Abstract
When I was a boy, my father and I would walk to the local barbershop, where Sal, an Italian immigrant, a comb in one hand and scissors in the other, would snip away to the sound of either opera or a baseball game. Men would wait quietly, smoking cigarettes or cigars, leafing through boxing magazines or Esquire. To this day, I associate the smell of cigars with the “butch wax” that made the front of my crew cut stand up straight.
My mother and sister went to Shirley’s Beauty Salon, where they’d be shampooed, cut, dried, and curlered in an ultra-feminized world of pink and yellow floral wallpaper.
Today, my son and I have our hair cut by Iris, a lovely Ukrainian immigrant, in a barbershop with only female haircutters; and my wife’s hair is cut by Jason, an equally lovely gay man from Barbados.
What happened? Where did those seemingly “natural” sex-segregated worlds go?
According to the ironically well-named Kristen Barber, that world of sex-segregated grooming remains, but it has been reconfigured to express not only the naturalness of gender differences, but the artificiality of class differences as well.
In her elegantly written and keenly observed book, Barber sets herself in twoupscale men’s grooming salons in LosAngeles in order to understand how middle-class men (mostly white and heterosexual) have become the most recent consumers of high-end grooming. This is not as easy as it looks: concern about appearance, and especially spending a lot of time on grooming, has long been seen as emasculating. The trick for the fashion industry—men’s lifestyle magazines, facial and body-care products, and grooming processes—has been to get straight white men to embrace them, to “masculinize men’s beauty consumption” (p.21). There’s a huge market there, but as M and GQ have learned, it’s a very tough sell.
One way to lure men into conspicuous consumption is to eroticize it, making it a confirmation of both masculinity and heterosexuality. Barber calls it “heterosexual aestheticlabor,” the conscious deployment of “straight, conventionally feminine-looking women” (p.19) as the technicians of men’s grooming. “Selling beauty to men involves using a discourse of masculinity to mark previously feminized spaces, products, and services ‘for men,’” she writes (p.61).
The owners of the salons must limn a fine line. On the one hand, they can’t be seen to be entertaining those fey metrosexuals, for whom the artifice of conspicuous consumption looks too applied from without as opposed to emanating from within. On the other hand, they must naturalize men’s grooming so that “real men” will feel comfortable and “natural.” (By contrast, the unisex salon is a space of androgynous gender confusion.)
Barber shows how everything in the salon is designed to calm men’s anxieties: the layout of the space itself, the wood paneling and the video screens and magazines. Nothing is left to chance: it takes a massive amount of effort to create the illusion of naturalness.
And what is lost, she notes, is precisely the casual homosocial conviviality of those barbershops of my youth. The new men’s salons are set up “to remove the elements of community and homosocial fraternizing” (p.58) that defined the barbershop (and still do, perhaps, in the African American community). The “cost” of men’s conspicuous consumption is male bonding; the salon is a solo experience.
This text contributes both to the sociology of gendered consumption and the sociology of work. Barber marries Thorstein Veblen’s understanding of conspicuous consumption with Arlie Hochschild’s understanding of emotional labor from The Managed Heart, discussing how attractive women lubricate and normalize potentially fraught homosocial interactions among men. Veblen understood that clothing and grooming were a class-based signal that one is above manual labor; Hochschild examined the enormous amount of work that cocktail waitresses and flight attendants have to do to make men feel comfortable in the homosocial spaces they occupy.
But unlike Veblen and Hochschild, who each focus on one side of the equation, Barber looks also at the other side. She talks to both the male consumers and the female haircutters. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book, in fact, is her interviews with the women who cut the men’s hair. They must navigate between being solicitous but not flirtatious, an often-difficult line to find. Men “appreciate sitting in a chair and having a woman listen to them,” says Vicky, one of the stylists. “They don’t get that everyday.” Barber understands this to mean, “men want to talk with women beauty workers because their wives or girlfriends may not listen to them” (p.110). Poor fellas. Makes the female haircutter into yet another instance of TGE for which many men seem so desperate to pay.
The costs to the women are considerable. They have to attend to the men’s narcissistic needs to be pampered but not poodled. They must appear to be “men’s women,” not career women trying to have jobs and balance work and family—that is, as subjects in their own right. And they establish their gendered allegiance with their male clients by putting down other women. The size of their tips may depend on how much they eschew female solidarity.
The men’s hair salon thus masculinizes men—or rather, reassures men of their masculinity—by re-feminizing women into both competent stylists and attentive servants. Barber shows how the entire artifice is designed to show that “looking good does not have to be emasculating,” but that “gendered beauty rhetoric, spaces, and experiences . . . can be folded into the status-enhancing narratives and experiences of class-privileged men” (pp.161–162). But such a world “is built on the backs of women beauty workers” (p.165).
In the end, Styling Masculinity left me feeling only slightly nostalgic for that lost world of Sal’s. The barbershop of my youth may have been a haven for Italian, Irish, and Jewish working-class men, but I never saw a black man enter the shop; class did not so neatly map onto race. And while the unproblematic casual homosocial intimacy of my first shave—leaning back in the chair, having Sal place a hot towel and then buckets of lather on my face and so expertly shave my peach fuzz with a straight-edged razor—may be lost, so too is the unproblematic male entitlement that was its hidden accoutrement. That today’s men need so much more reassurance that they’re still men may mean that, in some ways, that edifice of unexamined entitlement is eroding. But at least we’ll be manicured.