The women in men’s grooming: reproducing heteronormative gender relations through the body in contemporary Japan

Abstract

This article investigates the role women play in men’s everyday grooming practices in contemporary Japan. The past few decades have seen increasing scrutiny of men’s bodies with rising standards said to be in response to women’s supposed desires. Yet research has thus far focused primarily on cultural representations such as pop idols or models, leaving our understandings of men’s lived, everyday bodily experiences largely unexplored. Addressing this gap, I employ an ethnographic approach by drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with thirty-three heterosexual Japanese men of various marital statuses and ask how heteronormative imperatives of appealing to women inform men’s understandings of their bodies. Working under a common-sense assumption that women are particularly sensitive to men’s bodies, the single participants reported greater attention to bodily grooming in order to attract women in intimate, romantic situations. Meanwhile, married men rely on or are doted upon by their wives in relation to their grooming thus reinforcing orthodox gender roles. Although male grooming may appear to subvert orthodox gender norms according to which men should be disinterested in bodily care, these findings underscore how orthodox, heteronormative gender ideology is in fact reproduced through men’s bodies, thanks in large part to women’s role therein.

Keywords:

• masculinities in Japan
• body
• male grooming
• gender relations
• female gaze

Introduction

Men’s bodies and their bodily grooming have been subject to increasing scrutiny over the past few decades in many societies (e.g. Bordo 1999; Atkinson 2008; Weber 2009; Holliday and Elfving-Hwang 2012; Gough, Hall, and Seymour-Smith 2014; Casanova 2015). Men in Japan, too, have been undergoing their own makeovers, with smooth and hairless skin, slim physiques, odourlessness and carefully shaped eyebrows having been analysed in terms of a rejection of the orthodox dowdy and emotionally distant ‘salaryman’ figure. Woven into this is a heteronormative imperative whereby men must conform their bodies to women’s supposed grooming ideals (see Shibuya 2018; Miller 2006, 125–158; Darling-Wolf 2004; Bardsley 2011; Monden 2020, 273). Highlighting how acts of looking are inextricably embedded in larger gendered power structures, Laura Mulvey (1975, 17) made famous the concept of the male gaze whereby the ‘image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man … add[s] an additional layer as demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order’. While there remains a strong tendency for women’s bodies in Japan to be objectified for male pleasure (Gottfried 2015, 74; Chalmers 2002, 40), the recent male-grooming trends appear distinctly contrastive to orthodox dynamics where women’s bodies are objectified by men and may even hint at an upsetting of orthodoxy within a society that has been calling for a rethink of its deep-set gender relations. Yet, past research has focused almost entirely on cultural representation or prescriptive discourses, thus failing to provide understandings into the individual, lived experiences of how men themselves experience contemporary bodily norms.

In this article I focus on the role that women play in heterosexual men’s grooming by centring the lived experiences of such men within a context of increasing male grooming standards. Taking the practices most prominent and meaningful as expressed by these men in interviews, I approach ‘grooming’ in a broad sense, as the efforts and attention to how an individual presents their body in a visual but also a felt and smelt way which responds to calls from scholars to widen our perspectives on ‘grooming’ (Karlsson 2012, 61–62). I explore the meanings and effects of newer trends such as eyebrow shaping and facial moisturising, while also analysing the more mundane practices such as expunging body odour and restricting waistlines. Going beyond surface representation, I interrogate the social effects of grooming–what grooming does (Moreno-Figueroa 2013, 138). The effect of grooming to standards favourable among women is the reproduction of a heterosexual appeal informed by a heteronormative imperative crucial in Japanese conceptions of normative masculinity (Dasgupta 2013, 101–132; McLelland 2005). Masculinities scholars of Japan have recently called for more understanding into the ‘complex ways in which women co-construct and reinforce norms and ideals of masculinities’ (Cook 2020, 54). Responding to this call, I explore the multiple ways that women in various contexts and in various forms influence men’s grooming behaviour. To be sure, it is not my contention that men’s grooming is exclusively for women, as there is much crossover to other contexts such as professional lives. Rather, this article highlights the deeply significant role women play in the embodied reproduction of masculinities.

Heteronormative bodies

Women in Japanese society have played significant roles in the construction of men’s bodies, a dynamic that must be situated within post-war gender relations. Since the establishment of the post-war family order (kazoku no sengo taisei) (Ochiai 1997), men have been under a heteronormative imperative whereby entering a heterosexual marriage,¹ having children then supporting them as the primary breadwinner with full-time, stable employment is to become a ‘full member of society’ (ichininmae no shakaijin). While this orthodox life-course has come under increasing strain since the early 1990s, such as from younger-generation men who struggle to find full-time employment (Brinton 2011) or prioritise pursuing their dream jobs (Cook 2013), it remains an aspiration for a majority of young people (MHLW 2013, 66) and a prominent ideological reference point for men and women alike (Taga Futoshi 2019; Cook 2020; Endo 2019; Dales and Yamamoto 2019; Nemoto, Fuwa, and Ishiguro 2013; Dalton and Dales 2016).

