“No, I don’t watch ‘Love Island,’” Michael Ian Black begins. As a manly man he is far too bro’d-out for such feminized fare, so don’t ask him how he knows that its male contestants spend more time waxing than the average Real Housewife. He has certainly not noticed that modern television overflows with brawny men, some with magnificent beards, atop bodies as smooth as Barbie dolls. We have stumbled, he writes, into one of the stranger beauty moments in American history: the summer of the hairless he-men.
The specimen
The modern leading man is bigger, broader and more muscular than ever. He can deadlift a Buick. He can hang off a helicopter. His jawline can split granite. He also appears to have misplaced every hair below his collarbone. For generations body hair meant male adulthood; now the ideal man looks as if he was assembled by Marvel Studios and then buffed with an orbital sander. This is not a metrosexual revival. These men are ripped, tattooed and competing on dating shows. Their presentation screams testosterone, except for the part where they pluck themselves to the hairlessness of a dolphin. Zack Goytowski of “Love Is Blind” and Zach Georgiou of “Love Island” both cop to shaving their legs.
The number inside the joke
Retail analysts estimate that the global market for men’s grooming will boom by tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds of billions, in the next five or so years. That is the part of the essay a portfolio reads. Razors, foams, trimmers, skin care and the rest are sold by a short list of very large companies, and one of them, Procter & Gamble, owner of Gillette and Braun, sits in our dividend sleeve at 4.44%.
| What Black observes | Who sells it |
|---|---|
| Full-body shaving, waxing, “looksmaxxing” | Gillette and Braun (P&G), Schick (Edgewell), Harry’s and the direct-to-consumer set |
| Skin care for men | L’Oréal, Unilever, Estée Lauder |
| Manicured nails and beards by regulation | The salon economy, and, apparently, the Pentagon |
The leaders are not immune
Pete Hegseth, warrior-in-chief, spends an extraordinary amount of time warning that American masculinity is under assault, and in 2025 declared there would be “no more beardos” in the military. The announcement that the services would test warfighters’ testosterone sounded, Black writes, less like Pentagon policy than the pilot of “America’s Next Top Alpha.” Even as politicians lecture about rediscovering traditional manhood, they curate it with the obsessive precision of a fitness influencer. We are supposed to become Vikings. Just hairless Vikings.
Maybe manhood is shifting, he suggests, from something men are expected to earn to something they are expected to perform: reality-television sensitivity wrapped in six-pack abs, retrograde machismo with perfect nails. Or maybe it is the old anxiety in a new costume, the man card that has to be punched before the tribe lets you in. He does not resolve it, because it is a comic essay, but he lands the line: “Still, hair grows on its own. Character doesn’t.” Then he has to go, because somebody in his house, not him, needs to check whether Devo and Brittany got back together.