I usually forget to read Vogue, but I saw that this morning because Instapundit linked to "Hairy Pits Strike Blow Against The Patriarchy" at Victory Girls, a discussion of the Emma Corrin cover photo at Vogue, which followed on a Wall Street Journal piece entitled "Armpit Hair Is Back, Whether You Like It or Not."
The only hair the Vogue text refers to is head hair: "Emma Corrin’s... mop of short, insouciantly tousled blond hair." The armpit hair is just something to dare other people to talk about.
Is the body in its natural form unsettling to you? Must it be changed to suit your feelings of unease? Ironically, the people saying yes are (probably!) the same people who think those who feel unease about their natural genitalia should not undergo surgery.
Should we alter ourselves with sharp blades or not?
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You can't comb a completely hairy 3d object, so to avoid a part in the hair you need to cut it short somewhere. Hence armpits.
There's no such restriction on the presence of a penis, unless you're covered with them. There would be a lot more talk about the patriarchy then.
The difference between a good haircut and a bad one is about four weeks.
A trannie's fake vagina has to have a semi-permanent insert so his body won't completely close it over.
And really, the number of complaints about what fully adult persons do (or don't do) to their bodies is vanishingly small. The issue is what is being done to *minors*, to children who schools won't even give a fvcking asprin with parental consent but will refer out to butchers for permanent mutilation.
Haircuts are exactly the same as FGM. I don't know how I didn't see this before.
Remind me of this post in ten years.
Sure. I've had multiple alterations to my body. Sharp knives hammers and saws cauterizers. Some of it considered elective. My body my choice.
But I agree. Only adults who pass a intensive comprehensive mental health and background testing and investigation. Plus practical training and performance qualification.
Just like gun purchases should be.
Culture nazis - don't tell me what to do.
Countercultural people explicitly seek to reject, "stick it to," or "flip off" the establishment in any way possible. That can be armpit hair, burning bras, shaving heads, wearing tattoos, wearing dreadlocks, not showering, wearing leather biker jackets, and using foul patchouli oil as perfume. Okay, great, you are different and hostile to the mainstream. Go off an play in your own sandbox, and mainstream males won't waste their time or waste your time. Mission accomplished.
Women who shave are mainly drawing attention to body lines and curves. Plenty of establishment and countercultural people love the shaved aesthetic, and plenty do not. Emphasizing curves is a universal female fertility signal, and shaving perhaps shows more interest in mating with males.
Hair grooming is obviously not body modification because hair cells regrow immediately. Men groom too, by trimming or shaving their hair. Grooming is functional and hygienic, and there's the rub: mainstream are direct function and reproduction driven while countercultural people often are not.
Maybe we need a "The Patriarchy" tag.
"Should we alter ourselves with sharp blades or not? "
"If a big hole is cut in the floor, you'd be visiting a travesty."
I enjoyed the last lines of these consecutive posts.
Should we alter ourselves with sharp blades or not?
If it won't grow back...
back in the late '80's many (most?) of my friends had "punk rock" hair cuts; up to and including mohawks.. Lots of the girls made a point of not only growing pit hair, but making DAMN Sure that everyone knew it. We did this to stand out, to stand out as 'weird'.
But there was a huge different between that stuff and today's weirdness. As Christopher B points out, it only takes about 4 weeks to go from a skinhead punk hair do, to 'regular' hair.
How long does it take, to grow your sex organs back? A 15 year old might thing it's "cool" to cut off her breasts and sew on a chunk of leg tissue as a fake dick.. And when that 15 year old is a 35 year old, she'll be stuck with her choices.
If you're not old enough to vote, if you're not old enough to get a tattoo..
How In HELL are you old enough to Permanently disfigure your body?
We live in an era where the women are letting the hair grow under their arms and on their legs and the men are shaving their chests and pubic areas.
Women striving to look more manly under the guise of being natural. Men striving to look more boyish and feminine under the guise of "I've been told this will get me laid."
Girls will be boys and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for Lola
This has been playing in my head a lot lately for some reason.
Lots of the girls made a point of not only growing pit hair, but making DAMN Sure that everyone knew it. We did this to stand out, to stand out as 'weird’
Nonconformists all look alike…
"Should we alter ourselves with sharp blades or not?"
If shaving counts as altering: yes, daily.
