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NO says Petronella Wyatt

For years I have enjoyed the fashion for the smooth mahogany chests of David Beckham and Daniel Craig as James Bond. But according to recent surveys, male chest hair is back in fashion.

Out goes the Beckham look in favour of the shag pile carpets sported by the rugged actors Clive Owen and Hugh Jackman, and the new macho man of American TV, Jon Hamm, who plays the no-nonsense tough guy Don Draper in Mad Men.

(Antipodean Jackman, who stars - often shirtless - in the new epic, Australia, has just been voted the 'sexiest man alive' by People magazine.)

Best chest: What's more attractive in a man, a hairy chest like Hugh Jackman's, left, or smooth pecs like Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, right?

This development has been hailed as the revival of the sort of 'macho' man who doesn't belong to a club, but has a club that belongs to him. The caveman is back.

Real men have finally triumphed over the epicene figures created by feminism - the kind of metrosexuals, such as several members of the Chelsea football team, who actually choose to shave their chests if they are not naturally smooth.

They were, though they probably did not have the wit to know it, tapping into a hairless tradition that began in the early Nineties with the emergence of fey male stars like Brad Pitt.

The look he pioneered made those hirsute, macho hunks of the Seventies and Eighties - think Ted Danson and Tom Selleck - seem like dinosaurs.

Now, it appears, a new rugged generation of men has emerged to wrestle back the initiative, and members of my sex should find solace from the credit crunch in warm, fuzzy Burt Reynolds-like pelts once again.

Well, as Samuel Goldwyn once remarked, include me out. I do not want a man whose torso resembles that of a silverback gorilla. Men, like rooms, are more attractive when they are uncluttered.

Hairy scary: Petronella Wyatt finds men with a torso like a 'silverback gorilla' such as, from left, David Hasselhoff, Prince Charles and Ben Cohen, a turn off

Likewise, we are programmed to prefer smooth objects to rough ones. Running one's fingers along satin or Sevres china is infinitely more pleasant than coming into contact with the blade of a serrated knife.

This is the problem with male chest hair. Where is the comfort of wearily laying one's cheek on something that feels like a tangle of hard wires?

Chest hair is never silken like head hair. It is unpleasantly moist or far too Brillo pad-like. In my experience, it leaves the female face scoured - causing itchy, red blotches - and leaves the hands with the unpleasant sensation of having uprooted a prickly shrub.

I once had a boyfriend whose chest hair stuck up like cocktail sticks. All my attempts to lay it flat with unguents, combs and hairsprays were doomed to failure. So was our relationship. (This was after I finally managed to stick his hair down with paper glue. We, as a result, became totally unstuck.)

He resented what he referred to as my attempts to 'feminise' him. I was merely trying to civilise him.

Humans are social creatures and our societies have advanced as body hair has retreated. A streamlined chest is not a sign of wimpishness but of sophistication, and with it an ability to negotiate life's pitfalls.

The truly glamorous male film stars, such as Cary Grant, Clark Gable and Errol Flynn - all of whom, conversely, belonged to a more 'masculine' era - did not have enough chest hair between them to thread a needle, let alone create a toupe for Bruce Forsyth.

MGM had many of its male stars waxed so that their gleaming muscles could be seen in all their rippling glory - the unadorned pectorals of Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan (the most macho man in history) and of Errol Flynn as an Elizabethan buccaneer in The Sea Hawk are two of the greatest wonders of cinema.

Smooth operators: David Beckham, left, and Matthew McConaughey, right

Sean Connery's Bond was sexually attractive only from the neck up. In Dr No, when a giant black tarantula lands on his naked front, I found it hard to distinguish the spider from his chest. Both were equally unappealing - and potentially unhealthy.

Observing the torso of my hirsute former boyfriend, I was never quite sure what was hiding in all that undergrowth. Fleas? Lice? Some killer bug? Or, maybe nothing at all - and that includes muscle.

Chest hair is often a poor cover for letting the male figure go to pot. Look at me, these hairy slobs seem to be saying, I may be flabby but at least I have next year's winner of best garden at the Chelsea Flower Show stuck to my front.

