Men and Personal Grooming

Being an autistic nerd, I frequently encounter men who have this mentality of "I am fundamentally not an attractive person and women generally aren't interested in me due to uncontrollable factors—except when I get really lucky." Sometimes this is incel behavior, but more often it is just a lack of personal confidence and this mentality is usually accompanied with "Therefore, I just don't bother putting any effort into my appearance—because there is no point in putting lipstick on a pig." It creates a vicious cycle that a lot of men don't realize is all connected.

What I want men to understand is:

Personal grooming makes people want to interact with your body

Men are always shocked when I tell them this, but after some reflection, something will click, they'll start putting more effort into their hygiene and grooming, and the self-confidence boost is visible.
Let's break this down:

If your breath smells bad, people won't want to kiss you.
If your beard is scratchy, scraggly, and unkempt; people won't want to kiss you.
If your skin is dry, ashy, and red with irritation; people won't want to touch it.
If your scalp is dry and flaky or your hair is greasy; people won't want to touch it.
If you smell bad people, won't want to be near you.
If your clothes don't fit right, smell, or look dirty; people won't be interested in touching or removing them.
If you don't look like you're putting effort into your appearance, people think you won't put effort into a relationship.

All of this is entirely subjective and subject to taste of course, but I do think it's very good general advice that most of being attractive is a combination of:

The appearance of having put effort into your appearance
Confidence
Your body being inviting to interact with in basic ways.

Looking at the above list more positively:

Brushing your teeth and flossing makes your mouth more inviting to get up close to.
Trimming and moisturizing facial hair makes your face more kissable—or just shave your face consistently.
Applying lotion to your face, arms, and hands after you shower will make your skin less dry and more desirable to touch and caress.
Learning your hair type and how to take care of your hair properly will result in hair that people want to run their fingers through.
Now, some people think manly musk is hot but let's be real; if your smell is more spent all day sitting and typing than spent all day chopping down trees then you'll do better showering every 24-48 hours (depending on physical activity and sweat levels) and wearing a nice smelling or unscented deodorant. If you smell nice, people will want to be very proximally close to you.
Old baggy clothes hide your body and make you look like you don't care which isn't attractive. Clothes that fit you correctly will always look more attractive. Not too loose and not too tight. Being stylish to a very basic extent makes you stand out and highly desirable. The bar is to the floor for men in this regard.
Just looking like you're putting in effort to be attractive to your partner/prospective partners is hugely attractive because it means you care about their experience of interacting with your body.

If you're straight, an easy way to help you think about what will make you attractive to women is just to ask yourself "what will make straight guys think I'm gay?" and then do that. I'm only half joking. When you imagine what tips off the gaydar, it's usually just that a guy is kempt, groomed, and clean. He smells and dresses nice. He maybe wears a V-neck that shows off chest hair. There's a reason straight women are always saying that the hot guys are always gay; it's because the straight guys won't do even the most basic personal grooming.

I swear, if a straight man is seen applying chapstick in winter people think he's bisexual but which lips do you want to kiss: chapped lips or moisturized lip?

We are failing our men by not teaching them about hair conditioner

The fact that so many men just do not use hair conditioner just really demonstrates how we as a society have failed men. By the time boys are going through puberty, their parents should be teaching them about:

Hair conditioner[^1]
Body lotion
Face lotion
Beard oil
Aftershave
Laundry
Chapstick
Scrubbing your body with shower soap and not dish soap.
Combing or brushing your hair

Unfortunately, a lot of people see these things as "feminine behaviors" and do not teach boys about any sort of personal grooming or hygiene besides brush your teeth and wear deoderant. Then, they grow up into unkempt disheveled adults who just do not take care of their hair, skin, nails, or really even their body in general and don't even know how or why to do so. They just end up thinking: "Other people are so beautiful and attractive, but I'm just naturally ugly and there's nothing I can do about it, so why bother?" Some of them turn to /r/incel and start finding reasons they were destined to be unattractive from birth, instead of seeing that the people they compare themselves to are just putting more effort into their self-care.

Your body is covered in various things made of keratin. Keratin needs to be taken care of and moisturized or it gets scratchy and gross; and your skin gets all messed up. Then, it all just gets attributed to "sexual dimorphism" as if men are biologically predetermined to have a messy dry tangled beard, dry flaky itchy scalps, hair like greasy straw, or red irritated dry flaky skin. Women aren't less prone to these things by biology, it's because we are socially conditioned to do more personal grooming.

I used to neglect my skin care past applying lotion after I shower and just thought that other people are naturally smoother and more doll-like than me. Then I started doing a proper very basic skin care routine and now I just look so much better. It only adds 5 minutes to my morning and nightly routines and it makes such a huge difference. Using hair conditioner adds <5 minutes minutes to the length of your shower. It's just so worth it and it makes people want to be near you and it makes you feel better about yourself when you look in the mirror. It's such a better sensory experience because you aren't itchy all the time, or dealing with painful pimples and ingrown hairs.

Sure, some people more naturally fit western beauty standards than others and some people have skin conditions or other things that will get them perceived as "ugly" no matter what they do (I have a particularly nasty one myself that requires topical steroids and frequent visits to a dermatologist) but I guarantee you that just giving up entirely on personal grooming is making things so much worse for you than whatever your genetic lottery results were.

Especially for men, the bar is low. The entire "metrosexual" craze was people freaking out because straight men were sometimes doing the basic amount of personal grooming. Just a basic level of personal grooming will make people go crazy over you. You don't need to get into retinol serums or leave-in hair products to be above average. Why don't we just teach guys how to do this stuff when they're adolescents like we do girls? I'm grateful that because I was a gender non-conforming fruity little kid that I got taught some of this stuff before transition, but there's still a lot I had to self-teach that resulted in such huge quality-of-life improvements. A well-groomed body is just nicer to exist in even if other people never perceive it or you don't care about their opinions. I love not being itchy.

