I like soft hair. And humans have a lot of it. But the other night I was wondering why I do all the work to shave my legs, and then wear pants all winter. Humanbeings are so strange, always always altering their bodies. The next question to ask is why men are starting to shave their chests.
from the Journal of American Culture by Christine Hope bearing the grand title "Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture." The gist of the article is that U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915. (Leg hair came later.) The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn't know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair.
Some argue that there's more to this than short skirts and sleeveless dresses. Cecil's colleague Marg Meikle (Dear Answer Lady, 1992) notes that Greek statues of women in antiquity had no pubic hair, suggesting that hairlessness was some sort of ideal of feminine beauty embedded in Western culture. |
clipped from www.straightdope.com
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