These men tend not only to booze, but to over-eat bacon sarnies and tubs of cookie dough ice-cream behind your back.

Then, I shudder to add, there is the matter of their backs. The B-side of a hairy chest is a hairy back. And no woman in her right mind can find the latter sexually alluring.

The world learned last year that the Strictly Come Dancing star Anton du Beke has a hairy back when he was pictured on the beach, and to me his sexual allure plummeted in that moment.

I, too, recall being on a beach holiday with one male friend who suddenly turned over to ensure an even tan, and caused me to scream, thinking that some bestial life form had landed on him from the sky.

So please, Mr Jackman, Mr Owen and all you other less renowned hairy-chested males, don't take your kit off until you've taken your hair off.

Waxing is worth it. Real women like the feeling of something that resembles polished oak - think of the oak of England that made our Navy the greatest in the world - not a handful of damp, mouldering moss.

YES says Tanya Gold

I love a hairy chest. When you take the plunge after your fourth date and unpeel your new man from his Gap outfit and throw him to the floor of your badly repainted flat, it is always wonderful to find a hairy chest beneath the cheap and unfashionable clothing.

It is like winning the petting lottery. The last heyday of hair for men was the Seventies, when Bodie and Doyle of The Professionals strutted across the television screen like bears in brogues and men wore their shirts slashed to the waist.

But for the past 20 years, fashion has been a sad and hairless desert. I have watched Daniel Craig and David Beckham ponce around with their plaster of Paris smooth chests in boy skirts, waiting for me to drool on them. Well I don't. And I never will.

 'Real men' with chest hair: From left, Tom Selleck, Paul Michael Glaser and Clive Owen

So I am happy at the return of hair. Clive Owen of Sin City and Hugh Jackman of X-Men have both been spotted with fantastic chest hair and I am thrilled.

Feminist or not, I scream it from the rooftops - give me hair! Why do I love hairy chests, you may ask? Why do I like the animal look with my dinner?

Is it because I also love soft furnishings, and to discover that I have not only a new boyfriend but also a new rug, and if I am very lucky, a throw as well, means my John Lewis scatter cushion bill will be smaller for the duration of the relationship? I think that is partly true.

I am a Jewish woman and making passionate love to textiles is in my genes. But the real reason that I love a hairy chest is this - when you see hair nestling like a headless squirrel on your beloved's chest you know you have a man in your bed. Not a metrosexual, but Man. Grrr.

I actually feel sorry for men who don't have chest hair. For me, it is like they have no head. I type with authority because I am currently dating a very hairy man. I call him The Man Who Is Also A Rug.

It is all over his legs and chest, and it is beginning to make small but determined sorties onto his back and shoulders, because, he says, 'I'm old' (he is 34).

Unappealing?: Tanya Gold isn't attracted to smooth chests like footballer Frank Lampard's

He moans about this, and, in his most private moments, he talks about buying tweezers to pluck it. But I love it. It's hard to explain in a family newspaper because sex and words don't - and shouldn't - mix, but there is something incredibly attractive about The Hair.

I feel remarkably feminine next to The Man Who Is Also a Rug. Also, some kind of gorgeous scent seems to pour out of the hair, giving me the urge to do bad and wanton things.

I never got that feeling with hairless Alan from IT. What is also interesting is that I wasn't always a hairy chest woman. I am a convert.

I, too, read fashion magazines, and I used to believe the lies that men should pluck, polish and shave like those horrible common footballers.

I have spent 20 years going out with sensitive, hairless intellectuals with good degrees and library cards falling out of their macrobiotic wallets.

I have discussed the novels of Tolstoy with them, watched them cry during Casualty and laid my head on their hairless chests (I got freezing cold).

I love feminine men for their conversational qualities and tender hearts, but I have finally realised that I don't actually want to mate with one. They cry too much. They cry more than I do.

And during an argument that deprives me of my ultimate weapon. No, I have decided I want a man who watches Top Gear, growls when he is angry and insists on watching Match Of The Day in absolute silence, as if he is praying to his god. (I know these words will come back to haunt me.)

I want Man with hair upon his chest. I say again, now and for ever - grrr.