It’s 8:36 a.m., I’m on the train. In front of me is a man in a fitted navy suit with a matching dark blue skinny tie on a double cuff, sky blue and white striped tailored shirt. To finish he has on black patent, pointed full circle dress shoes, and what I believe to be Diesel cologne. Perfection, his image is fit for the cover of a GQ mag. The woman beside me coughs; I turn my head and stop looking at my reflection in the window.

Men’s fashion has become more and more influential; it would appear that we are not too far behind our female counterparts. Thanks to new media and the like of Topman and H&M a look that is considered stylish one week will undoubtedly be ubiquitous the next. Examples that spring to mind are the omnipresence of boat shoes and the abundance of colourful chequered summer shirts…they’re everywhere. Not only are we dressing more stylishly but our styles and the extent to which we groom ourselves are borderline gay. The widespread grooming is great! No longer do I board the train and have my nostrils abused by the foul smell of men who refuse to acknowledge deodorant. But on the other extreme you don’t have to look too far in order to find a bloke who waxes his legs or plucks his eyebrows. Men who are considered stylish today such as…(insert name) would have been considered homo a decade ago. Though I’m a Kanye West fan, his obsession with Louis Vuitton is a perfect example of fashion that would have been unquestionably queer.

As you can tell from the above description I myself like to look, smell and feel good but I fear that in our voyage for aesthetic appeal we will evolve to a stage whereby we forfeit all manliness and are in essence neutered. It’s already happening. In some urban societies it’s considered uncouth to have a hairy chest or to have stubble on your face. However these factors that some deem undesirable are the very essence of man. Regardless of what women say about such features, in my opinion they’re part of what makes a man. Besides since when have women ever known what they wanted? About a month ago I was pursuing a woman whose rhetoric was “umm, you need to shave your chest before I sleep with you” to which I objected.  Erm the next time we met lets just say I still had the same chest hair.

Ruggedness is a reality. It is one of the fundamental building blocks to a mans attraction, having some stubble, some stray strands of hair and even from time to time chapped lips, does not make you any less attractive to a woman. Evolution would state that the contrary is actually the case. Neanderthal man would have had to fight in order to survive, and women would have been after the fight in the man, that manly essence. Put plainly women fall for MEN. Possessing facial or body hair in reasonable volumes is not distasteful rather a matter of preference and opinion. I myself have fallen into the trap of beautifying excessively, it’s not cool. As a horny and female obsessed teenager I’d use concealer to mask the odd spot now and then, but it’s not cool. Think about it; I was using women’s products to attract straight women, but straight women are attracted to men, so by being feminine I was effectively shooting myself between the legs.

Male or female appearance matters, but what’s more important for men is the image you leave imprinted in a woman’s head, The way you carry yourself, your tone of voice, the way you touch. This image is the more important than your aesthetic value and in order to ’sharpen’ the image one must increase the contrast between yourself and the backdrop. “Through being original one becomes memorable,” so set aside the behaviours and fashions picked up from others, and be you.

It’s my belief that we must not seek to control ruggedness in an attempt to Photoshop reality. The stuff in the magazines is great, take parts from here and bits from there but do not try to ‘emulate’ or imitate a photo shoot. For the sake of mankind I urge you if you are male and reading this, embrace your manliness. If you’re female and reading this, encourage the men in your life to be true to who they are, we don’t want it to get to the stage whereby guys are checking themselves out in every reflective surface wondering whether or not their bum looks big.

Caesar

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