A more everyday component of this heteronormative imperative is found in men’s grooming standards. While grooming to become attractive for romantic purposes is by no means a new phenomenon (e.g. Ashikari 2003), such an imperative was given particular impetus in the early 1990s when the country fell into economic recession. Narratives began to question men’s orthodox life courses which were stereotypically embodied in the dowdy, austere ‘salaryman’ figure, ‘de-eroticized by a corporate culture’ (Miller 2006, 127) and commonly depicted with a dark suit, clean-shaven facial hair and a neat, short haircut (Dasgupta 2010). Representations searched for an alternative which came perhaps most notably in male pop idols often portrayed alluringly with smooth skin, slim bodies and long hair (Nagaike Kazumi 2012; Glasspool 2012; see also Takeyama 2010, 235–236). The highly popular group SMAP are especially salient: their ‘bodies are hairless and lean and their costumes in concert often cross gender boundaries – they wear form-fitting shorts, hot pink suits, or long animal-print coats with huge flowers pinned on their collars’ (Darling-Wolf 2004, 360). One member in particular, Kimura Takuya, was often choreographed in sexually objectifying ways. In 1996, the cosmetics manufacturer Kanebō launched what would become an iconic advertising campaign for women’s lipstick that featured Kimura with lipstick painted on his lips and drawn on his face. In the television advertisements he is putting on the lipstick himself, whereas in others he is lying in bed with a woman putting it on him. The tagline as read by Kimura is: ‘Attack me with your Super Lip’ (sūpā rippu de semete koi), ‘Super Lip’ being the name of the product (Kanebō 1996). The campaign was a huge success with posters in train stations being stolen with such frequency sponsors struggled to replace them (Darling-Wolf 2003, 76). These developments marked an important change in the representation of men’s bodies. While the product targeted women, it portrayed a virile man beautifying himself as someone heterosexually desirable, thus making attention to bodily care itself desirable. The tagline urging women to ‘attack me’ also objectifies Kimura, with women assuming a role of greater sexual agency. These idolised men exemplify their titles as ‘idols’; their packaged performances which included a greater concern for grooming became reference points for men to emulate.

This trend included a growth in grooming practices and services, including the ideal of pop-idol-like hairlessness, smooth skin, and elegant crescent-shaped eyebrows (Ishida Kaori 2009, 122–124). Sales of facial skin care and moisturising products increased, such as facial washes (sengan), and various moisturising creams including facial toner (keshōsui) and facial beauty creams (biyōeki, nyūeki, kuriimu), particularly from the mid-2000s when the large cosmetics manufacturer Shiseido launched a line targeting white-collar men in their 30s and 40s in the upscale Shinjuku Isetan department store (DELTA iD 2007, 54). Significantly, as Miller (2006, 136, 141) argues, these practices and services implicate a heterosexual female judgment, often being marketed by playing to the discerning tastes of women, such as removing various body hair for dating or demonstrating competency in new cosmetics products for girlfriends and wives. As Bardsley similarly highlights in her analysis of how-to guides for white-collar men who should distance themselves from the orthodox salaryman figure by moisturising one’s hands or expunging body odours, such practices take ‘women’s preferences as a matter of course’ (Bardsley 2011, 123). And even if these practices did not give men sex appeal matching that of a male pop idol, the actual acts of performing these grooming routines were laden with the particular significance of appealing to women.

Such influences are not limited to single men’s grooming practices, but continue when men are partnered, thus echoing trends in other contexts where female partners in heterosexual relationships play a large role in men’s bodily care (e.g. Mallyon et al. 2010). The other half of the male breadwinner has been the middle-class ‘professional housewife’ (sengyō shufu), whose role has centred on the reproductive labour of raising children and caring for her husband (Tso, Koch, and Steger 2020, 15), including therein ‘caring for the bodily needs of others’ (Mackie 2002, 206). Husbands have been shown to expect what Borovoy terms (2005, 76) ‘total care’, underscoring a fundamental relationship dynamic where women dote on their reliant husbands. In this way, whereas men’s grooming efforts came from society’s search for an alternative ideal masculine life course, a husband whose bodily grooming is taken care of by his wife may be said to literally embody the orthodox post-war family order.

The plurality of instances whereby women ought to be concerned for men’s bodies gives rise to a belief among men that women are particularly sensitive to their own and others’ grooming. In addition to domestic responsibilities, women themselves are under a general imperative to ‘strive towards being beautiful’ (Iino 2013, 87). In many contexts throughout public life, women must maintain a slim physique (Ellis-Rees 2020; Spielvogel 2003), follow the latest fashion trends (Xie 2020; Kikuchi 2019), not show herself without foundation makeup (Ashikari 2003), use a variety of products for youthful skin (Tanimoto 2013) and remove all traces of body hair (Miller 2006, 102–110). The association of women with the body means ‘women’ has come to form an important component of how men make sense of their bodily grooming, as highlighted by Sunaga (1999, 137–147) and Shibuya (2018) in their concept of the ‘fictionalised female gaze’ (fikushon toshite no josei no me). This describes how a belief (shinnen) that women dislike certain bodily features such as men who experience hair loss or unclean and unhygienic penises (Shibuya 2018) has ‘circulated and made its presence known completely independently from any standard of women’s actual [preferences]’ (Sunaga 1999, 140). Such beliefs create certain ‘common senses’ (jōshiki) whose existence is perpetuated through the perceived lack of worth in critically questioning them. Belief and common sense are complemented by explicit communication. As Tanimoto stresses, bodies are disciplined not only through feelings of surveillance, particularly in the mediascapes of contemporary society; rather ‘motivations for bodily modification arise from everyday interactions and communication with others’ (2018, 159, emphasis in original) such as chatter among friends or family. As we shall see, the same gendered relations play out in men’s grooming behaviour where husbands and boyfriends’ bodies become the target of wives and girlfriends’ explicit communication such as telling husbands to join the gym to lose weight. The combination of fiction and real communication becomes a form of surveillance that creates a mentality where men groom to please or appease women–in short, to be popular (moteru). In turn, this mentality constitutes an important way normative male bodies are reproduced. While it may be tempting to understand men’s bodies as being objectified by women, it is more accurate to understand men themselves objectifying and working on their bodies based on women’s (supposed) desires.

