I am a pongophobe. I have an irrational and deep-seated fear of hairy men. I have nightmares about the personal hygiene problems of People With Hair: lager foam lurking in the murky depths of beards; terrible rashes spreading hideously and invisibly beneath rug-like chests. Sometimes I lie awake at night imagining being forced at gunpoint to touch a hairy back. I'd rather die.

Obviously - let's be reasonable here - a faint amount of body hair is good. An average amount of chest hair, for example, lets you know that you're not in bed with a 12-year-old. Hair on legs is reassuring because it lets you know that, no matter what his other foibles may be, your loved one is no closet transvestite. And although snog rash is irritating in the extreme, stubble means that at least his hormones are working properly.

No. The problem arises when grotesque whorls of superabundant chest hair start peering out of shirt collars. And then there's nose hair. Ear hair. Hand hair. Foot hair. Toe hair. Buttock hair. Shirts that sit about an inch off their owner's shoulder blades, thickly cushioned off by a patch of (eurghhhh) back hair. Moustaches. Sideburns. Beards, for God's sake.

The Austrian philosopher Shopenhauer once said that he deeply distrusted bearded men because they looked like they had pubic hair on their face. What's good enough for Shopenhauer is good enough for me.

From the tufty upper-lip down so favoured by French teenagers to stomach-churning clumps of woolly stuff squatting monstrously on masculine backs, body hair is simply disgusting. So too is the attitude of People With Hair, who inevitably see themselves as macho dreamboats instead of the furry little creeps they really are.

Take facial hair (as Bernard Manning might say, I wish you would). What on earth possesses an otherwise rational being to sprout facial fur? An inordinate desire to look more like an ape, perhaps? (It works with me - I always imagine the bearded to have longer-than-average arms.) Or the insane belief that it make them look - ha! - sexy?

It's a total mystery to me, this facial hair lark. Why do heterosexual men have moustaches? Are they very naïve, or have they simply never heard of the Village People? In this day and age, a moustache rates right up there with those other tired stereotypes like leather chaps and peaked cap, hardhat and white vest, and ripped jeans with pocket bandana. And yet 'family men' mill around the country, sporting giant 'taches, sublimely unaware of their connotations. Burt Reynolds has a lot to answer for.

There is something inescapably Seventies about facial - and body - hair. Think Burt and Tom Jones, Sonny Bono and Englebert Humperdinck. And Sean Connery in one of the Bond films, explaining to a Japanese: "Bird always make nest in hairy chest". I mean, please.

Funny, then, that last season's Seventies revival somehow missed out on reviving body hair. There were no chest wigs parading down the catwalks, no beards, no moustaches. Since Kevin in Coronation Street wisely shaved off his moustache, the only facial-hair-sporting rôle models around are Captain Birdseye and Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses.

Body hair is more difficult because, so far as I am aware, no-one sets out deliberately to grow it. But show me a girl who doesn't blanch at the sight of hairy shoulders and I'll show you either a sicko or a liar. Body hair simply isn't sexy by any stretch of the imagination. How can you look sexy when you look like you're permanently wearing a mohair jumper?

As for this macho business; well, it ought to be obvious to even the most pea-brained individual that any man who needs to emphasise his masculinity by displaying copious amounts of hair has a problem. One that's about three inches long and lives in beige Y-fronts, no doubt. It's like Big Car, Small Dick: Big Hair, Empty Underwear.

There is also something ludicrously cartoonish about body hair. It is the male equivalent of silicone tits: they look silly and they fool no-one. Male blow-up dolls have body hair, and who'd fuck them?

During the course of writing this article, I have carried out a small telephone survey on the subject of body hair. Not one of my girlfriends actively likes it. One even sent her boyfriend off to have his too-hairy chest waxed. No-one mentioned the delicious feeling of running your nails through a forest of fluggy back hair. No-one talked about the bliss of caressing feet that already looked like they were besocked. No-one said "I think of his furry hands and I come in my pants." It was more like, "What do you think you're doing with those Brillo Pads?" Have you ever seen a chest rug in Vogue Hommes?

I've heard that some gay men fetishise body hair (very hairy ones are called 'Bears' and are, I'm told, much sought-after). I'm glad somebody appreciates the virtues of hirsuteness, but as for me, I think all excessively hairy men should be rounded up and sent to Albania, where facial hair is illegal. Then they could all be locked up together. They could compare length, texture, tendency to spring and curl, or to stand straight out. And we'd all be much happier. As everyone knows, there's only one thing that's even worse than too much body hair. Ginger pubic hair. Aargh!

Copyright Bite, September 1993.