I have some bad memories. Things I’ve seen, things I can’t forget. I’m OK during the day, but sometimes, in the silent hours after midnight, I wake up gasping, covered in sweat, clutching my chest. I know I can’t be alone; I know other people have seen these things, too.

I’m talking, of course, about the bathrooms of the straight men I used to date.

Walk with me through the shower-mists of time. Do you see it? The navy plastic razor on the bathtub shelf, its rusting edge befurred with a clotted thicket of pubic hairs? Breathe. Come on, take some deep breaths. Let’s move on to a different bathroom, where a wet washcloth of a nondescript color, not fully dry since 2004, is wrapped around the faucet and smells so strongly of mildew that cartoon scent lines practically wiggle above it. It’s OK, my friend – it cannot hurt you now. Neither can the lone, cracked, softened bar of Irish Spring soap floating in a plastic dish of scummy water – it’s just a bad dream, shhh.

I only date women and queers now, but once there was a time when I only dated men, and I remember the eerie, echoing sense of trepidation when stepping into their bathrooms for the first time to take a shower. There was never conditioner. There usually wasn’t even shampoo; if there was, it was 2-in-1 Head & Shoulders, or a brand I wasn’t aware was still in production – Pert Plus, Prell, White Rain. If I was looking for face moisturizer (in a hopeful, naive kind of way), I might get lucky and find a crusted, economy-size pump bottle of Lubriderm, 9/10 gone, propped on the nightstand next to the bed.

I remember it all.

Things are different now. Times have changed. Have you walked down the men’s grooming aisle at Target lately? It’s gotten much bigger; in fact, at a Target close to my house, it’s not an aisle at all – it’s two double-sided, extra-wide aisles, with a huge display in the middle featuring magnified shaving mirrors and big pictures of mustachioed men. The whole area is bright and well-designed. It’s inviting. It’s loaded with products housed in slick, gimmicky packaging.

What has happened?

It seems that while I was busy discovering I was a lesbian and working hard on my goal of never accidentally touching a guy’s moldy shower curtain with my naked body again, there was a men’s grooming revolution.

There are now more products for the beautification of men than ever before. Face moisturizers! Moustache combs! Body lotions, moustache waxes, exfoliating scrubs, mesh shower loofahs. Loofahs! Just like I use in my shower!

But hold up. Don’t get any funny ideas. These shower loofahs are for men. You know they are for men because they come in grey, navy blue, red, olive green, and black. Classic “man” colors. Nothing floofy about these loofahs, no sir. These are definitely not shower poufs for poofs.

Taking a closer look, it’s clear that all of these grooming products are for strapping, red-blooded men. Even though the products are … the exact same beauty items women have been using for decades.

I have questions. We all know conditioner makes hair soft and face moisturizers work better on cheeks than a squirt of Jergens and loofahs make lots of fun soapy foam in the shower. So what’s going on here? Why is any of this new, just-for-men stuff necessary? All of these grooming products already exist.

It’s just that they were previously marketed only towards women, and were therefore shameful for men to use.

A quick wander down the aisles turns up pine-scented body washes housed in flask-shaped bottles that are printed with wood-grain backgrounds and plastered with plaid labels; boxes of under-eye cream (yes!) decorated with silhouettes of dapper men in top hats. Everything smells like cedar. Everything that does not smell like cedar smells like mountains, forests, tobacco, beer, or “Arctic ice”. I counted five separate men’s grooming products featuring a bourbon scent. One of them was an exfoliating body scrub. It was $16.

There are “beard shears” (tiny silver hair scissors) and beard washes (special soap just for beards) and beard finishes (leave-in conditioner) and tubs of “beard recovery” creams (expensive lotion). There is a line of products by a company called BeardBrand Lumber Yard that sells $15 beard conditioner and has a chopped log as its logo and I’m not even kidding.

I love all of this.

I am so, so here for straight men being expected to do more with their basic levels of grooming. I am also here for these products to be targeted to their various body parts on a laughably specific level (beard wash!), and for these products to be expensive. Like products for women are.

I am also cracking up. While some companies, like Old Spice and Axe, are jumping into this new world of hyper-masculine men’s grooming products with a sense of humor, most of these brands are serious, and apparently selling well. How fragile are men about their masculinity? How fragile do marketers think they are?

And why are we gendering products to begin with? I like plaid. I like bourbon and pine trees. Why aren’t forest-scented body washes available in the “women’s” beauty aisles? Why aren’t there any “Island Berry Breeze”-scented shaving creams in the “men’s” grooming aisles? Men like berries! (Don’t men like berries?)

Companies are creating masculinity-based insecurities for men and then selling grooming products to alleviate those insecurities; that’s how they did it for women and that’s how they’re doing it for this shiny, new, worried and lightly balding market. I think it’s hilarious, but perhaps it’s time to abolish gender from grooming products. Maybe it’s time for men to level up and get on board with moisturizer, at last. At last.

Either way, may we all, collectively, never step into a shower without conditioner again.

• Krista Burton is a writer for the online magazine Rookie