To shave or not to shave? There are many options when it comes to male body hair, and every choice holds its own social significance. A shaven face or neatly trimmed beard are standard characteristics of the working man. More rigorous hair removal or “manscaping,” including tweezed eyebrows, waxed chest and back, and shaved legs and arms, might indicate membership in the twink subcategory of the gay community. Cultivating an excessive amount of body hair, on the other hand, may signal adherence to the practices of a bear, another gay subculture.

Manscaping scrutiny also extends to the pubic. Here, variety abounds with some men choosing to trim, artfully shape their pubic hair, or even go completely bald.

The modern variety in grooming practices has led to changing attitudes towards gendered appearances as we construct new ways of distinguishing between genders. Metrosexuals are on the rise, and “unisex” or “agender” are becoming more frequent categories in fashion. The public is growing accustomed to gender expression that falls outside of a strict binary thanks to shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, the Instagram accounts mathuism or bigandmilky, and the recent Vanity Fair cover of Caitlyn Jenner.

The meanings we assign to grooming habits are socially constructed, not innate. At the same time, although the precise valences have changed, it seems that, throughout history, facial and body hair have been important staging grounds for the expression of different masculine identities. In classical Athens, male body hair and its strategic removal was just as much the subject of humor, abuse, and discourse as it is today.

The ancient text most associated with ancient Greek manscaping is Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae. In an early scene, the elderly male character known as “the Kinsman” has his pubic hair removed, and he is definitely not pleased about it. He had agreed to help his son-in-law, the famous playwright Euripides, by dressing up like a woman as part of a ploy to spy on a disgruntled female mob at the upcoming celebration of the Thesmophoria. However this — singeing near his genitals — was going too far:

EURIPIDES: Get up so I can singe you; bend over and don’t move.

KINSMAN: Damn the luck, I’m going to be roast pig (delfakion)!

EURIPIDES: Somebody bring out a torch or a lamp. Slave brings out a lighted torch and hands it to Euripides. Bend over. Now watch the tip of your dick.

KINSMAN: I’ll watch out, all right — only I’m on fire! Oh no, no! (to the audience) Water! Water, neighbors, before somebody else’s arse catches fire!

EURIPIDES: Be brave!

KINSMAN. How am I supposed to be brave when I’m being turbovulcanized?

(Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae 236–243, trans. Jeffrey Henderson)

Removing the Kinsman’s pubic hair was, of course, beyond what was necessary. As far as we know, the Thesmophoria was not a nudist event. And even if it had been, the Kinsman’s scrotum and testes would have been a much bigger problem for his disguise than the state of his pubic hair. Yet Aristophanes made sure to include pubic grooming as part of the disguise.

Beyond eliciting laughter, the scene shows how grooming practices in Ancient Greece were gendered. It emphasizes that the practice of pubic hair removal was a visual cue that distinguished the sexes, even though in this case the cue was unnecessary from the audience’s point of view — if caught with his chiton down the Kinsman was going to have bigger balls to juggle than unkempt pubic hair. The message is clear: removing pubic hair was a female practice.

Athenian men who participated in new trends in beauty and fashion were vulnerable to polemical accusations of effeminacy and cross-dressing; Aristophanes did not miss an opportunity to ridicule such men. For the Athenian adult male (as at other points in history), beardedness was the norm. When Euripides shaves the Kinsman’s face as part of his disguise, the older man is shocked, upon seeing his reflection, to find he looks like the contemporary politician Cleisthenes (Aristophanes manages to get in a jab at both the Kinsman and a leading politician). It becomes clearer later in the play that Cleisthenes is being mocked for his effeminacy: he appears at the Thesmophoria and tells the women that his status as their ally is manifest on his hairless face (575).

Aristophanes also mocks the tragic poet Agathon in the same scene. Euripides and the Kinsman need women’s clothing for the disguise they are constructing to help the Kinsman infiltrate the women-only festival. Agathon has everything readily available because, as it turns out, he regularly dresses like a woman because it helps him write his tragedies. In addition, Agathon tells Euripides and the Kinsman that he considers it unseemly for a poet, whose goal is the pursuit of beauty, to be “coarse (ἀγρεῖον) and hairy” (159–60). Aristophanes thus effeminizes Agathon and, at the same time, shows us that there were different ways of expressing masculinity in ancient Greece via the grooming of facial hair.

With this burlesque scene Aristophanes asserts that men are hairy, women are not, and men without facial hair assume a feminine appearance. On the one hand, men are, typically, hairier than women; on the other hand, the expectation that they must leave all of their hair intact in order to maintain distance from female bodies is socially constructed.

It is likely that Aristophanes primarily intended the scene in which Euripides and his Kinsman coordinate the disguise of a woman to be comedy, not social commentary. It was entertaining back then and continues to be today for its crass slapstick. After all, what isn’t funny about an old man bent over on stage wailing about his dick catching fire and worrying that he will end up looking like a “delfakion” (a word that literally means “roast pig” but was also a euphemism for female genitalia)? But it is not the only scene from classical Athens that shows the gendered nature of pubic grooming.

A near contemporary scene of women in the midst of grooming appears on a bell krater that has been attributed to the Dinos Painter and is now located in the Arthur M. Sackler collection of the Harvard University Art Museum. The painted scene, like the one acted out on stage in the Thesmophoriazusae, shows that pubic hair removal is a feminine activity. A naked woman is seated in a chair on the left as she depilates herself. The gesture of her right hand is unclear — is she clutching a pair of tweezers to remove each hair or is she brushing away hairs that she has just singed with the lamp in her left hand? On the right, a winged Eros kneels in front of a woman (probably Aphrodite, since it his hard to imagine anyone else for whom Eros would do such a service) concentrating as he removes her pubic hair.