Grooming the boundaries of masculinity

While grooming to gain favour among women is key in realising heteronormative social expectations, doing so may simultaneously raise suspicions about such a person’s masculinity due to the association of bodily care with femininity. Adding another level of analysis, I suggest that drawing on ‘women’ as the reason to groom also provides a discursive strategy to reproduce a man’s masculinity. Masculinities are commonly theorised as existing in hierarchically asymmetrical terms among a plurality of masculinities and femininities (Connell 1995; Messerschmidt 2018). Reproducing one’s gendered identity means constantly setting oneself apart from other forms and their ‘configuration of gender practice’ (Connell 1995, 77). It is in the ‘idealized quality content of the categories of “man” and “woman”’ (Schippers 2007, 90) that masculinities (and femininities) are constructed and experienced. In a US context, Bordo (1999, 197) argues that men are ‘oblivious to their beauty’ due largely to bodily concern being associated with feminine frivolity. To be sure, ‘feminine’ attention to appearance ‘takes time, energy, creativity, dedication … [and] can hurt’ (1999, 220–221, emphasis in original). Beauty is never just for beauty’s sake; women conform their bodies to standards for ‘business manners’ or to ‘not stand out’ (Ashikari 2003). Nevertheless, such associations reproduce essentialist gender boundaries in which beauty’s association with a feminine-coded gender practice means men’s partaking in such practices may lead to charges of vanity, ‘something to be condemned and guarded against at all costs’ (Gill, Henwood, and Mclean 2005, 50). While Miller (2006, 126) sees ‘beautification as a component of masculinity’ and although grooming practices may have increased, the way men actually express their grooming practices at an everyday level must be carefully framed to set what Goffman (1966, 43–45, 60) has termed ‘margins of disinvolvement’, a repudiation of behaviour inappropriate to one’s – in this case orthodoxly masculine – identity. Men in Japan may shy away from talking about their bodies, and if such topics do arise, they may be dismissed jokingly (Shibuya and Kaneda 2019, 165–166), while even for young men, expressing bodily concern such as showing interest in fashion or makeup may be permissible, but because of the associations with femininity it must be spoken of in familiar, orthodox masculine terms to produce senses of masculinity (Tanimoto and Nishiyama 2009, 69).

More precisely, men do not groom for themselves per se, they do not groom for pleasure, for this would associate them with femininity; rather, we shall see that men draw on the discursive strategy whereby they groom themselves for women. This legitimately masculine formulation allows them to adhere to grooming standards while simultaneously working to repudiate feminine beauty and align themselves with heteronormativity. This is not to say that men are hiding some form of desire to groom, that in fact they really do enjoy grooming and are indifferent to being judged by women. Rather, my contention is that participants understand their grooming behaviour in terms of the cultural intelligibility of a heterosexual female judgment that is underpinned by an essentialist notion where women are strongly associated with bodily concern. This ideology, then, has been thoroughly incorporated not only in their bodies but also in how they understand their own behaviour.

Methodology

To understand how men experience their bodily grooming vis-à-vis women, this article draws on in-depth, interviews with a purposive sample of 33 men working in white-collar positions in the Tokyo region conducted over a period totalling 15 months between 2017 and 2019. Participants were aged from twenty-two to sixty-four and of various relationship statuses; 16 were married, 6 in long-term relationships and 11 either dating or single. Excepting one interview in a mixture of English and Japanese (owing to the participant’s desire to practise his English with a native speaker), all interviews were conducted in Japanese and semi-structured around themes related to grooming, including their grooming routines in contexts such as work, at home and dating, their exercise and dieting regimes, and attitudes or experiences of ageing. Interviews lasted on average one hour and twenty minutes and took place in various locations including participants’ workplaces, restaurants, cafes, parks and at their homes. Most interviews were recorded with permission, otherwise extensive notes were taken. After all interviews, I wrote down notes describing everything that would not be immediately apparent in the recordings including participants’ appearance, gestures, the atmosphere of the interview space and the general mood of the interview. I met with thirteen participants on subsequent occasions informally, often using these for follow-up questions. I transcribed all recorded interviews, drew out codes using an interpretive discourse analysis method (Tonkiss 2004, 377), then clustered codes into significant themes, one of which is the role of women. All names are pseudonyms and all identifying information has been anonymised.

My sample is composed of what one may call ‘salarymen’ (sarariiman) or white-collar workers. While the salaryman figure has often been designated the so-called hegemonic form of masculinity, an ideological reference point for men to follow (Dasgupta 2013) on a national, gender-order level (Connell 1987, 134; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 850), as has been pointed out, he in fact constitutes a statistical minority (Mouer and Kawanishi 2005, 119; Roberson 1998, 7–8) and is not somehow representative of all men or masculinities in Japan. Nevertheless, because of his pervasiveness (Gill 2015, 174), this identity has become an unhelpful trope that elides the complexity and diversity in individuals’ everyday lived experiences. My participants may be cis-gendered and lead normative lifestyles, including their sexuality, but it is their particular experiences in negotiating heteronormativity and how, in doing so, heteronormative norms are reproduced–or not–by individuals that can provide insight into the processes of how norms embed and arrange themselves throughout all levels of society.