From the Classic of Rites, Book 祭義:
吾聞諸曾子，曾子聞諸夫子曰：『天之所生，地之所養，無人為大。』父母全而生之，子全而歸之，可謂孝矣。不虧其體，不辱其身，可謂全矣。故君子頃步而弗敢忘孝也。
I heard from Zengzi what he had heard Confucius say: "of all that Heaven produces and Earth nourishes, there is none so great as man." His parents give birth to his person all complete, and to return it to them all complete may be called filial duty. When no member has been mutilated and no disgrace done to any part of the person, it may be called complete. Hence a superior man does not dare to take the slightest step in forgetfulness of his filial duty.
Shaving isn't the sort of self mutilation frowned on in Confucianism. Permanent self-mutilation is. Perhaps counter to my interpretation, this anecdote begins with a fellow regretting that he injured his foot badly even though it has now healed --- I think, though, that the regret is due to his failure to take appropriate precautions to avoid permanent damage to his body, rather than the outcome, which was only temporary damage.
If people want to castrate themselves as adults -- that's their business. But it's not a good or even morally neutral act.
All that said, even if shaving isn't morally reprehensible, it's also not really a problem if random women have armpit (or leg) hair. I may think it's a little gross, but there's a lot of other things about other peoples' bodies (e.g. obesity squeezed into tight clothes) that I find worse. And I also dislike seeing mens' hairy legs too, for what it's worth. I don't want to inflict the sight of my own legs on other people, so I always cover them up in all seasons.
Emma Corrin says "Gender isn't something that feels fixed," and "There is some fluidity there." Honey, maybe gender isn't that important. Maybe you can just be "she" and "her" and not obsess about your pronouns. Maybe gender isn't your real identity but a distraction from who you really are. What I'm trying to say is that she thinks she's rising above gender categories, but she's actually dwelling on them and surrendering to gender stereotypes rather than escaping from them.
I can understand, though, that spending much time with Prince Charles or an actor playing him could easily put women off traditional ideas about men and women.
There must be some old-fashioned people, often religious, who are inclined to say: make minimal changes to the body God gave you. Hide your body in certain ways, but don't alter it cosmetically or surgically. (Is it true that some Muslim women wear make-up when it's only shown to a few people?)
Andrew Dice Clay, in his notorious act about how it was mainly his own sexual pleasure that concerned him, complained about women's public hair. Today I gather it is quite fashionable to have little or none of this hair; surely not to satisfy the ADC's of this world. I believe the story about Victorian art critic John Ruskin has made it into a movie: he was an expert in paintings that showed women with no pubic hair, so he was shocked when his young wife turned out to have some.
I remember the debate about armpit hair in the office (of course involving cis women; no debate about cis men) in the 70s. Is it just about feeling good about oneself, or in some sneaky way is it about being attractive to ... those other people?
For some reason, women like to make themselves as attractive as possible. We all know that it gives them power with men. If one of them doesn't care about that power or sometimes gives something else higher priority, that's their business. The rest of them will continue shaving their legs and their underarms, putting on lipstick and makeup etc. Why is this an issue?
I didn't know mental illness and narcissism were participatory sports...
Count me among those who must not be much of a hair fan. I dislike beards and never dated anyone with one. I cut my hair short in my 20s and never looked back. Thankfully, I never dated men who preferred what I used to call “cheerleader hair.”
I freely admit that I find the combination of nail polish and hairy hands off-putting (especially white hands and dark hair.) It’s likely less about the trans thing than just pure aesthetics and my general hair aversion.
I eagerly await the embrace of the hairy armpit by such political icons as Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Gretchen Whitmer, Kamala Harris, Kathy Hochul, Kate Brown, and the rest of the leftie gang.
I doubt Kristi Noem, Nikki Haley, Sarah Palin, Kari Lake, Tudor Dixon, Mayra Flores, and the other GOP women are going there, but you never know.
It's a false equivalency as shaving does not permanently alter or remove the function of any part of the body. So while I wouldn't say that anyone needs to shave for my feelings of unease, there's not a problem with society encouraging shaving for reasons of cleanliness or aesthetics.
Permanently damaging or removing organs and structures is a much more serious matter with a correspondingly higher bar. Feelings of unease, my own or otherwise, are not a powerful enough consideration for that. Adults can make their own decisions, of course, but it is a terrible thing to do that to a child who doesn't understand the ramifications and cannot consent.
Now that you’re asking, should we bathe? Should we brush our teeth? Should we cut our hair or comb it?
It never fails to surprise me that the so-called intelligentsia believe such topics as armpit hair to be worthy of debate. No one forces you to do any body grooming. But if you choose not to do any, don’t be surprised if people give you a wide berth.
