Now 5 months into 2023 and I think we've already run out of 'articles about extreme grooming practices' that the lifestyle magazines can commission. We've had designer vaginas and phalloplasties, leg extensions and the next iteration of the BBL – now, in what I have to hope is the last of the current glut of these pieces, we have someone writing in Wired about the boom in 'manscaping' and testicular grooming products being foisted upon guys to help ensure that their ballsacks smell pine-fresh (other scents are, I believe, available) at all times.
I could say it started when I turned 33—my Jesus year, the year I vowed to transcend anxiety and exhaustion and do my most important work, the year I would emerge from my cave of pandemic isolation and early parenthood and couples therapy as the second coming of myself. But I am a millennial, not a messiah. The truth is that my search for rebirth began a few months later, with a Slack message about ball deodorant.
This is readable, and quite fun, and pleasantly-silly, but also it's a bit depressing tbh – I suppose there's a degree of (miserable) gender equality in the fact that men are now being subjected to exactly the same sort of lies as women when it comes to FMCG brands attempting to sell us new unguents, but, look, NOONE'S GENITALIA IS MEANT TO SMELL OF BUBBLEGUM FFS AND IF YOUR PARTNER DEMANDS THAT YOU ENSURE THAT YOUR JUNK SMELLS OF SWEETIES THEN I THINK YOU SHOULD PROBABLY DO SOME DEEPER INVESTIGATIONS AS TO WHY THE FCUK THAT MIGHT BE AND EXACTLY WHAT THEIR PROBLEM IS.
Via Webcurios.
