongs are as much masculine as feminine garments. The same problem arises with Becks’s tracksuits, which, however sequined, are not indisputably feminine dress items. At the annual gerewol, by contrast, Wodaabe men wear actual women’s dresses—the gorgeous, patterned wraps of Wodaabe women that are fastened around the hips by a very feminine belt of beads, and around the knees by a tight leather or cloth strap (to restrict the wearer to appropriately coy and mincing steps).
Modern metrosexual defenders might protest that wearing just one dress a year hardly qualifies—even Dennis Rodman, for example, has slipped into (of all things) a wedding frock in public. But many ancient and tribal males embraced their feminine selves all year round. Some, indeed, took the embrace so far that they almost became women. One such group were the Tahitian mahus—men who so feminized themselves that they were often mistaken for women by early European explorers, as described by Captain William Bligh after examining one particular mahu:
…he had the appearance of a Woman, his Yard & Testicles being so drawn in under him…from custom of keeping them in that position…[that]…those [men] who are connected with him have their beastly pleasures gratified between his thighs…on examining his privates I found them both very small and the Testicles remarkably so, being not larger than a boy’s of 5 or 6 years old, and very soft as in a state of decay…
The mahu’s adoption of a receptive role in sex was one marker of his feminization, but there were others. Mahus also embraced the everyday aspects of female life, as this missionary’s report makes clear:
…they [the mahus] go among the women, observe all their customs, eat & drink & sleep with them & do all the offices of females in making cloth etc…21
A similar eagerness to embrace the world of women’s work was also noted among the fa’afafine “women men” of Samoa, encountered by nineteenth-century seafarers. Fa’afafine boys could be picked in childhood by their attraction to women’s work such as cooking, cleaning, and nursing. Fa’afafine might, or might not, grow up to become receptive homosexuals and to wear women’s clothing, but their embrace of the feminine was so total that they, like mahus, sometimes went on to become secondary wives for more conventional Samoan males. Lest both mahus and fa’afafine be thought a Polynesian peculiarity, even one of the most hyper-masculine tribal societies, the North American Sioux Indians, had a class of men who lived, and loved, as women. Termed “berdache” by early anthropologists, these Sioux men renounced the warrior’s life in favor of a womanly life of weaving, nursing, cooking, and receptive homosexuality. So completely did they adopt their feminine roles that they, too, might become second or third wives to other Sioux men.
It’s difficult to see David Beckham, whatever his feminization credentials, going quite that far.
That, apparently, is strike two. What, then, of the final leg in the metrosexual trifecta: eroticization? On that score, it is clear that we modern metrosexuals really are more prone to sexual exhibitionism than our immediate forefathers. A survey by GQ magazine, for example, found that while no ads prior to 1984 depicted men semi-nude or in sexually evocative contexts, thirty
-seven ads in that year did so. By 1994 that figure had risen to forty-three. Beckham, too, has clearly taken erotic display of his male body to new heights: a 2002 film of him sleeping, commissioned by London’s National Portrait Gallery, was described by one critic as an erotic masterpiece in which the viewer is made to feel they are sleeping beside Becks. But what about our more distant forefathers? How does our exhibitionism rate when compared to the Wodaabe, or to that of other tribal or ancient men?
The gerewol, for example, is clearly an overtly erotic display. Apart from the womanly wraps covering their thighs, and their gorgeous jewelry and ornamentation, Wodaabe males compete bare-chested in both the gerewol and the yaake. Even those decorations are profoundly erotic symbols: the strings of cowrie shells that Wodaabe men wear for necklaces at gerewol represent female vaginas, and the ostrich plume jutting vertically from their headdresses is a deliberately phallic symbol. The erotic movements Wodaabe dancers make also supplement these sexual emblems. Men dancing at gerewol stretch themselves on tiptoe to make themselves more sexually desirable, and snap their heads into exaggerated poses to display the beauty of their necks and profiles. They also widen their eyes and roll them in flirtatious expressions very similar to those of (female) Balinese dancers. Perhaps the clearest proof of the erotic nature of gerewol can be seen in who judges it—women. The jury of three suboybe (“choosers”) is drawn from the most beautiful and nubile of the host tribe’s young women. (The girls of highest status are usually, in fact, the daughters of previous gerewol winners.) These three young beauties observe the men from a distance, discussing their erotic appeal, then slowly pass up and down the line of dancing males, finally indicating the sexiest by stopping in front of him and giving a ceremonial gesture. The winner is not, contrary to lurid Western reports, entitled to sleep with the three judges—though a good deal of other sex does eventuate at gerewol.