Following Tseëlon’s (2003) methodological contentions with regard to dress and femininity, my interview data are, in fact, men talking about their bodily experiences and, therefore, this research is more accurately an exploration of men’s perspectives as gained through the discourses employed in relation to bodily grooming (cf. Casanova 2015, 211). While there may be gaps and contradictions between participants’ accounts and their actual grooming behaviour and relations with women, I was interested firstly in what they do to their bodies and, secondly, I wanted to understand how men talk about their bodies and how both of these themes can be understood in terms of women’s role in the construction of masculinity. Participants’ accounts are meaningful as they are constructed to express their (gendered) identities and provide insight into how they understand their behaviour. Centring participant observation in dating or family contexts may have been informative in investigating in detail men’s actual practices but this would not have provided access to men’s reflexive decision processes and opinions on grooming. It would also not have given access to many of the grooming practices due to their very private nature. Following Gill, Henwood, and Mclean (2005, 44), the focus on discourse ‘is intended to point up the deliberative nature of contemporary identities’, meaning that rather than the presence or absence of certain grooming practices, far more interesting are the ‘justificatory narratives … employed to account for their bodily modifications’. My interests, more precisely, reside in participants’ particular narratives of ‘women’ and how this is literally incorporated.

Before entering the field, with the association of bodily care and femininity in mind, I was concerned that participants would have little to say about their bodily grooming, let alone divulge specific practices used to please women. While I interviewed participants who had reputations among their acquaintances as having particularly high interest in grooming (biishiki), I also sought interviews with men who were purportedly ‘average’ in terms of concern about their grooming or those who claimed a complete disinterest. It was common for participants to say something akin to, ‘I have no interest in grooming or appearance so I don’t know how much I can help you, but in any case, I’d be more than happy to meet’. Holstein and Gubrium (2009, 5–6) argue that male interviewees tend to reproduce normative masculinities, eschewing accounts incongruous to this, such as those in which they express ‘feminine practices’ such as being at all concerned with bodily grooming. These tendencies are particularly apparent when men interview other men as Broom, Hand, and Tovey (2009, 54, 58) and Sallee and Harris III (2011, 424) highlight in their fieldwork where male participants tended to speak in orthodoxly masculine, often misogynistic, ways in male homosocial contexts. Negotiating the field as a man myself, although building rapport through male bonding proved productive, this may have skewed interviewees’ responses in certain directions, such as a common theme whereby participants ridiculed women’s supposed frivolity in beauty and, in one participants’ words, their supposedly being ‘simply obsessed with pretty things’. Nevertheless, these orthodoxly masculine accounts themselves are highly informative in elucidating how men think about their bodies and express themselves to other men, particularly when considering the mutually constitutive dimension of gender where masculinity and femininity are constructed through their mutual disavowal and rejection. If a participant gave curt responses saying he ‘did nothing’ to his body and that ‘grooming is for women and not men’ or, likewise, when these men explain their grooming behaviour not in terms of some personal desire to look good but to attract or appease women, this provides valuable insights concerning the ideology of what it means for them to be men.

Grooming to get a girl

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of single participants put particular effort into their grooming in pursuit of a partner. Impressing women on dates is the driving factor in their grooming and participants believe that to be liked by women, they have to measure up to women’s demanding preferences. This belief is underpinned by another one: that women are particularly sensitive to others’ bodily grooming, thus echoing the trend whereby concern about bodily care and beauty are strongly linked to femininity, as discussed above. Both friends in their early 30s and single, Takeshi and Hideyo illustrate this tendency well. Meeting in an izakaya in Shibuya where both of their IT companies are located, they talked extensively about women’s supposed fixation on grooming standards; according to Hideyo,

Japanese women, especially when they see a good-looking guy (kirei na dansei), they’re like, ‘That’s great!’ (ii na) … Women are simply obsessed with pretty things (kirei na mono). That’s women for you.

Hideyo believes that one cannot generalise women’s various grooming preferences, as I elaborate below in this section, but he nevertheless holds a firm belief that women notice and judge his grooming. Indeed, there is a general understanding among participants that women care more about grooming than men and that they possess a greater sensitivity towards bodily care. Why this is the case, however, is more difficult to explain, illustrated by the married sixty-two year old manager at a large manufacturing company, Shō who in a blunt, matter-of-fact tone described women’s proclivity to grooming as ‘nature’:

They don’t like dirty things … or, for example, if a guy’s suit is wrinkled or his pants are dirty, they always make someone’s appearance into a topic of conversation among themselves.

Greater sensitivity to grooming and ‘pretty things’ are traits for which women have a ‘natural’ proclivity. This is then extended to a belief that women have particular interests in men’s bodies, much more than men themselves. Miller’s (2006, 127) argument that men’s grooming standards in Japan react to female desire lends credence to my participants’ belief. Indeed, participants live within a society where representations of women judging men’s bodies are widespread. Yet, importantly, beyond cultural representations, whether or not women really care–whether it is fiction or reality–is never questioned. These participants demonstrate that it has simply become common sense. Shō’s curt response underscores the pointlessness in questioning it. The irony is that the belief in women’s sensitivity to grooming results in men, too, taking closer care of their own grooming.

