Below the belt: the indelicate truth about male grooming

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear. I’m British, divorced, ginger-haired and I once accidentally called the late Radio 1 DJ Annie Nightingale ‘mum’ during an interview. So there’s very little I can learn about embarrassment.

Or so I thought. My perspective changed somewhere around the moment that a male groomer versed in the nascent trend of the ‘boyzilian’ placed hot wax over my most intimate areas and told me, in the nonchalant manner of a butcher asking me how I’d like my sausages bagged, that I should prepare for a certain amount of pain.

A certain amount of pain? I have always considered my discomfort threshold to be somewhere between an aged poodle with lumbar ache and a toddler playing with a freshly singed match. So perhaps you shouldn’t be surprised when I tell you that getting every hair on my chest, perineum, scrotum, buttocks, anus and pubic bone removed is never going to compare with a glass of chablis on a French beach at sunset when it comes to congenial personal experiences.

Perhaps it’s a throwback to the era of Greek and Roman antiquity where, as statues of Caesar and Fauno Barberini et al depict, hirsuteness on a man was considered the nemesis of poor grooming

But my ‘waxers’ Vaishaliben and Ashlie are not interested in my plaintive calls for sedatives, gin or a hammer to knock me unconscious.