An aside on race

It is particularly white families which do not teach boys to groom, or outright discourage it. I have ahem been with men of all races who have been unaware of personal grooming practices and had low self-esteem or a bad sensory time due to the result of that. However, white men are the worst culprits when it comes to grooming. Black men generally (not always, but generally) do a lot more personal grooming than white men; and then they are derided as feminine and less masculine than white men because of it. White guys love to appropriate hip-hop culture and street fashion aesthetics from Black men, but I think they should instead appropriate some jojoba oil for their beards and body butter for their skin. It's time for white men to appropriate the CurlyGurl method instead of trying to rap. The chronic social issue of white men not grooming and then becoming incels is cultural, and not biological. Grooming practices are passed down from parents to adolescents through parenting and teaching; not through their genetics.

The purposes of personal grooming

The purposes of personal grooming, which I define as the optional things you do on top of basic hygiene that won't impact your health if neglected, are:

A sensory thing first and foremost. To manage things like dry and cracking skin, dry scalp, eczema, keratosis pillaris, acne, dandruff, itchiness, odor, feeling greasy, all the little things that cause small daily amounts of pain and discomfort and can be managed through grooming routines. Things that a lot of people, for gendered reasons, think they're just cursed with forever and that there's nothing they can do about them. You can reduce that suffering via grooming. Most of why I do grooming is because it feels bad when I don't. I used to spend a lot of cognitive spoons processing all these bad stims on my body and since adopting grooming routines they don't bother me so much. Even if you aren't autistic, grooming can just make your body more pleasant to exist in. Smelling nice can be a positive sensory experience even for NTs. Having smooth skin feels nice under your hands even for NTs.
Secondly, to make you feel good about your body. It's so frequent that I encounter people who clearly feel extremely self-conscious about one of the above listed conditions or just perceive themselves as inherently gross or having a gross body and, again, believe often for gendered reasons that there is nothing they can do about these things and that other people were just blessed through genetic lottery to be Chads. A lot of blackpilled incels attribute to biology things that actually just come down to grooming. A lot of men think that women are just Inherently Cleaner Prettier People and don't realize that we do grooming routines to achieve this. I swear the number of times I've had a guy say "you're so beautiful and I feel unworthy making you stand next to me when I'm gross" and it's entirely grooming that makes that difference. He deserves to feel good about his body and to not feel gross.
Thirdly, and least importantly, but in my opinion still worth desiring because it's human nature to desire this for most people, is to make your body pleasant to interact with for loved ones or prospective partners. I like when people play with my hair; and having soft silky hair that's nice to touch encourages people I'm intimate with to play with my hair. It gives them a positive experience and I like giving people I care about a positive experience. There have been people I've been intimate with who had a part of their body that was a bad sensory experience for me to interact with and so I did not interact with it—because my golden rule as an autistic person is that if something is very bad sensory for me I Simply Will Not Do It Unless Absolutely Necessary. When they've said they really wanted me to, I think it was reasonable to say that they could adopt a small grooming practice to make it pleasant to interact with. 90% of the time this is asking a man to adopt a beard care routine so it's nicer to kiss him. I don't think this is harsh or judgmental. It's being considerate of me as a partner. I think a double standard is applied to men where women are expected to accept this sort of thing but not vice versa.

I do not think that meeting western beauty standards is a good goal for grooming and I don't recommend grooming practices that exclusively exist to meet those standards. I do not recommend weight loss, skin lightening, or hair relaxing/straightening. I am a fat transsexual Jew. I do not meet western beauty standards and I don't want to. I groom because of the reasons I mentioned above and I think those are good reasons.

Grooming is morally neutral

I don't think you have to groom in any particular way. A little goes a long way. Doing just the amount you feel you can will make big differences in your comfort and quality of life. But if it's not worth it to you, then don't do it! But if the reason you're not doing it is because "it's for girls" or because nobody ever taught you how, then that's—in my opinion—not your fault and not a good reason to not learn, try things out, and see if it's worth it to you.

In dialectical behavior therapy, there is a worksheet called Four Ways To Solve Any Problem. If we take a problem like, say, a dry itchy scalp, we can use it to go through this worksheet.

Change the situation (decide to adopt a hair care routine which addresses the itchy scalp)
Accept the situation (decide that having a dry scalp is OK and you accept this part of yourself and you don't mind it)
Accept how you feel about the situation (decide that you don't like having a dry itchy scalp but it's not worth adopting a new routine to try and fix it and you're okay with choosing the itchy over the routine)
Stay miserable (Hate your itchy dry scalp and feel bad about it but refuse to change it, accept it, or accept that you are choosing your negative feelings over the effort to resolve them)

You can choose any of these options and they're all valid options but if you choose option 4 then that is entirely on you. My mom taught me how to do a variety of grooming things that I choose not to do because they aren't worth it to me. I don't iron my clothes, and I don't really floss much. For these, I've personally chosen options 2 or 3. Wrinkled clothes are fine to me; that's an option 2. I think it feels nicer in my mouth when I floss but often it's not worth it to me so that's an option 3.

But by not even telling men about things like hair conditioner, then we aren't even enabling them to have agency over what options they're choosing. They can only take option 4 if they think there's nothing that can be done. Otherwise, they have been made miserable by patriarchy—not a genetic lottery that sorts people into chads and incels.