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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The Last Show with David Cooper. Believe it or not, many men are moisturizing, they're toning, they're bulking, they're injecting, all the while insisting it's not working on their beauty. So let's talk about how guys can be deep in beauty appearance culture, but somehow allergic to that word, beauty.
They'll call it anything but that. I am joined by Dr. Jordan Foster, a sociology professor at McEwen University in Edmonton, to discuss this. He's done research on this. Jordan, what a pleasure it is having you on the show. Thank you for having me, David. It's great to be here. So when we say men are embracing beauty culture but refusing to call it that, what are they calling it instead?
Chapter 2: What is the significance of men embracing beauty culture?
And why does that matter? Yeah.
Well, so two things to take into consideration. One is that across data points, we know men are embracing beauty culture. If it's, as you said, you know, turning to injections or cosmetic surgery, we know this is on the uptick. More sort of everyday or mundane practices like investing in a skincare routine, moisturizers, those are also sort of on the uptick. So men are certainly engaging.
But as you've noted, they're really avoiding that language of beauty and beautification.
Chapter 3: Why do men avoid the term 'beauty' when discussing their grooming habits?
So they've called it, honestly, everything and anything but beauty. So we've seen, for example, the term looks maxing really trending among men. So silly. But it's a sort of more masculine way of referring to like practices of beautification.
We've seen men, you know, talking about self-optimization, taking a sort of entrepreneurial spin toward their beauty practices and investments in appearance and attractiveness. Sometimes we might just be calling this bulking up, right, or becoming more attractive or available, right? You'll sometimes see a sort of sexualized bent on this too.
So we might see men, for example, describing this in terms of optimizing appearance for women, for their dates, for making sure that they show up as their best self.
So for the straight men out there, I'm going to disclose something to make it, you know, normalized. I keep a little stick of concealer in my pocket, you know, to cover zits and stuff. And I don't care. But I feel like when I'm at the airport and I toss it in the bin and then people look at me like, why does this guy have a makeup stick? I still feel like it's weird. Somehow...
I don't want to be associated with like feminine beauty culture. I mean, I don't care on its surface, but I still feel that like judgment. Is that why this distinction matters? Like men are somehow being judged as being feminine and that's somehow a bad thing. It shouldn't be.
Yeah. And I think that's a big part of it, right? Is that beauty is this deeply feminized subject matter or domain, right?
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Chapter 4: What alternative terms do men use to describe their beauty practices?
Of practice. So We often associate practices related to beauty as being frivolous, as being superficial. And that sort of is consistent with how we've often treated feminine subjects and femininity more broadly.
So it's not surprising in light of that, that men are sort of, as you said, allergic to the term beauty, that they might be critiqued as superficial or vain for having, like you said, a stick of concealer or even using lip chap. Now, on the other hand, there is some I would describe maybe more progressive conversations around beauty online.
So there are more men talking about, you know, I do have that stick of concealer or I am using like a CC cream to color correct my face to sort of look a little bit better. Not often in that language of beauty. It's couched in other spaces and other kinds of vocabularies.
But it is, I think, a positive to see more men at least openly beginning to have this dialogue in this conversation around the work that they're doing on their bodies.
And it's so mixed up because there are domains where men are, quote unquote, allowed to care about their look. For example, no one would judge a man for buying like a perfectly tailored suit. But that's aesthetics. That's beauty. That's your looks. Why makeup? Why skincare? Why certain things opposed to others?
Yeah, well, I would say that this this has that sort of historical bent to it. Right. Which is that we have seen certain norms relax in some spaces. So like clothing, also a space historically dominated by women. It's a space we've seen more investment in over the years. And so over the years, our concerns around investing in things like clothing, they've begun to dissipate. Right. Or to lessen.
I think that the same will be true ultimately of things like makeup and skincare, but we're simply not there yet. Even something like, you know, physical fitness, that's something most men can get on board with. They're super into the gym. They want to bulk up or maybe slim down. They don't often describe that as a kind of beauty work. And in my own research with students, particularly young men,
That's something that we try and sort of dialogue around is that you are working on the body. And if it was a woman working on her body to improve her appearance, we would typically describe this as a kind of beautification. So can we have that sort of switch, right, to think about muscularity even as an investment in appearance and in beauty?
Does dysmorphia pop up there, the feeling like your body's not good enough? I feel like that's a conversation we had about women's bodies maybe 20, 30 years ago about weight. Is the same true about maybe like muscles for men? Are there body image issues that crop up in men that aren't talked about enough?
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Chapter 5: How is masculinity influencing men's engagement with beauty culture?
They tend to be quite conventionally attractive. That's having a kind of...
effect right on on young men and other men who are seeing all of this and are now really inundated in ways that women long have been inundated by these beauty and body messages and so it is taking a toll across like i said those insecurities that rise in anxieties and in more extreme cases in instances of body dysmorphia and muscle dysmorphia specifically
Is it a good thing that men are being welcomed into this club of not feeling great about your body? Shouldn't we just abolish the club? So there's this thread of sort of like equality. It's now happening to men and women the same, but it's also like, oh, we all shouldn't feel bad about our bodies.
Yes. You know, it's okay. I love this point. It's a point of discussion among scholars and these sort of professionally intelligent people who have been debating, yeah, does this mean that men and women are now equal? If these beauty pressures that women have long faced apply to men, does that mean the sexes are somehow equal? You know, that's not necessarily the case.
Because while these pressures and their consequences are rising, they do actually look different in their scope and scale. And men can still get away with a lot more than what women can get away with. So men, for example, can avoid doing work on their appearance. They can show up as a little bit frumpy. We have the popularization of the dad bod.
So there's still a space for men to actually neglect appearance, to neglect the body, to neglect their investment, so to speak. And that's not considered a bad thing in the same way that women neglecting their appearance is often criticized and very vocally, right?
So women still tend to be understood more narrowly in terms of their appearance, whereas this is now just a part of our consideration of men and masculinity. So I would say this probably doesn't signal a shift in greater equality, not in whole, maybe in part. Another thing that I think is worth considering is
is whether or not, and you sort of touched on this, David, it's even a good thing that beauty's force expand in general, right? Because I would argue that its expansion into the lives of men actually is a signal of the fact that beauty's pressures are expanding across the board, right? Right.
That women face more intensive pressures just as men are beginning to face some of these appearance focused pressure. So you can think of investments in plastic surgery, in cosmetics, in injections, which we know are all on the rise. Right. That would be a signal that actually beauty's pressures are weighing more on everybody.
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