In fact, such explicit erotic consequences highlight another failure of modern metrosexuals—follow-through. Despite his constant buffed and bared appearances before the camera shutter, Beckham is clearly a mere click-tease. Dubious media scandals such as the Rebecca Loos affair aside, Becks is, it seems, boringly faithful to his wife, Victoria. The gerewol, on the other hand, is explicitly designed for Wodaabe males to hook up with women other than their wives. Two kinds of sexual liaisons result from gerewol: assignations and teegal marriages. In Western terms, the former is a one-night stand and the latter refers to the taking of a mistress—both outside the official koobgal marriage between a Wodaabe man and his primary wife. By rolling their eyes at the watching girls and glancing to indicate a meeting place, the men organize one-night stands with those women, married and unmarried, they have managed to impress. At the conclusion of the dance, they melt into the bush with their partners for a night of bliss on their woven mats. If a man has seriously impressed a conquest with his beauty, he may pull off the envied feat of “wife-stealing”—convincing the woman to leave her husband, if she has one, and stay with him as a second, third, or even fourth wife in a teegal marriage.
How’s that for erotic follow-through?
Even Beckham’s exhibitionist eroticization of sport has all been done before, again with much more direct and explicit sexual consequences. Ancient Greek athletics were so infused with eroticism that they often culminated in actual sex, usually homosexual. Athletes were worshipped sexually to such a degree, in fact, that some sportsmen attracted hordes of love-struck gay groupies. Socrates, for example, described the chaos when the handsome young athlete Charmides attended the gymnasium: “amazement and confusion reigned when he entered; and a troop of lovers followed him.”22 Later, when the young hunk took a seat on the bench, his male groupies literally fell over each other to secure a place near him. Nor did the Greeks fail to follow this eroticization through to its logical conclusion. Indeed, surviving artworks show that the Greek gymnasium was a hotbed of homosexual activity. Numerous vase paintings, for instance, show Greek men at the gym approaching young athletes in the standard pose of a seducer—one hand touching the boy’s chin, the other his penis. Lest it be thought Greek sports only stimulated homosexual eroticism, though, we also have the outraged words of the Athenian playwright Euripides on the nudity of Spartan women while competing in athletics, to show that the trade swung both ways:
No Spartan girl could ever live clean if she wanted. They’re always out on the street in scanty outfits, making a great display of naked limbs. In those they race and wrestle with the boys too—abominable’s the word.23
Even female Greek athletes, it seems, took their eroticization of sport further than the wannabe efforts of our metrosexual-in-chief, David Beckham.
Dear me—Beckham’s attempt, admittedly involuntary, to sweep the Wodaabe gerewol seems to have turned to farce. He’s fallen short on all three legs of the metrosexual trifecta: narcissism, feminization, and eroticization. While the winners are packing up and fitting their camels with extra saddles for the girls whose hearts they’ve stolen, Becks is still out there, kicking up dust in a vain attempt to escape the label of Wodaabe wallflower. His wife, Victoria, meanwhile, has disappeared into the desert with a particularly tall and handsome Wodaabe wife-stealer, there to spend her life grinding his millet and milking his cows as his third teegal wife—while he pampers his beauty, the better to arrange further liaisons. Not even last ditch attempts to retrieve Beckham’s reputation by appealing to his athleticism will save him. Sure, he puts in a solid ninety minutes or more of soccer, but gerewol dances last all night for seven grueling days in a row. There is actually some question whether even Beckham would be fit enough to last this distance. Similarly, attempts to uphold the reputation of modern metrosexuals by pointing to our excessive dieting in pursuit of thinness won’t wash either. Wodaabe men eat no more than the odd mouthful for the entire duration of gerewol—one reason it’s such an intense endurance contest.
