why women feel compelled to clean, polish and moisturize their mates
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 By Misty Harris
Canwest News Service
Published October 2005
It's often said that behind every great man there's a great woman. What they don't tell you is that she's there because she's either shaving her partner's back, popping his hard-to-reach zits or exfoliating the dead skin off his sunburn.
Such is the unsavoury but almost universal behaviour of the fairer sex behind closed doors. Just as primates are predisposed to grooming their mates, women feel inexplicably compelled to clean, polish and moisturize our men until their testosterone turns a pale shade of pink.
Ask any guy and he'll admit — perhaps a tad reluctantly — that at least one female in his life has prodded him with tweezers, tugged at a stray eyebrow hair or attacked a pimple on his back as if it were threatening the state of democracy.
Some might call it obsessive.
We prefer to call it good spousekeeping.
To be clear, the goal isn't to turn men into women with these cosmetic rituals. Who then would kill spiders and open jars?
We simply want a guy with the body of Brad Pitt, the grooming of Prince William, the hairlessness of a dolphin, two separate eyebrows and the willingness to buy us tampons on the way home from work.
Really, is that too much to ask?
Because men don't come with warranties, their significant others can't return them to the manufacturer — namely, mommy dearest — when something malfunctions. So it's imperative to perform regular maintenance, which entails everything from monitoring his cholesterol to overseeing his skincare habits and preventing the unholy union of socks with sandals.
Writing in the new issue of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, S.S. Fair issues a clarion call to women who want to further this curious practice.
"It's time we divert those queer eyes from our straight guys and take over decorating and renovating the opposite sex ourselves. It's time for us to rescue the clueless hetero man from being bossed around by anyone but us."
To our credit, we somehow manage to control our compulsive grooming urges at the beginning of a relationship. Much the same way guys control urges to clean the bathroom — their entire lives.
But as a comfort level builds and the bathroom door is less likely to stay closed, a female's desire to bust out the hair clippers and channel Edward Scissorhands becomes too overpowering to ignore.
Of course, straight men would sooner watch a Highway to Heaven marathon with Richard Simmons than submit to the whims of a wannabe spousekeeper. But upon realizing that a woman brandishing tweezers, antiseptic and a safety pin is likely the closest they'll ever get to S & M, most surrender.
Just days ago, a co-worker confessed her husband gamely indulges her need to pluck the wiry black hairs from his neck.
Another revealed a profound sadness that her talon-like nails bar her from attending to her boyfriend's back blemishes. (If he ever needs a tracheotomy, however, she's totally prepared.)
A third woman sheepishly chimed in, exposing her secret penchant for peeling the dead skin off her hubby's arms and shoulders.
Not surprisingly, this type of gritty discourse is lacking around the water cooler, thus leading every man to believe he's alone in being treated like a science project in the bathroom. Each feels that if anyone were to discover why his nose hairs no longer runneth over, Maxim would suspend his subscription and he'd be denied entry at Hooters.
Today, we break the code of silence and recognize those who have suffered physical indignities in the name of female neuroticism. Men, believe it when we say you are not alone.
Just follow the trail of pink testosterone.
The stories of Misty Harris can be found in such high-profile publications as the National Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, Flare magazine, the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Citizen, the Vancouver Sun and the Edmonton Journal, among others. Misty lives in Edmonton, where she is currently plotting how to finance her next Chanel handbag.
Thanks, Misty, for giving us permission to reprint your story.
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