I know the look but I can’t define it. It is a look of maturity. Very common in old photos of young men in their twenties but much less common today even in men in their 40’s. Even movie characters in modern movies either fail to capture this or steer away from it.
Is this something a young man can cultivate through facial expressions, posture style??? I have no clue. I do notice that on occassion wehn I see someone on their off time in more casual dress they do seem to loose some of that look but in most cases it doesn't seem to matter so much.
Any theories on this? Am I noticing something that doesn't really exist?
changes in photographic technology. Lighting and film and the need for people who hold the heck still for a long time, are all different now.
changes in who photographers decide to take pictures of.
changes in communications = awareness by the photographic subjects, of the rest of the world.
what people think manliness is supposed to look like. There were times past, when any time a male was asked to pose, they would instantly feign intense seriousness.
I wish I could describe the look. I have old photos of my Dad in the army. Maybe 25 years old. I don’t see any youthfullness in the face at all. Lack of youthfullness is probably about the best I can do. I have even seen the look on guys with baby faces. I think they tend to be taken more seriously on first impressions.
the testosterone makes good sense. It kind of ties in with something else. I know animals like male lions are very easy to spot high levels of testosterone in. Their mane gets darker, thicker and more lustrous. If they loose to many challenges the reverse happens as levels drop and the mane becomes thinner and less lustrous. I suspect men are the same way. Years ago and even in my lifetime young men would posture and challenge one another in usually safe ways. This I think was enough to generate some testosterone. This practice seems to be less widespread today.
They’d been working, almost certainly in physical labour, for 10 years by their mid-20s. Married, a couple of kids - maybe even lost one by then, drinking to excess at least twice a week. If they avoided industrial injury, disease or war they might live another 30 years. They were almost their fathers already. They weren’t thinking about retirement funds.
I think physical labor has a lot to do with it. Men of the 40’s and 50’s had all grown up chopping wood and doing other physical chores every day of their lives. The young adults of today just have no musculature - unless they got it at the gym.
Even then, workout muscles are just not the same as daily work muscles. A carpenter will have much harder arms than a weight lifter.
Given the OP’s age, pix of his Dad and contemporaries would be people born in 1920 or earlier.
Besides all the hard physical work already mentioned, those folks lived through the era of maybe WWI, certainly the Depression, and WWII. If your childhood years were mostly like that you knew that life hadn’t been cushy, and wasn’t ever going to be cushy.
Just look at men today even if they are the same age. Life experiences can cause variation. A 20 something manual labourer can easily look older than a mid-thirties gym hitting office worker.
Good fortune occasioned by decades of diligent work in reforming society and people’s attitudes. All of which can be undone in a few years of benighted ignorance.
People being photographed back then saw it as an event, a novelty. Their main examples to model themselves on were painted portraits and stiff daguerreotypes up thorough formal celebrity shots. They posed.
This, along with the sepia-like aging of older photographs (which tends to give a darker skin tone) is probably the most significant . In past eras, men dressed in more somber clothing and generally wore more reserved expressions. The change in behavior in photograph subjects (both male and female) over the decades is striking, going from very posed and severe expressions to candid, jovial, and even clownish behavior, culminating in the abhorrent practice of taking ‘selfies’. Try this experiment; take a picture of several people both laughing in bright lighting and with unexpressionless or stern faces in dimmer light, and then ask a sampling of subjects to estimate their ages. You’ll almost certainly find a significant shift in the average estimated age. People smiling with open expressions and fully illuminated eyes appear younger (and more appealing) than people with reserved expressions and shrouded eyes.
The measured reducing trends in testosterone over the last several decades are genuine but difficult for researchers to precisely quantify due to fluctuating levels of the steroid in the body over daily and weekly cycles. However, these reductions are primarily seen in men in later middle age (in their fifties and later) and so have nothing to do with adolescent development and maturity through the twenties. The cause(s) of this reduction are not widely accepted, but hypothesized contributors are both the lack of strenuous muscle-building activities (even professional suburban men in the 'Fifties and 'Sixties did more physical labor than ‘yuppies’ today), lack of effective means of dealing with stressors, changes in societal roles that reduce the traditional impetus and desirability of aggressive behavior, and potential environmental contaminants not in wide existence decades ago (plastic beverage and food containers, hormonal contaminants in municipal water supplies, et cetera). None of these by themselves seem to be dominant contributors to reductions, and do not seem to have impacted testosterone production in adolescent males, which if anything has increased due to generally better macronutrition encouraging full hormone production.
Also, if you look at photos of men (and women) who matured while living marginally during eras like the Great Depression and the Midwestern Dust Bowl, or through famines in Europe during and after World War II, you’ll see a marked lack of physical maturity, with slight builds, less musculature, and generally neotenic features that mature into often weak features due to poor childhood and adolescent nutrition (which correlates with lower testosterone production). The notion that all people in previous eras looked more mature is really an example of confirmation bias and differences in photographic subject behavior.
Trying to think of an example that people could relate to. George Clooney seemed to develop his manlilook over the years in age appropriate progressions. While Brad Pitt seems to maintain that boyish look no matter how hard he tries to copy Geaorge Clooney.