There is one last aspect of male beauty in which die-hard supporters of modern metros might still insist they claim the winner’s mantle, however: body modification. We modern men are, they maintain, quicker to pierce, tattoo, scar, or deliberately mutilate ourselves in pursuit of beauty than any men in history. We are also, according to them, more willing to go under the plastic surgeon’s knife than our forefathers ever were. The tide of complaints from conservative commentators about “modern primitives” with Christmas-tree body ornaments, and botoxed boys with liposucked abs, certainly gives some credence to the notion. Once again, though, it is just a bald assertion until we compare the body-modifying habits of ancient and tribal men. And even a quick survey, it turns out, immediately dispels the idea that we could have taught our forefathers a thing about piercing or plasticizing the masculine body.
Take piercing and scarring. True, we modern men do display an astonishing eagerness to mutilate ourselves thus—one survey of European males, for example, found that 27 percent aged fourteen to twenty-four had undergone at least one of these procedures. Yet, as American anthropologist Ted Polhemus has pointed out, in those tribal societies where mutilation was the norm (the greater number of them) all the men would be so mutilated. To not decorate oneself thus would, in fact, mean one wasn’t a man. Similarly, the actual procedures of our piercings and scarrings, which are mostly undertaken under anaesthetic, pale beside the terrifying ordeals that tribal men underwent to beautify themselves. Piercing, to begin with, was often a brutal exercise in tribal societies. Where modern men might perforate their lower lips, using painkillers, with a small stud or ring, Mura Indian men punctured theirs with the fat tusks of the peccary, or South American wild pig. Nose piercing, similarly, is increasingly popular with modern males, yet it doesn’t begin to approach the trauma of “septum piercing” as still practiced by the Asmat tribe of Irian Jaya, whose men perforate their nose-cartilage with the huge otsj, an inch-thick bone plug. Some modern males, likewise, stretch their ears with expanding plugs until they dangle halfway to their shoulders, yet this pales alongside the effo
rts of the Botocudo Indians of South America, so named for the Portuguese word describing the huge wooden discs their men (and women) wore in their ears and lower lips.
The same situation prevails with intentional scarring. Modern tattoo magazines report a surge in men scarring themselves with designs using tattoo guns without the ink. This is, admittedly, quite painful, because the procedure is usually done sans anaesthetic. Yet a single bout of decorative scarring at the hands of prehistoric Australian Aborigines would probably send those same men screaming for the bandaids and lignocaine. Australian Aboriginal men at the time of European colonization often bore elaborate patterns of thick, raised keloid scars over their entire bodies. To make these they sliced deep cuts into their skin and muscle, forced the lips of the wound apart and packed it with fat, clay, and ashes to irritate the wound and prevent healing.24 These procedures would be repeated for up to three months, by which time the keloid scars might be over an inch higher than the skin. Explorers reported that the scars of a fully initiated man of the Kimberley region would, if laid end on end, measure thirty yards in length.
If we moderns are wusses in our cosmetic mutilations, then, might we still not take the cake in terms of actual cosmetic surgery? That modern men are increasingly prepared to go under the knife to gratify their narcissism is not in doubt—in 2006 American plastic surgeons performed 85,570 male nose jobs and 35,020 male liposuctions. It’s also true that ancient and tribal men, the Maasai and Romans excepted, were blocked from performing much cosmetic surgery by their primitive surgical skills. Yet this didn’t stop some prehistoric men from carrying out very radical procedures to correct what they saw as their cosmetic deficiencies. Oromo men of Ethiopia several hundred years ago, for example, performed the gynecomastia, or male breast reduction, which is the fifth most commonly requested procedure for modern would-be metrosexuals—in the Oromos’ case, however, the operation was a simple amputation with an iron blade (sans anesthetic, of course). More commonly, however, prehistoric men used non-surgical means to correct their bodies’ failings. Mayan men, for instance, attached a bead or ball of wax to their head so as to dangle between their eyes and thereby encourage them to go cross-eyed—a very desirable look in their culture. Another non-surgical, but extreme, cosmetic technique was head deformation. This procedure, which took place in a boy’s infancy, involved his young head being squashed into either a conical or flat-topped shape by binding it tightly with boards or pressing it between two heavy stones. As a cosmetic procedure, it seems to have had a long history—several Neandertal skulls from 45,000 years ago show evidence of it.25 Even back in deep prehistory, it seems, men were willing to undergo cosmetic procedures so drastic they would make Joan Rivers blanch.
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