How To Shave The Modern Male

In which a helpful corporate giant encourages you to please groom your crotch. Truly

I have often wondered, in calmer moments of profound wisdom unaffected by actual subtle thought or deeper intellectual concerns, why there is no sly and essential maintenance manual for the penis.

Wait, let me be more specific. Why has no men's magazine, not Esquire and not Maxim and certainly not yuppie-riffic GQ, dared venture (to my knowledge, anyway) a single enthusiastically detailed column as to the general health and upkeep and -- perhaps most importantly of all, as far as overall aesthetics and tactile friendliness are concerned -- the prudent follicular trimmage of the enchanted regions surrounding the male appendage?

Oh I know, it's a sensitive topic, this male-maintenance thing. It's not one many sexually confused modern men open up to easily, not something we like to dwell upon and analyze in the way women can so easily discuss menstrual flow or waxing techniques or purse design.

Men, in our infinite mulish simplemindedness, tend to think all body parts are just supposed to work and all the stuff growing on our backs and thighs and groinal regions looks damn fine as it is no matter how tangled and shaggy and utterly extraterrestrial it might appear and how often our lovers cringe and shudder at the sight of us naked. Besides, there's little we can do about it anyway. Right?

Wrong.

For example, grooming. "Queer Eye" and the entire unloved metrosexual movement aside, simply shocking is the size of the male population that thinks trimming the male body's incredible swarm of hair follicles is silly and unnecessary and just far too feminine, and is only meant to be restricted to the head and face and maybe a few strays on the biceps, when in fact there is an entire universe of trimmage that could take place and grateful indeed would be most attuned women of the world.

(By the way, many of the top waxing salons, especially here in San Francisco, have a great plethora of straight male clients, many of whom are brought in by their wives and girlfriends. And as any worthy and attentive porn fan knows, many of the male stars are waxed and trimmed and almost shaved completely, all the way down and back up underneath and well up into God's country. Makes for more aesthetically pleasing camera shots, is why. Just, you know, FYI.)

Which brings us, finally, after far too many meandering paragraphs, to Philips Norelco, a major appliance manufacturer and global leader in high-end hospital medical devices, recently venturing with seeming unchecked fearlessness into the delicate terrain of, you know, shaving the male crotch.

Gaze, won't you, at Philips Norelco's latest and surprisingly bold viral Internet ad campaign from 2006, found on shaveeverywhere.com (Note, with some bemusement, that the shaveeverywhere.com URL was apparently still available to Philips and had not already been claimed by some happy underground fetish porn outfit. Wonders.)

For the record, shaveeverywhere.com is one of the new breed of interactive live-action campaigns that uses a series of fluid, fast-loading video splices of real actors to give the feel that the character is actually speaking right to you. There is another prime example of this genre, Microsoft's baffling but highly entertaining (well, for about 10 minutes) search site called Ms. Dewey (msdewey.com), in which a terrifically sexy actress (Janina Gavankar) simultaneously flirts with and fluently berates her army of swooning geek-boy viewers as they desperately scramble to type something clever to get her attention. Check it.

Right off the bat, the playfully smarmy Philips pitchman -- let's call him "Gary," a guy apparently meant to be a cross between a likable frat guy and a B-grade Hugh Hefner and that dude at the bar who orders a gin and tonic and won't stop talking about his love of cigars and parasailing -- Gary lets you know the game. He mentions the absolute necessity of trimming (with full bleeps intact, natch) your back, c--k, balls and ass. He keeps a straight face throughout, all winking nudge-nudge in-the-know guy chitchat.

Gary is selling something called the Bodygroom, a rather cheaply modified electric shaver made "exclusively" for men. It is, apparently, an all-over trimmer for all sorts of hair, from back to armpits to undercarriage. And yes, it really exists. Philips has sold a truckload of them, far more than they expected. And it's all thanks to Gary.

The pitch is clear. Gary will tell you, straight out, that the Bodygroom will "help make your d--k look bigger." This is a theme and a key selling point. He will also tell you, with a (winking) straight face, that the Bodygroom is "the convenient, easy, gentle way to make your genitals bloom." And if you ask him if women really prefer a well-groomed man, he will snicker in disbelief and barely be able to contain his laughter before composing himself, looking straight at the camera and deadpanning, "Yes, yes they do."

In fact, the opening introduction alone addresses your average American frat guy's naggingly homophobic concerns right from the start. Gary even admits to it himself: "Let me tell you, this whole issue [of genital grooming] used to make me quite uncomfortable. But now, with a hair-free back, well-groomed shoulders and an extra optical inch on my c--k, let's just say life has gotten pretty darn cozy."

You will smile and say to yourself, wait, this is Philips Norelco? This is a major manufacturer of mountains of Chinese-made consumer products? Are they insane? Are they simply begging the Christian right to write nasty little notes to corporate HQ and threaten a shaver boycott as they pule about the flagrant innuendo and the bleeps and the offensive notion that American men should shave their perineum?

Doesn't matter. Click through this site a couple times (be sure to watch the music video) and you can't help but admit it's a ballsy move. Not only is Philips' ad agency (Tribal DDB) smarmily defying the cultural conservative mind-set that wails about gays and cries about sex and screams at the sight of the female nipple, but they are simultaneously going after that rarest of homophobic monosyllabic demographic beasts, the untrimmed American Net-savvy frat guy blog-reading dude. And if sales are any indication, they're succeeding fabulously.

In this way, you might even say that Philips is serving a deeper humanitarian purpose, fulfilling a serious cultural need. They are (inadvertently, of course) doing nothing less than informing armies of young, sexually confused man-beasts that the general trimming of body hair -- including, as Gary repeatedly states, the c--k, balls and ass -- isn't just for transvestites and gay porn stars and metrosexual writers anymore. In other words, caring about this sort of thing doesn't make you gay, or stupid, or emasculated. It actually makes you sort of hot.

And besides, who wouldn't want the pleasure of an extra optical inch?