When women groom men: interactive service work in men's beauty salons

In this dissertation, I explore how men’s increasing role as consumers in the beauty industry impacts the occupational expectations and experiences of a primarily female workforce—cosmetologists, estheticians, nail technicians, and salon receptionists. While men have long beautified in order to cultivate identities and status around their class, gender, and racial locations (Entwistle, 2000; Luciano, 2001; Peiss, 1998; White & White, 1999; Willett, 2000), they are only recently becoming a major consumer market within the beauty industry (Euromonitor, 2010; IBIS, 2008). Most research on beauty work focuses on the relationships between women stylists and women customers (e.g. Furman, 1997; Gimlin, 1996; Jacobs- Huey, 2006; Kang, 2003), and so we do not yet understand how gender differently impacts the work experiences of women who are formally charged with grooming the bodies of men. ❧ Using interviews, ethnography, surveys, and content analysis, I look critically at two men’s salons in Southern California, Adonis and The Executive, to show that selling beauty to men means providing them with a masculinizing consumer experience, which is shaped largely by the work of women stylists. While the salons are masculine in their décor, amenities, and description of services (waxing becomes “manscaping” and hair color becomes “camo color”), it is up to women workers to provide men with the “right” kind of beauty experience—one which does not alienate them but helps to tie their masculine and class identities to their consumptive practices. In addition to providing men with stylish haircuts and well-manicured nails, the women who work at Adonis and The Executive are responsible for fetching men beer, soothing their masculine egos, appealing to their presumed heterosexual desires, listening to their problems, providing them with luxurious and pampering touch, and accommodating them in “anyway whatsoever.” In a work environment where men are given primacy and where service is tied up with the sexual, emotional, and physical servitude of women, stylists work hard to make sense of their occupational experiences in ways that benefit them. ❧ By focusing on the meaning-making strategies employed by stylists at men’s salons, I find that women who groom men are invested in marking themselves as professionals who are naturally predisposed to caring, touching, and grooming the bodies of men. They take pride in being beauty experts, act as sources of gender knowledge, and regularly manage the gender and sexual identities of their clients in order to protect their own dignity in otherwise exploitive and objectifying situations. Those stylists who work only with men evoke a gendered workplace identity around being extraordinary women who have more in common with the high status men they serve than with conventional ideas of womanhood. I conclude that such workplace rhetoric is largely institutionalized and serves to uphold both the organizational goals of the salons and men’s entitlement to women’s labor. So, at the same time these “consenting” workplace identities help women to create financially beneficial relationships with men as well as valued identities, they also reflect and reinforce larger inequalities informed by the gender order (Connell, 1993), heterosexual imaginary (Ingraham, 1999), and class privilege of their clients (Sherman, 2007). Grooming men means that women beauty workers are confronted with particular inequalities, which they are motivated to navigate, redefine, and ultimately uphold.