This is particularly apparent in participants’ dating lives. Thirty-three year-old Shinji is now married but paid great attention to his grooming during his single life as an undergraduate student in Tokyo. He was particular about his hairstyle, especially the proportion of thickness at the back which saw him frequent a famous, ‘top stylist’ in the trendy Harajuku neighbourhood. He bought clothes that were more expensive and stylish. He was a ‘young guy … I mean, I wanted to be popular, I wanted to go girl hunting (gāru hanto), I wanted to go on dates. So I cared about my appearance’. Ironically, when he first met his wife-to-be, he was wearing sandals which she thought made him look slovenly (darashi nai) and careless about his self presentation (according to him, though, these sandals were then fashionable). Nonetheless, it is clear that Shinji considers good grooming–what he described as ‘what I felt looked good for me’ (jibun ga ii na-ppoi)–important to be popular when ‘girl hunting’. In describing his grooming choices in terms of what he felt looked good also highlights that it is ultimately the man himself who must gauge women’s preferences, a point to which I return at the end of this section.

The naked body, too, is important, as illustrated by twenty-two year-old Keisuke who has recently begun full-time work at a large manufacturing company after graduating from a university in the USA. Despite his young age, he had a particularly strong desire for marriage. On the several occasions we met, he seemed to be testing the waters with different women; he even had a date scheduled for after our meeting. Keisuke is passionate about building his muscles at the gym, a pursuit that began while living in the USA where he felt pressure from large-muscled and smooth-skinned sportsmen and movie stars–in particular, Daniel Craig in James Bond or Captain America–as well as his male peers. ‘Women don’t like skinny guys. In order to get a girlfriend, you have to be on the same level as others. You know, I won’t be taken seriously. People will just make fun of me if I’m skinny’. To illustrate, he showed a photo from the fashion magazine for men in their teens and 20 s, men’s non-no, of a thin male model with long hair and wearing a baggy white sweatshirt, describing him as ‘unhealthy’. By contrast,

You know, like, in a Hollywood movie, I have to say that, they have the sex scene, right? With the naked guy and the naked girl. And the naked guy has like perfect body shape–everyone has a Cristiano Ronaldo body shape. And then I think that’s how sex should be [laughs], right? And then I come to Japan, and then, talk with my friends about those things, I mean–they, those friends have girlfriends, but their bodies like this! Skinny, so skinny, I can see their bones here! [points at ribs] And then, like, okay, you guys have sex with that body? Like, so gross. So uncool … looks really unhealthy, this is like – girls won’t fuck that.

Keisuke’s reference for women’s preferences is literally fiction, in the form of Hollywood movies that show various muscled men who supposedly trump the ‘gross’, sexually undesirable skinny bodies of his Japanese friends. Drawing on foreign figures resonates with James Roberson’s (2005) analysis of energy drinks where the author argues that incorporating imagery of foreign muscled men such as Bruce Lee into Japanese energy drink advertisements signals greater acceptance of external power in the context of an ailing economy. If the popularity among women of slender pop-idol physiques is anything to go by (Monden 2020), Keisuke’s equating skinny bodies with weakness and undesirability may buck the trend. Yet, while individuals’ standards may differ, Keisuke understands his body in terms of its sexual desirability among the women he had been seeing. Apart from body shape, for Keisuke there are very few ways to optimise bodily grooming when going on dates. Having to work during the day inhibits participants’ fashion choices and for many their grooming on a blind, group date (gōkon) is essentially identical to meeting business clients, minus the neck tie. This is permissible on weekdays, whereas on weekends participants dress more casually such as in chinos, jeans, blazers or sweaters, depending on the type of date. In contrast, no matter the day of the week, sex or its potentiality is a reason for closer bodily care.

I asked Takeshi and Hideyo, introduced above, if they do any particular grooming before going on dates. This prompted Takeshi to raise the importance of hairlessness. In addition to protruding nose hairs and eyebrow shaping, he makes sure to shave or clip the hair in more sensitive areas. These practices began during his university days when his male peers would be clean shaven to win approval from their female friends. Takeshi’s aspiration was to look like the smooth-skinned Japanese idol Nagase Ren. Unfortunately, however, his hair became thicker and thicker and nowadays, the night before a date, he shaves his leg hair with a pair of clippers in the bath, particularly on the thighs, around his nipples and navel, and trims his pubic hair. ‘Going on a date, ultimately, well, sex – there’s the potential of having sex so I want to enjoy that. When that happens, I want to look cool (kakko yoku miraretai)’.

‘That’s important, really important’, Hideyo chipped in.

Takeshi continued,

Women, they have quite the preferences, really. Maybe some like men with a load of hair but that kind of slapdash (chūto hanpa) look isn’t good because it doesn’t have that sense of cleanliness, it looks wild. Maybe I’d look good like that but my hair doesn’t grow that much so I have to shave whatever grows out.

