To clarify, I see the purposes of grooming to be:
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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.
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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. In this area, I do my grooming practices to reduce dysphoria and because I get joy out of, for instance, looking at my hands and thinking that they look really pretty to me.
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Thirdly, and least importantly, but imho 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 on intimate with to play with my hair and gives them a positive experience and I like giving people I care about a positive experience. And 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 hair care routine so his hair doesn't feel like greasy straw that leaves a residue on my hands. 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 did not recommend weight loss, or 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.
I don't think you have to groom in any particular way. Like I kept saying, 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 imho not your fault but also not a good reason to not learn and try things out and see if it's worth it to you.
In DBT 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 about over the effort to resolve them)
You can choose any of these options and they're all valid options but don't go commenting on my posts telling me to shut up because you're choosing option 4. Choose option 4, I don't care. If you wanna choose option 4 then just don't read the post the silence post button is free.
And what my main point was was that 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. That's why I framed it as "we failed men" by not teaching them how to take care of their bodies.
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. Like I mentioned, I don't iron my clothes, I don't really floss much, I don't shave my legs, etc. and for these I've personally chosen options 2 or 3. Hairy legs are fine. Wrinkled clothes are fine. I think it feels nicer in my mouth when I floss but often it's not worth it to me so that's a 3.
I'm not judging if you look at my own personal grooming routine (that people asked for it's not like I'm giving unsolicited advice here) and say "yeah I'd rather have torn cuticles sometimes than buy nail oil and rub it on my fingers twice a day that sounds like way too much effort just to avoid torn cuticles" like that's totally fine. Option 3 is super valid. But you can't even choose option 3 if you don't know that it's possible to prevent torn cuticles.