Tonight I found myself looking at the Facebook page of my cousin’s daughter. On that page were posted several photos of cousin’s daughter’s daughters (little girls) playing with fake mustaches.
One of cousin’s daughter’s friends commented on the photos, saying something along the line of “[that girl] needs to work on her manscaping!” (because the fake mustache in question looked quite untended).
I was all, “Did she really say that?” It occurred to me that this young woman didn’t exactly know what “manscaping” meant.
I almost posted a “rebuke” right there on the Facebook page, but reconsidered. Not the right place. So I just sent the friend a private message, beginning with, “You don’t know me, but …” and then explained that the term “manscaping” has nothing to do with facial hair, and in fact involves hair “much lower”, and really isn’t a good term to attach to pictures of little girls with fake mustaches.
Of course, right after I clicked “Send”, I panicked and wondered, “Wait, was I right?” So I looked it up on Urban Dictionary. Yup, I was right:
manscaping
A term used to define male grooming below the belt. A male can use both an electric razor or a regular razor. A Mach 3 is preferable with the ladies on the testicular area. No female likes to deal with hairy balls, so men must education [sic] themselves on proper manscaping and maintenance techniques
Urbandictionary is great for getting an idea of the meaning of a slang term, but it’s not the be-all of meaning. Plenty of people use manscaping to refer to shaping facial and moustache hairs.
You sent the friend of your cousin’s daughter a private message talking about how she was wrong and how manscaping actually refers to men’s pubic hair? Did you know the friend?
I mean, at no point did you think, “Maybe this is a little creepy,” or “Maybe I don’t need to correct everything I see wrong on the Internet”?
Am I the only one who thinks this was a little weird?
Anyway, yes, manscaping can mean any man-hair. It’s not just pubic hair, that’s just urban dictionary.
As far as I can tell, manscaping was intended to be inclusive of the whole body. And it’s not necessarily the removal of hair. If a guy merely trimmed his pubes, I’d call that an example of manscaping. Just like landscaping, really - it’s the cosmetic alteration of natural growth.
So, I’d say that someone who only trims his mustache isn’t manscaping per se, but that mustache grooming could be considered a subset of manscaping.
In the context of a FaceBook comment… it would be precisely that implication of unkempt body hair that would make the comment funny to me. Little girls don’t have body hair, but they don’t have mustaches either… haha. I don’t know if that was exactly the intention or not.
Of course, now I’m debating whether I should message the friend again and apologize for being “Maybe … a little creepy”, or just leave it alone. I’m leaning toward the latter.
From the first page of searching moustache+manscape
Personally, when I hear manscape, my first thought is chest and armpits. Nor would I consider simply trimming and grooming a beard or moustache to be manscaping unless it were a particularly funky-looking one. But it seems clear to me that urbandictionary aside, there’s a chunk of society using manscape to mean tidy male hair care.
Agree, just leave it alone, but I’m not sure about the Friends Only. If the girl or someone else asks about it you may want to say a very bried, It wasn’t an appropriate thing for me to say. Please disregard it, and I apologize.
Something like that. If someone presses again, just paste in that same thing again, and add something like I do not care to discuss this further.
But yeah, just leave it alone. You should be fine.