Keisuke, Takeshi and Hideyo thus all perform bodily grooming for the express purpose of having ‘cool looking’ sex. While the ones looking may be their female companions, we must recall that these participants are themselves objectifying their own bodies according to what they believe women like. Their bodies are self-objectified for women with the smooth-skin look reflecting the trend that emerged in the 1990s, exemplified by the sexually objectified pop idol group SMAP. These days the semi-naked and smooth-skinned male body is well established. Male pop idol groups regularly appear in special editions of women’s fashion magazines where their perfectly hairless bodies are shown in the nude (e.g. an-an January 2010)² while the smooth-skinned celebrities who sell men’s facial moisturisers reproduce these ideals at a more everyday level (Monden 2020). Women may often be seen ‘applauding cute and hairless young male bodies’ (Miller 2006, 157) and although participants may be unable to match the sex appeal of these pop stars, they groom their bodies for women’s visual pleasure, showing how the fantasy or fictional image of male Japanese pop idols are perhaps not so fantastical anymore.

However, whether or not their efforts are effective is a different question. Now, in his early 30s (and still single), Takeshi has concluded that women have a wide variety of preferences and that being well groomed does not guarantee winning their favour. Instead, he grooms according to his own preferences and if these are favoured by someone he is dating, all the better. When I asked Takeshi if the women with whom he sleeps let known their body-hair preferences, he veered off, repeating how his particular physique does not look good with a lot of chest hair. When I raised the topic at another drinking session, he emphasised trimming his body hair for sex but could not recall any instances of talking about it with his partners. This lapse in memory may suggest that any such conversation never occurred. In any case, the main reference guiding Takeshi is a self-perpetuating belief in women’s preferences informed by the social norm of having smooth skin.

Similarly, although Hideyo puts on cologne when dating (and sweet smelling ones as such colognes are ‘sexy’ and ‘sexy’ smelling colognes are meant to be used in the evenings when on dates, according to his logic), he concluded that he ultimately chooses the scents that he himself prefers to boost his confidence when around women. This echoes Shinji above who when ‘girl hunting’ could only groom in terms of what he himself thought looked good. Takeshi and Hideyo even agreed that ‘good’ grooming in itself may have little effect on a date for various reasons such as the date’s personal preferences. Rather, they place value on the confidence that good grooming produces. As Monden (2019, 162) highlights, a well-groomed body plays a key role in a person’s mental state and can become a source of confidence. For these single participants, putting effort into grooming while taking cues from their ideals in Hollywood movies, magazines, in pop idols or simply their own intuition, is a strategy to instil in them confidence when they must create a favourable impression under the imagined gaze from potential partners.

Underlying the inability to know women’s preferences is a lack of communication. As Castro-Vázquez and Kishi (2007, 168) find, talk about heterosexual intercourse for young men ‘seems to be relegated to a conversation with [male] peers’, whereas in intimate situations, communication to express desire becomes non-verbal. Among my participants, grooming advice, by contrast, does not even constitute a topic of conversation among their male peers. Resonating with the tendency for men to avoid talking about bodily care in their daily lives (Shibuya and Kaneda 2019), very few of the participants talk about their grooming with friends or acquaintances with dating in mind, and even fewer still have similar discussions with female friends or acquaintances, let alone those they are dating. We may therefore say that participants are fundamentally motivated by a socially recognised, common-sense assumption that women have ‘quite the preferences’ about men’s grooming which holds one key to popularity. As now-married thirty-two year-old Kōhei put it, ‘in my mind (jibun no naka), being liked by women is the very epitome of being cool’, thus underscoring that participants have thoroughly internalised this female judgment. Yet, it is precisely this blind internalisation which disregards any ‘real’, specific preferences among women – even those with whom participants have become intimate – that reinforces the stereotype of women while keeping participants in the dark about any actual preferences.

Managing husbands’ bodies

After attracting a potential partner, dating and marrying, many participants lose motivation to groom. However, their lack of motivation is replaced by pressure from their partners to do more, manifesting in frank and one-sided communication from women to men. Tanimoto (2017, 9) brings attention to the role of everyday conversations between close female friends and family members in leading women to undergo or consider undergoing cosmetic surgery procedures such as double eyelid construction or the removal of spots and wrinkles. While husbands are often shut out from these exchanges, when it comes to more mundane grooming, my married participants described instances where their wives tell them to exercise to lose weight or march them off to the hair salon with a style chosen from a catalogue. Moving beyond assumptions of women’s supposed preferences, this section focuses on the role of wives’ communication in married men’s grooming practices and the reproduction therein of orthodox gender roles.

To begin, a majority of the married participants rely on their partners to buy their grooming products. As Clammer (1997, 70; see also Goldstein-Gidoni 2012, 104–107) remarks, wives have typically held the household purse strings, taking charge of day-to-day expenses and issues such as value for money, durability and the safety of family goods. Forty-five year-old investment banker Akira uses his own shampoo, hair wax and lip balm but has no preferences in their brand or type, leaving the choice to his full-time housewife who picks them up during her grocery shopping. Akira’s grooming, including the judgment of what product is best for him and the family budget, thus becomes an extension of his wife’s domestic labour. Other participants sketched out a process in which their mothers were responsible for their grooming as adolescents and how this responsibility shifted to girlfriends and then wives. Thirty-seven year-old publishing company employee, Kōta, although single when we met, described how his mother first made him use a certain facial moisturising lotion (keshō sui) for his atopic dermatitis. He continued using the same product until he began dating someone who introduced him to a supposedly better product which he tried, liked and then switched over to. According to Kōta, the vast amount of brands and types is beyond him: ‘I don’t have the knowledge to choose [which product to use] so I just leave it up to others (hito makasu) … Women really know their stuff (kuwashii), even the not-so-famous brands.’ If this pattern is to continue with Kōta getting married, it would next be his wife in charge of his grooming, meaning that the person responsible would have gone from his mother to his girlfriends to his wife. The relationship dynamic is perhaps exemplified through participants’ use of the phrase ‘leave it to’ (makaseru, makasu) which allows them to fall back on women’s orthodox role of caring for their partners. Meanwhile, describing women as ‘knowing their stuff’ (kuwashii) about grooming also reproduces the common-sense association of women’s greater proclivity towards grooming.

