I just got back from vacation on the beach where I estimate that the majority of men (maybe three quarters, both young and old) had no chest hair whatsoever on their bodies, i.e. smooth frontal bodies.
This got me thinking whether chest hair growth is actually quite rare (for the purposes of this discussion let’s consider White or Caucasian men only).
Now I know that shaving/waxing is a common trend among many fashion-conscious men. If that’s the case, is shaving of body hair actually all that common, even among older men? Or is it (the more likely case) that chest hair isn’t actually all that common?
I read on Wikipedia that 8% of adult men in a random sample were found to have no chest hair, but that’s suspicious to me based on the overwhelming majority of men that I saw having no visible body hair. Thanks
You were vacationing with a bunch of waxers. I have very little chest hair-maybe 30 hairs in the center and a little patch around each nip. My recollection of the high-school locker room: EVERYBODY-black or white-had more chest hair than me. Of course it would have been different if I had gone to school with a lot of Asians or Native Americans, but those didn’t exist in my little section of rural Georgia.
Congratulations! You get an F in General Questions! See you in summer school!
Per Wikipedia (under chest hair, fer Chrissakes, so it’s not like one had to go to some obscure source to get a factual answer for the first reply in GQ…):
You’re welcome.
ETA: Oh, I see that even the OP knew the answer to that. So what the hell is the question? “Why didn’t my casual survey corroborate that reported fact?” I don’t know. Coinicidence? Confirmation bias? A possibility that there is a tendency to remove chest hair in advance of a beach vacay? I don’t think there is a GQ-caliber factual answer to “Why didn’t it seem that way to me this one time I looked?”
However, the reason I posted this thread was because I find implausible the claim that only 6% of adult men have no upper body hair. In other words, I find it implausible that such a large number of men shave or wax their chests. Maybe the younger generation does, but it would be unusual if the older generation does, too - and yet, they also don’t have any visible hair.
Where are you located? Perhaps chest hair is related to ethnicity. It might not e quite so improbable that men I. Your area have less chest hair than most.
How old are you? In the past seeing an adult male with no chest hair would have caused eyes to bug out. Today the style is to remove hair. That’s all it is: a style. You’re seeing it on a beach because people who expose themselves on beaches preferentially remove their body hair today.
I assume your next question will be to ask how common public hair is on women because you’ve just looked at a lot of porn and didn’t see any.
Obviously not, but when the answer to the GQ can be found in a wikipedia article with the title most obviously suggested by the GQ, we probably should insist that the first answer in the thread not be an out-and-out half-joking WAG.
I’ll just say that casual observation at the beach isn’t a great way to determine this. Besides guys who remove hair, many have some that isn’t readily obvious. For instance, I don’t look extremely hairy on my chest normally because it’s fine hair. But when I get wet it stands out on my pasty skin. Unless you’re getting closer than makes sense with strangers on a beach you won’t really know.
This part I thought could get an F for GQ. The rest, Pass with flying colors. If you want, I’ll post the offending and movingly plaintive question in IMHO.
Your detractor has been similarly querulous with me before, I believe.
I have quite a bit of chest hair now(I’m 45), but when I was in my 20s I didnt have much. I named my chest hairs back then, both of them :). I remember this because when I got married I only had the two chest hairs. Now they are uncountable. Maybe mostly young guys at the beach?
Hmmm. Personally I’d be reluctant to accept a second-hand Wiki cite of a 1961 article describing a group of “Caucasoid” males with no explanation of what ethnic groups were included in the sample or how they were chosen as defnitive, especially if it went against my personal experience. So I get our op’s skepticism, and asking for a more definitive answer, preferably sourced, seems reasonable. The snark was out of bounds.
That said my WAG agrees with the likelihood of hair removal being common for beach goers in the area our op was vacationing and do not believe that age precludes such a practice depending on the group involved. I have no great additional source to offer. There is this other Wiki article that states that 21% of adult White males have no chest hair, but I also would not accept that as a great source. It does vary greatly by sub-population.
I’m 52 and I don’t have any ‘chest hair’ (nor any hair on my back) and never have.
The hair on my thighs is extremely fine and short, what little of it there is, and very sparse hair that is visible, (unless you get really close) on the calves of my legs.
All of the women I’ve known in my life, love it. (I’ve even been accused of shaving my legs. I think they were just jealous.)
I wasn’t able to grow a mustache until I reached 35, and even now, it’s pretty thin. I have a small patch on the ‘corners’ of my chin, and that’s the extent of my facial hair.
My father and brother had very little body and facial hair, also.
I definitely have chest hair. However, it’s not very dark - kind of a sandy blond, and that’s about the tone my chest takes on if I’ve been out on the beach for a bit. It’s also not very thick and about pattern 2 in extent. As a result, you’d have to get pretty close to me to see that I had chest hair. (And I have no back hair at all.) I didn’t even grow that much hair until my mid-20’s.
Going back to the science, here is a better source, perhaps, than the Wikipedia one: Variations of the hair patterns of the chest of white males. - PMC . It uses a lot more different pattern descriptions and gives no neat percentages, but it does agree with the ~6% no chest hair number. Both this study and the Wikipedia one suggest that as much as 40% of men might be more like me, with some hair that just isn’t very visible.
