Just Because I'm Paranoid...

It is super cold again in New York today, with winds making the temperatures feel no warmer than the single digits. (Yes, people in the Midwest and the really northern parts of the US and Canada, I know I am being a wuss. Stop snickering.) As I sit shivering at my dining room table in my two sweaters (one an acrylic turtleneck and the other a cashmere one that I got on sale at Macy’s for $30), pants, tights, knee socks, and boots, my mind has returned to the delightful product I mentioned yesterday known as The Body Groomer.

Body hair on days like today is good. It’s another little layer of warmth. I don’t fully understand the link between body hair and historical environment, as it seems far less clear cut than skin color and environment (blazing hot sun=darker skin to prevent skin cancer; not so much sunlight=lighter skin so that Vitamin D can be absorbed more easily), but it seems to make sense that people with Eastern European heritage are typically a bit hairier than others because it is fucking cold there in the winter. Although that would make one think that Scandinavians would be human polar bears and Greeks and Indians would be, I don’t know, sleek seals or something, and it doesn’t seem to work that way, but I digress.

Back to the Body Groomer. At first, I was excited in my cynical way because it pleased me that men increasingly feel the pressure that women do to look one way to be considered acceptable. Norelco finally woke up and realized that it could increase its profits by exploiting the other 50% of the population. Ha! It’s about time. (I know, I know - an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. Blah blah blah.) This morning I worried that Norelco’s clever little ad campaign at www.shaveeverywhere.com isn’t really about the “optical inch” at all. What if it is really about women like me?

Bear with me here. I think hairy men are fine. (Of course, I think hairy women are find, too.) One of the things that I like about hairy men is that they are even hairier slobs than I am, so I can still feel “feminine” in comparison. What if men were no longer hairy? Then I would really feel gross and weird. I’d have to start shaving, at least my legs and pits. And I’d be colder than ever. It would really suck.

It seems like the men’s grooming movement is not really going to solve any problems. I will still laugh at it though. I figure at the rate things are going, global warming will do away with us silly humans or even sooner, the US will be involved in a war in Iran as well as Iraq, and may get bombed back into the stone ages anyway. On the bright side, I learned from the human evolution exhibit in the Natural History Museum that body hair was quite stylish back then…