In contrast to this reliance, in other cases a wife’s doting on her husband is not so welcome. Above, I discussed the experiences of Shinji who, while single, put particular care into his grooming for the express purpose of ‘girl hunting’. After having married, his interest in grooming tapered off; he would stop putting wax in his hair, wear glasses instead of contacts and, instead of going to the famous ‘top stylist’s’ hairdresser in Harajuku, he decided that any place would do, so long as they cut his hair so that it would look presentable without having to use wax. Putting wax through his hair and shaving was for him the ‘most stylish’ but after having married, he preferred to go for the look that required the least amount of effort (saiteigen). This lack of effort, however, did not sit well with his wife, Saori who had other ideas. Saori picks out a hair style from a catalogue and makes him take it to the hairdresser (which she chooses) for the stylist to cut accordingly. She trims his eyebrows routinely: ‘my wife’s really good, being a woman, right, trimming the eyebrows’. At the time of the interview, Shinji was pursuing a master’s degree in the UK and was thus away from his former position in a conservative financial company meaning he no longer had the professional obligation to shave every day. However this professional obligation was replaced by a marital one, his wife insisting that being clean shaven suits him much better than a scruffy layer of facial hair. Saori’s attention extends beyond grooming to other behaviour such as his general diet: ‘snacks and sweets, sweet things and cakes, I don’t eat them, crisps and that. I don’t eat them because my wife tells me so … sometimes I feel like eating them though’.

When I had the chance to ask Saori herself about her directives when the three of us met, Shinji became animated, also wanting to know and stressing how her preferences are rather demanding. She explained that she is simply looking out for him, part of which is creating a good impression when he meets others. As for his diet, she is concerned that without her instruction, he will become overweight. Due to a busy schedule that included a side business that saw him going back and forth between Japan and the UK in addition to staying on top of his studies, he struggled to eat healthily and seldom had the time to exercise, going for a five kilometre run once a week. These concerns echo discourses on ‘healthism’ which have grown in prominence since the early 2000s when the government instituted various health campaigns such as the ‘Healthy Japan 21’ to address increasing concerns over lifestyle diseases (seikatsu shūkan-byō), particularly among middle-aged men who led sedentary lifestyles with poor diets and little exercise (Castro-Vázquez 2020). While diet and exercise may not be strictly ‘grooming’, an overweight body–as it appears–may also become a concern of self-presentation. Shinji’s bodily needs which manifest in the impression he conveys to others, including body weight, hairstyle and shaving, then, are all carefully managed by his wife who, in so doing, fulfils her orthodox gendered role.

Kaori, the wife of thirty-one year-old Tamotsu, a CEO of a small consultancy company, in a similarly nagging way, is the main reason for his various grooming habits, including shaping his eyebrows. Asked how that came about, he explained,

well, I guess she prefers it that way and, well, so she shaves them. I can’t do it myself and nor does the hair dresser, so she does it … [The reason for having them shaved] was completely my wife. She kept going on, like, ‘I’ll shave them, I’ll shave them’ and so I was like ‘fine, fine, go ahead (dōzo, dōzo).

He also recalled how approximately a year before we met his stomach began to protrude and was told in no uncertain terms by his wife to go to the gym: ‘when my stomach comes out, you know, my wife will let me know … you know, like, “lose some weight, lose some weight” (yasete, yasero) … that’s how I was pushed into going to the gym’. In Tamotsu’s case, it was through his wife’s ‘encouragement’ that he rediscovered his past interest in swimming at his local gym, which he would visit as frequently as possible after work.

In contrast to Shinji and Tamotsu, forty-two year-old food company manager Kazuki described a more attentive attitude to his wife when it came to grooming. Kazuki works out at his local gym several times a week and has recently taken up surfing to maintain his fitness as well as a slim physique. In addition to the need to stay in shape in order to show his ‘health management’ (kenkō kanri) for work, he does it for his wife.

Actually, I’m married, so I guess it’s also for my wife … it’s not as if anything in particular has happened between us but my wife is rather slim, she maintains that [kind of body shape]… Hmm, I mean, I guess I don’t want to look shabby (darashi nai) in front of my wife. She’s very particular about my appearance, whether it be hairstyle or what I’m wearing. I myself don’t really pay so much attention to my own appearance.

However, this is not necessarily to say that he thinks of this in begrudging terms; on the contrary, this dynamic is also a point of intimacy. At other times during the interview, Kazuki spoke in endearing terms of his wife with whom he had been together for over fifteen years such as their practice of sharing shampoo which they call ‘yome shan’, short for ‘wife shampoo’.

