Hairier guys before?

    • Hairier guys before?

      Hi. Well this is a kinda weird question, but I couldn't find it answered anywhere else online and this site seemed like somewhere I might get an answer. So I was watching old movies from like the 80's and 90's and I saw a lot of the guys who are supposed to be in high school have really hairy chests, but I know that they often just have older actors playing teenagers so didn't really think about it much.
      But I was watching the clip for the song Popular by Nada Surf, and just read that it used real high school students instead of actors and saw the football guys in the shower and they are really hairy for high school dudes. So here is my question, were guys hairier before than they are now? Or is it just the guys in that video or something? I am about the age in the video, and none of my friends are that hairy? Or do more guys shave now?

    • Re: Hairier guys before?

      How hairy people are is in their DNA. I know a few people who have had hairs on their chest since around the age of 12 - while I also know others who haven't got a single hair.
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    • Re: Hairier guys before?

      Humans have been top of the food chain since long before 1996 (your Nada Surf song). Therefore we can rule out that people would be less hairy now because hairy people are more prone to predation so do not pass on their genes.
      How about sexual selection? No. Practically everybody finds somebody to fuck. Doesn't matter how hairy they are. One of the perks of being Human I guess.
      Unless there are specific genes for hairiness that are recessive and they are not expressed in as many individuals now than before because populations have mixed as a result of more emigration and marriages outside of own ethnicity, therefore less chance of a child recieving both copies of the recessive genes (both of which are needed to express the characteristic (hairiness)), then I can see no reason due to genetics that people would be less hairy now and I would assume they are not.

      The other two factors I can think of are change in diet which may affect how males grow hair on their chest (perhaps you've heard the saying "eat/drink this, it puts hairs on your chest", perhaps it is based on a truth), and plain and simple perhaps more men shave/wax their chests nowadays. That is, if there is any truth at all in the suggestion that men are less hairy now. Given their are statistics for hairiness among males from the 80's and 90's and that they are accurate then the tests could be repeated now and the comparison could be made between the two sets of data. Could yield some interesting results and require adjustments to be made to the theory of evolution if you are right.

      Hopefully this answer will suffice.

    • Re: Hairier guys before?

      Some guys are just like that. I had one friend who was really hairy. I know that a lot of people shave it nowadays, or at least trim it. Sometimes people might seems like they don't have much, but in reality it is just a lighter color. Also, it seems to grow faster if it is shaved. That happened for me. I was just experimenting shaving my light-haired chest and then it got dark.