The Ape That Shaves Twice

A man in Tokyo is having his shins lasered because his office got hot.

That is roughly the news. This summer Tokyo’s governor, Yuriko Koike, widened her “Cool Biz” campaign — the two-decade-old push to turn down the office air-conditioning by letting the suit go — all the way to shorts. Ties were the first casualty back in 2005. Now the jacket and the long trousers can come off too, in the name of not cooking your staff. Last summer was Japan’s hottest on record; more than a hundred thousand people were taken to hospital for heatstroke. Shorts in the office is, on any sane reading, a mercy.

And it has produced a brand-new social crime. The Japanese internet has a word for it already: sunehara, “leg-hair harassment,” the specific discomfort of having to look at a colleague’s hairy shins. A men’s cosmetic chain reports a jump in leg-hair lasering. In one of their own June surveys, most respondents said they’d rather not wear shorts at all, and body hair sat near the top of the reasons.

Read that back. The heat forced men’s legs into public view for the first time, and within a single season the culture had grown a taboo to cover them.

That is the whole history of body hair in miniature. And it quietly demolishes the tidiest explanation we have.

The tidy explanation goes: hairlessness is a beauty standard men impose on women. There is something to it, and I’ll come back to the something. But it cannot be the whole engine, because here is the same machine building the same taboo out of men’s legs, with no woman anywhere in the causal chain. Nobody’s wife asked for smooth shins. The pressure came in sideways, from other men and from the plain fact of suddenly being seen.

Go back far enough and the “modern male plot” idea doesn’t survive contact with a bronze razor.

The Egyptians were scraping themselves smooth around 3000 BCE — both sexes, with blades, pumice and sugar paste — as a mark of cleanliness and rank. That is millennia before anything you’d call patriarchy in the modern sense, and the tell is that the elite men did it too. Hairlessness there wasn’t about gender. It was about class. The smooth body was the body that didn’t have to sweat in a field.

So where did our version come from? This part really is manufactured, and we can almost put a date on it. In 1915 Gillette launched the Milady Décolleté, the first razor sold to women, and the copy did the heavy lifting: it reframed underarm hair as an “embarrassing personal problem,” conveniently just as sleeveless dresses were putting armpits on display. By mid-century, shaved legs and underarms were simply what an American woman did. In the 1990s the same move was run on pubic hair, with the Brazilian wax and a generous assist from pornography; by 2016 a national survey found about 84% of American women groomed there, most of the youngest cohort taking it all off.

Now the honest caveat, because the marketing story flatters us and I distrust anything that flatters us. Gillette didn’t invent the wish from nothing. Women were already using homemade methods; hemlines were already rising. The razor company poured petrol on a fire that was already lit. That is what advertising is actually good at: finding a faint preference and selling it back to you as a need. It rarely conjures the preference cold.

Then the question everyone wants answered. If not men, who?

The uncomfortable finding is that women police this far harder than men do. Put a photo of an unshaven woman in front of raters, and the women mark her down more sharply than the men. Smooth skin works as a signal aimed sideways, at other women — a visible receipt for grooming effort, in a status game most men are not even playing. Which does not erase the male baseline; there is a real, cross-cultural male lean toward youthful, low-hair looks that sets a floor. But the day-to-day enforcement is lateral and commercial, not a nightly instruction from head office. “Patriarchy” is too blunt an instrument for a norm that now has men caught in it too.

And the cross-cultural map should end the argument that any of this is human nature. The strict Western standard is the outlier, not the rule. Plenty of societies across East Asia, South Asia and Africa carried no strong taboo on women’s body hair at all; Japan itself was fairly relaxed about it until the 1990s. What we are watching is one norm sweeping the globe on the back of the same beauty industry and the same screens, not a truth about the species surfacing everywhere at once.

Which brings us to the part I find genuinely strange.

We are the naked ape — except we aren’t. Count the follicles and a human has around five million, roughly the same density as a chimpanzee. We didn’t lose the hair; we shrank it. The thick terminal fur was swapped for fine, near-invisible vellus down, most likely so we could sweat. Out on the open savanna, running prey to exhaustion in the heat, an ape that could dump its body heat through bare skin instead of panting through fur had an edge, and we carry roughly ten times the sweat-gland density of a chimp to prove it. Fewer parasites in bare skin probably helped too.

Here is the twist. The hair we kept, we kept for a reason. Underarm and pubic hair arrives at puberty, sits over glands that broadcast scent, and almost certainly did a job in attraction. So the modern project, shaving exactly those patches, is us reversing by fashion the one bit of body hair evolution went out of its way to keep.

Put the two processes side by side and they rhyme almost too neatly.

Biology spent a few million years removing our fur because smooth skin paid: it cooled us, it carried fewer ticks, and a clear hide may have signaled health to a mate. Culture is now removing what’s left, on exactly the same logic — smooth skin reads as clean, healthy, well-tended, worth choosing — only it runs the program in a single generation instead of a hundred thousand of them, and it enforces the result with lasers and comment sections instead of survival. Same selection pressure. Different substrate. Absurdly different clock.

And unlike the first round, this one overshoots. Evolution left us with strategic tufts. Culture wants the tufts gone too, and the arms, and now the shins — a degree of hairlessness no wild human population ever had. The “natural, smooth” body sold back to us is not a return to nature. It is a construction nature never built, one that requires a standing appointment to maintain.

The hygiene alibi doesn’t hold either, for what it’s worth. Shaving nicks the skin and, if anything, raises the odds of infection — one college-team outbreak pinned a sixfold jump in a nasty staph strain on body shaving — and it does nothing for odor. “Cleanliness” is the story we tell after the fact about a choice that was always aesthetic.

So a Tokyo salaryman lasers his shins because the office got hot, and in doing so he joins a program that started with a pharaoh’s bronze razor and an Egyptian’s idea of rank. The engine underneath, smoothness as a signal you can afford, hasn’t changed in five thousand years. It just found a new surface to work on.

The interesting question isn’t whether the shins will win. It’s which patch is next, and who’ll swear it was about hygiene all along.