Kazuki’s endearing account may seem contrastive to the accounts of Shinji and Tamotsu, who frame their spouses as the ‘nagging housewife’, but all three share fundamental similarities. I suggest that when these participants invoke the trope of the doting wife, it demonstrates that their marriages are (orthodoxly) healthy. Namely, their wives conform to the orthodox post-war ideal of the housewife who cares for their husbands’ bodily needs and health. While they may at times be nagging, this in itself is a display of their fondness and duty towards their husbands. A poor marriage is one where the wife is neglectful towards her husband and will certainly not go to the lengths of trimming his eyebrows or making sure he gets enough exercise. A pitiful (kawaisō) husband is one whose wife fails to make the efforts to keep up his grooming and will not spend the time picking out a hairstyle that suits him from a catalogue. A poorly groomed husband also reflects negatively on the wife. In Goldstein-Gidoni’s (2012, 84–87, 118) ethnography of Japanese housewives, status is accorded to the type of job (and income) of their husbands, with the wife of a man working in a financially stable company enjoying a privileged position. While one cannot confirm without more detailed accounts from their wives, I suggest that making sure one’s husband’s grooming is up to scratch constitutes an informal way through which a wife may maintain her own status.

The explicit form of this communication may also reflect the age of these participants in their early 30s or Kazuki in his early 40s. Marriages among older generations tended to be built around an ideology where spouses would became one (ittai; literally ‘one body’) or ishin denshin (‘separate hearts communicating as one’), their mutual understanding so strong that any need for direct communication was obviated (Alexy 2019, 94–96; Borovoy 2005, 95). This helps to explain why older participants (in their 50s and above) did not mention any communication about grooming with their wives. As Alexy (2019, 99–100) highlights, discourses that encourage greater engagement in communication to improve marital harmony have been rising since the mid-2000s. Verbalising phrases such as ‘I love you’ are framed by counsellors and the media as being ‘vitally necessary for a healthy relationship’ (Alexy 2019, 102). While grooming directions may seem at odds to declarations of love, for the younger married participants, verbalising–and listening–to a wife’s grooming instructions reflects an open, healthy relationship.

To be sure, these gendered roles simultaneously delimit women’s and men’s opportunities, reproducing ideology that burdens women with domestic responsibilities and pushes men further towards work. Yet, while it is difficult to come to any firm conclusion about the overall health of their relationships just from grooming and without thorough accounts from their wives, as Holloway (2010, 106–112) reminds us, a wife’s devotion to her husband should not be understood solely in terms of burden and sacrifice but may also be a deep source of pleasure derived from having someone to care for and the act of caring itself. Steel (2019, 41) similarly highlights how many women find meaning and satisfaction in their orthodox housewife roles, albeit to a large extent due to the ongoing gender-based exclusionary practices faced in work contexts.

These accounts underscore that in marriages women hold particular influence over grooming ideals in their husbands’ bodies. While single men seeking a partner groom to meet women’s supposed preferences, upon marriage, if men fail to meet these standards, the intimate context of a marriage where women are under orthodox expectations to care for their husbands gives them leverage to make their husbands conform to ideals. In one way or another–imagined or through actual communication–women thus play a fundamental role in how men understand and work on their bodies.

Discussion

Underscoring the importance when studying masculinities (or any gender) in investigating the ‘co-creation of masculinity and femininity’ (Cook 2020, 54), I have demonstrated that women play a key role in reproducing heteronormative male bodies. For single men, grooming is understood in terms of attracting potential partners and is invoked in particular for sexual encounters, while for married men, wives’ explicit communication shapes men’s bodies as well as orthodox gendered relations where women take on the responsibility of caring for men’s bodily needs. This finding brings to light that the co-creation of men’s bodies means that it is not only masculinities but, because genders construct themselves in relation to other forms, also femininities and their relevant orthodox gender roles that are reproduced.

We must also recall that ‘women’ should be understood as a narrative trope serving to protect men’s orthodox conceptions of masculinity where they must repudiate feminine-coded bodily care to justify their grooming. When young, single men draw on discourses of ‘women’ as their motivation for grooming in their pursuits to find a girlfriend, not only does this demonstrate their heterosexuality but it also serves to show that they are grooming not for self-indulgence or because they want to look good per se, but for the ‘manly’ purpose of forming a heteronormative partnership. Similarly, when married men frame their grooming as a way to please or appease their wives, this serves to demonstrate that, firstly, they are married and have thus fulfilled an important role of normative masculinity and that their marriages are orthodoxly healthy. Thus while some scholars have asserted–or hoped–that greater scrutiny of men’s bodies and the resultant increase in attention to bodily care by men signals a shift to greater inclusivity and ‘progressive’ attitudes, particularly towards women (Darling-Wolf 2004, 366–367; Miller 2006, 157–158), going beyond cultural representations of men’s bodies and centring men’s experiences in their own words, this article has provided evidence that such gendered power relations are not so facilely upset. If anything, greater scrutiny of men’s bodies has further entrenched orthodox gender roles. Men perhaps now more than ever require women to draw the boundaries of normative masculinity.

Christopher Tso is a final-year PhD student in Japanese Studies at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. His teaching and research interests lie in gender and sexualities in contemporary Japan, with a particular focus on white-collar business culture and embodiment. He may be contacted at [email protected]

Acknowledgements

I thank the British Association for Japanese Studies for their generous support during the closing stages of conducting this research project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Same-sex marriage is currently unrecognised by the Japanese government. Certificates recognising same-sex unions are offered in at least seven wards and cities as of 2018 (Knight 2018).

2 Nude but without visible genitals.