Shaving (or not shaving) armpits and the pubic area is a fashion which comes and goes. Is shaving or not shaving such places really a male versus female thing? Metaphorically (or metonymically or synechdotally or whatever), men are hairy and women aren't, but what you do down there is more a matter of culture or fashion than biology.
Surely, Laslo Spatula has something to say about this armpit hair thing. Doesn’t this at least rise to the same level of interest as the vibrant market in Used Girls' Bicycle Seats from Venezuela?
- Krumhorn
MikeR said...
For some reason, women like to make themselves as attractive as possible.
As the saying goes: Men think Visually Women think Verbally; that's why Men Lie and Women wear Makeup
"Should we alter ourselves with sharp blades or not? "
Well, when I was growing up, children were not allowed to alter themselves with sharp blades until they were at least teenagers. True, it was mostly girls fighting for the right to shave various parts. For boys, it usually came as, you need to shave that scruff off.
If an adult wants to fund and undergo genitalia surgery, who am I do be concerned. But when they do it to children, are are vulnerable to influence by others as they seek to navigate their mental and physical changes of growing up, then that's different.
As far as women shaving, well, if I don't like hairy armpits or whatever, I just won't look at you, or in this case, buy the magazine. You have a right to not alter yourself to make yourself visually attractive to me. But you've no right to expect I will alter my opinion and find you visually attractive. We live as free individuals, I ignore you, you ignore me.
I think I must be on a language kick right now, but the writing in that article is so pretentious that it calls attention to itself. "They" employed to refer to one person just sounds smug, but it also makes the article really hard to understand. At some points I couldn't tell WHO the author is even talking about.
That must be a rule of good writing somewhere: it shouldn't call attention to itself. It should get the hell out of the way.
Armpit hair is cool. Leg hair, though, I don’t know, especially thicker wiry dark stuff. Maybe I’m a fuddy duddy but major masculine vibes.
onically, the people saying yes are (probably!) the same people who think those who feel unease about their natural genitalia should not undergo surgery. Should we alter ourselves with sharp blades or not?
Holy false equivalence Batman! I'm no biologist but don't those parts altered by surgery usually stay altered? Seems like a meaningful difference.
These hedges are on the edges of the curvaceous Bell.
Because everyone has no problem with long tufts of hair growing out of men's noses or ear canals or sides of ears or weird mutant hairs growing out of their eye brows. Or that one stray long and thick hair sticking out of a woman's chin.
I shave my armpits because when I do not, they get smelly faster. The hair traps the bacteria that cause body odor, and even showering doesn't alleviate the problem.
And I find it hilarious that a man, claiming to be female, thinks he is ground-breaking because he doesn't shave his armpits.
"Hairy Pits Strike Blow Against The " Humanity
Normal men and women do what they can, when they can, if they can, within reason, to present themselves in their best light. Grooming is a minor treatment. Women in dresses normalizes a favorable juxtaposition of the sexes. Men may abstain from wearing shorts is well within rational limits.
"I feel much more seen..."
The most fitting epitaph for this narcissistic, self-centered, self-gratifying generation. It's all about them and their need to be seen, to be validated.
Since about 50 years of age, I've enjoyed watching my eyebrows slowly go from black to gray, and from well-behaved follicles to Brezhnev Doctrine expansionist crazies. Nobody told me I'd have to trim my eyebrows to prevent looking insane, or at least less insane. Hairy ears are a novelty of old age, too. Such fun, so enthusiastic, these hairs!
I wonder how that works in contexts where "being seen" really matters.
Consider:
"I think Emma has really grasped the nature of the problem," said Emma's boss. "Marty, I want you and Jo to team up with her on the solution."
"I know my boss heard and understood what I said, and even thinks the team should support my vision, but his gendered reference to me makes me feel like he doesn't really see me.
Or:
"We all know Emma means well," said Emma's boss. "But when was the last time they actually contributed to these planning meetings?"
"I hate the way my boss talks about me like I'm not here, and how he constantly ignores my contributions in our meetings," thought Emma. "But referring to me as 'they' makes me feel like he really does see me."
Don't have any idea who Emma is, but as far as shaving armpit hair, I certainly shave mine. Not for aesthetics, but because I am active, and I sweat a lot, and it is a lot easier to keep from stinking if you shave your pits. And that is worth a couple of minutes extra in the shower twice a week.
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