Algorithmic Manscaping: Ruckus and Cabal
Nicholas Rickards, Ph.D. Student
Faculty of Education, Brock University
University Lecturer & Public School Teacher
We need to talk about your balls. Are they smooth, or covered in bits of annoying fluff? These are my balls. See how they glisten in the light?
-MANSCAPED, 2021
Manscaping is a euphemism used to describe the meticulous grooming method of the suave, modern, modestly metrosexual man. More specifically, it involves the process of removing pubic hair from the testicles, the “gooch,” and the far reaches of the (inner)outer rim, among other places. Beyond a ritual of habitual self-care, this form of body discipline has cultural cache, a certain je ne sais quoi, and involves the artistic appreciation and technical precisions that you might find in a shop run by guys with nice beards who love raw denim. As such, it should come as no surprise that such a sophisticated grooming technique has become incredibly commodified. Fine artisans of the craft might employ, for instance, the use of MASCAPED’s™ “Performance Package 5.0 Ultra” equipped with the Weed Whacker® 2.0 ear and nose hair trimmer, Crop Soother™ ball aftershave lotion, Crop Preserver® anti-chafing ball deodorant, and the waterproof Lawn Mower™ 5.0, “engineered for maximum confidence while trimming below-the-waist” (Manscape, 2024). Gillette is no longer the best a man can get.
I know this because I frequent the likes of GQ and Esquire magazine. My grade seven students know this because they learned about it in my classroom. Inadvertently, mind you — more by accidental facilitation, not direct instruction.
Last year, after starting an age-appropriate, curriculum-approved YouTube video, I zipped across the hall to fill my water bottle. In the 60 seconds it took me to reach the fountain, fill the bottle, and return to the class, my students were at the tail end of MANSCAPED’s chucklesome snooker commercial that YouTube regularly dispenses to my user accounts based on some ephemeral psychographic profile the company has built for me (outside of research for this article, I have never before visited MANSCAPED’s website and I have not purchased the Lawn Mower in protest of the algorithm. Although, admittedly, I want one). The ad was not approved before it was broadcast to my students. It was not a part of the lesson plan. Students in my language arts class were not yet equipped with the critical media literacy skills necessary to analyze and contextualize the ad. Neither my students’ parents nor myself consented to the use of this ad in the classroom in any way. Yet, the process by which this pedagogy of manscaping consumed their attention and imagination occurred all the same. Their mix of hellion laughs, impish grins, wide eyes, and gaping jaws — “Oh. My. God. Mr. Rickards” — indicated to me that they, too, found the ad undeniably funny.
Witticism aside, a pedagogy of manscaping should be taken seriously here, if only for a moment. At the time of this writing, the culture wars over identity, sexuality, pronouns, bathrooms, curriculum, pedagogy, and parental involvement in schools are being waged in communities, classrooms, and school board offices across Canada. Among other vexations, of issue to concerned stakeholders — the worried parents, families, communities, etc. — is that the pronouns or gender identity chosen by students at school are being withheld from parents, thereby denying their parental rights to know, and that students are being indoctrinated by “woke” teachers and “gender ideology” (Alphonso, 2023). These concerns would be laughable if they weren’t so ubiquitous. These are not petty problems held by a fringe minority, but platform issues that are yielding political results. In the province where I work as a teacher, Take Back Alberta, a conservative movement led by David Parker, has successfully influenced electoral politics and has its sights set on the next round of school board trustee elections (Kennedy-Glans, 2024).
Public education has become a battleground. But while the left shrugs off the warning shots from who they see as nut-bar-neocons and the right takes aim at the uppity social justice warriors, it’s students and teachers that are caught in the crossfire. Navigating this political, social, and cultural tumult in public education as a teacher requires uncanny skills in the Dark Arts. Like Voldemort, Horcruxes split my soul. The best interests of students, teachers, schools, and parents are not mutually exclusive. More often than not, they are in conflict and contradiction with one another.
Yet, absent in all of the ideological positions, discourses, and rhetoric on the current culture wars in education is a critique towards the prevalence of and reliance on third-party companies that harvest and sell our data, all while solidifying themselves as permanent fixtures within the infrastructure of our schools and the very DNA of education itself. Shoshana Zuboff (2019) refers to this “privatization of the division of learning” as “surveillance capitalism” (p. 19). So sinister the reach of corporate greed, so benevolent the tools of technology provided for free that the likes of Google have created a set of conditions that allow — even if only once — for a company to sell overpriced, waterproof, electric, pubic hair razors and testicle aftershave to my students — your children — in the middle of a school day. It would be laughable if it weren’t so dystopic. How did this happen?
If you’re pointing fingers at the practitioner or the IT department for not installing ad blocking software, you’re missing the point. Teachers are beholden to helping young people navigate adolescence and young adulthood in 2024 (think on that for a moment) using all the tools available to them. Schools serve the interests of the communities in which they reside. Parents have a say in what goes on. We all have a seat at the table. But while we squabble above our plates across the dinner table from one another, MANSCAPED swings its smooth kahones all the way to the bank.
References
Alphonso, C. (2023, June 9). Schools become targets for backlash against LGBTQ rights. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-schools-become-targets-for-backlash-against-lgbtq-rights/
Kennedy-Glans, D. (2024, Jan 28). Former backroom political staffer takes centre stage in Take Back Alberta Movement. The National Post. https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/david-parker-takes-centre-stage-in-take-back-alberta
MANSCAPED. (2021, May 14). Pool Table MANSCAPED™ Lawn Mower® 4.0 Snooker Commercial [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joTnLPwOLzw
MANSCAPED. (2024, March 17). The Performance Package 4.0. Retrieved September 28, 2022, from https://ca.manscaped.com/products/the-performance-package-5
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism. Public Affairs.