Only female bodies are depilated in the scene painted on the bell krater. The kneeling Eros’ body is smooth and hairless, but that was likely more an indication of his young age. The images of three youths completely covered by their himatia, or long cloaks, are painted on the other side of the bell krater. Their presence on the other side of the vessel emphasizes the gendered distinction between the two scenes — hair removal was for women.

The painted scene on the bell krater introduces a twist to my argument about the regulation of gendered appearances in ancient Athens. Depilating was for women but, as the composition suggests, there are certain similarities between youths (particularly prepubescent ones) and women. Eros’ youthful body is hairless, like a woman’s, and the other side of the bell krater is decorated with beardless faces of youths tightly wrapped in their himatia. We are encouraged to wonder: beneath those garments, are they as hairless as the women on the other side of the krater soon will be?

Women and young men were both potential objects of sexual desire in the world of the adult Athenian male. Sex between an older and younger man was normal in elite circles, a practice that was part of a much older pedagogical tradition. The norm governing these relationships dictated that older men guide their younger lovers to full social integration as they matured and that the youths pleasure their older lovers in return. The reality did not necessarily match the social explanation for such relationships, but the result was that youths and women were both viewed as sexually desirable.

The scene on the Dinos painter’s bell krater first and foremost asserts that depilation is a feminine activity. But it also raises the possibility that there are similarities between the erotic female body and that of the youth. In the context of the women preparing their bodies for sex — the purpose of their grooming is emphasized by Eros’ presence — the fully covered youths on the back of the vase taunt the omnipresent adult, male viewer. What state are they in? Are they still closer to the women or have they begun the transition to mature men?

Young men occupied a particular in-between stage whose fleeting quality could be eroticized. Theognis of Megara, a sixth century BCE poet, described the ephemeral window of youth as such: “Knowing in your heart that the flower of lovely youth / is briefer than a footrace, loosen my chain.”(1305–1306, trans. Thomas Hubbard). For grown men, however, hairlessness was not eroticized; it was mocked. For example, the fashion choices of one Artemon, whose identity is otherwise unclear, were repeatedly ridiculed for the better part of the fifth century. Anacreon lampooned his personal style (frs 8 and 82 Gentili = 372 and 388 PMG) and the comic poet Cratinus continued to mock him as a luxurious effete long after his death (Ach. 80). Persian-style parasols, silk himatia, and golden jewelry were contentious male accessories that, if worn, could make a man vulnerable to polemical attack in the ancient Greek world.

Speeches purportedly presented in the law courts of ancient Athens preserve examples of men denigrating their opponent’s appearance as evidence of moral failing. Demosthenes accuses Apollodorus of being licentious and explicitly points out his soft chlanis (or mantle) as proof of his decadent, wayward lifestyle (Dem. 36.45). Such allegations must have been thrown around frequently, because Demosthenes also finds himself the subject of this kind of scrutiny: in a speech accusing Timarchus of prostituting himself, Aeschines draws his audience’s attention to Demosthenes, who is defending Timarchus in court. He points to the orator’s soft chitoniskos (or tunic) and pretty chlanis as evidence of his lewd effeminacy (Aes. 1.131). These accusations are early examples in the history of physiognomy, a kind of analysis further developed by Polemon and the sophists. They reflect anxiety about the meanings of the choices men make about their appearances.

To us, these attributions of gender to various kinds of garments may seem odd; a himation today looks like a glorified wrap. But these examples of the regulation of male beauty and fashion in antiquity can be used to critique our own tendencies to monitor the distinction between male and female appearances.

Social types that are developing today illustrate the need to reconsider the traditional classifications of gendered visual cues. Consider the figure of the metrosexual. A loosely defined social type within modern American society, he shares some qualities with the American notion of European style as well as with an American construction of what a gay man looks like. The visual cues of a metrosexual include a well-dressed male who clearly subscribes to a regular routine of grooming. His hair is styled and his facial hair, if he has any, is neatly trimmed. The metrosexual might wear accessories, such as a bracelet or a summer scarf that adds a bit of color or pattern to his outfit.

Many still maintain that gay men dress a particular way, making them identifiable within a group of heterosexual men. But the nebulously defined metrosexual, with his fashion sense that cuts across divisions in sexuality, confuses any neat categorization. A groomed man who is well dressed could be gay, or he could be an urban individual with more disposable income, or he could be both. The definition of the metrosexual as “a straight man who dresses like a gay one” rests heavily on binaries of sexuality that are clumsily mapped onto standards of fashion and beauty in a reductive manner.

As we construct new norms to suit our changing society, let us remember Aristophanes’ poor Kinsman character, bending over to have his pubic hair singed. An object of ridicule in his time, he serves a more noble role for posterity — reminding us that grooming choices are powerful, if socially constructed, indicators of gender, especially when those indicators do not match the phenotypical expectation.

Angele Rosenberg is an Amsterdam-based lover of the ancient world who is particularly interested in aesthetics, the materiality of objects, and theories of style. Having recently graduated with a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Chicago, she is now a researcher at the University of Amsterdam where she is writing her first book on the impact of low cultural forms on high art during the Classical period.