Hirsutitude

Last week I was visiting one of my favored porn sites --a kind of portal blog run by a former male escort and amateur novelist from Finland, with execrably predictable Europolitical attitudes and a generally fine taste in male images. His samplings run the gamut from bland twink to serious kink.

One of the pix was of two guys, both under thirty, in a dominance and submission play. The sub was shaved. Pubes included. One of the commentors complained that it would be sexy if not for the lack of hair "down there". A responder opined that in the drama of dominating and submitting, the bottom's having been shaved intensified his nakedness and ramped up the dominator's symbolic power at the same time.

Linking this post to another in 2015, I realized that I recognize this fella now. 

Works out sometimes at my gym. Very big guy, about 6'6".

The highly successful and extremely irritating Chris Rock now has a show on HBO about Black obsession with hair. With my long-term connection to a Black man, I had been introduced to some of the hairy mysteries of Black America. I once used the code phrase "good hair" in front of a Black colleague and she looked at me as if I had just divulged the secret of the Eleusynian mysteries. Rock reveals much more.

And although it is considered somewhat unmanly for a man who is not a hippy to be too concerned about his hair --except when the spectre of baldness arises-- a lot of men can get permission to care about it on the grounds that women care about men's hair. Hair Club for men, etc.

Tonsure --Latin for "shearing"-- is a religious rite in which all or part of the hair is shaved. Western monks have done it for a long time and it used to be part of initiation into the priesthood. It takes several forms and its history in the West is very conjectural but some say that a shaved head was characteristic of slaves, as opposed to free men.

Christian history is full of passionate opinions about beards. Clearly this is hot-button stuff.

Buddhist monks do a total head shave. It is clearly a kind of sacrifice of power or status for the sake of inclusion in a sacred group. Which, of course, gives you a new kind of status and power!

The other place that it occurs now is the military. My guess would be that it started, at least in America, during World War I. God knows that the generals in the Civil War were hairy as apes.
But nowadays, what image is more classically masculine than a tonsured Marine with the characteristic "high and tight"? 

There is something about the visible control of hair, especially on the head and face, which marks a man as being a certain kind of man, a man familiar with discipline, and one which includes freely chosen self-discipline.

For the soldier, this submission to authority, to a code and to a group, actually increases his masculine potency. When a raw kid joins the Marines, for example, and then comes home later on with his strict self-control and his polite treatment of elders as "sir" and "ma'am", no one takes this for weakness. It is a proud discipline that confidently contains lethality.

For the monk, it is more complex. He is opting out of the archetypal male tasks of sex and violence on the concrete plane and through discipline is  risking a more feminine style --affiliative-- in order to recreate the male task on a supposedly higher plane: his procreation, his protection and his provisioning are in the realm of the God. How he cuts his hair says something about that.

Back to my original image, I "get" the sexual energy created between a dominant furry man and submitting shaved man.  It may be an echo of perhaps the fundamental form of homosexual connection, the erastes/eromenos bond. If the submitting male is, like the guy in the picture, clearly not a boy, the shaving is paradoxical...as it is nowadays in our culture for bodybuilders...that by divesting himself of his masculine fur, he both signals submission and makes it all the clearer, with the unobstructed view, that he is a powerful male. Men, as opposed to women, are supposed to be simple. That may be true, but they are not really as simple as we're led to believe.

For myself, I like a combo of tonsure and fur. If I may recall discreetly, it used to really ring my bell when B, a fella with some natural fur in the right places, would get a short haircut. To me, the best of both ends of the masculine archetype of hair.

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Just for interest, a 90's porn star, also a professional body builder, in two versions: