BEYOND BLISS

Today I witnessed men mocking a woman for having hairy legs and underarms. I have something to say about this.

Firstly, the shaving of legs is a new fashion trend. It was done a bit in the 20′s, but honestly, it wasn’t until the forties that anyone gave a damn. Before that, no one saw your legs, because they wee covered in skirts. Men didn’t even know women HAD legs.

Slight exaggeration, but still quite meaningful.

In the last 70 years, men have gone from not knowing and not caring one bit about female body hair, to completely transforming their ideal feminine counterpart into a hairless model. Men like to tout masculinity as being impervious, but I’ll warrant you, you can watch them evolve with the feedback of marketing scams run on their little mammalian brains.

Did Queen Victoria have shaved legs…well, let’s first establish that yes, she did actually have legs. But were they hairless? During her 60-odd year reign, did she employ some servant to come pluck out her hairs?

Did Queen Elizabeth have hairless legs? 44 years of reign, at the time the longest reigning monarch of British history, but no, you’re right. She probably had the Lady of the Royal Chamber rake on a good lather before she went out in her Spanish farthingale.

Did Cleopatra have a straight razor? Did Helen of Troy? These are two women who literally destroyed nations with their beauty and the lust men had for them. Do you think they had shaved legs? What about their underarms?

Now, yes, there were traditions of removing hair. The Roman women, for example, plucked their hair out of their underarms, but I promise you…no one sat about for hours having their legs plucked with tweezers. And if they did, they had a lot of time and money to spare.

Do you know who Boudicca is? She was an Icenian queen during the first century. She led a rebellion against Roman factions at Londinium. 

Famously, she said, “This is done with the resolve of a woman. Men may live as slaves if they wish.”

She leveled three Roman outposts, well-established settlements. And came to Londinium with an army decked out in stolen Roman arms. They razed the city to the ground with fires so thick that an ash layer still exists in the stria of the City of London to this very day. As she rode through the old city on her chariot, with her Roman spear in hand, poised to launch it through the throat of a fleeing patrician, did she pause her assault to wonder…

Did I shave my legs for this?

As the man fell to the ground, choking on his own blood and the ash from the searing fires, do you think he looked up at this queen, this woman defiant and majestic, and thought, “Ye gods, what hirsuit underarms!”

I wonder how many plucked Roman women were trampled by that carriage.

I wonder if Anne Bonny, the notorious pirate ever was mocked by her male crew for having a fluffy undercarriage.

I wonder if when Annie Oakley, at 15, beat her crackshot future husband at a shooting contest, he looked at her little knees and thought, “Not this one. She’s too furry.”

I wonder if Anne Boleyn was beheaded for wearing a pair of furry britches beneath her skirts.

I wonder, if while He suckled as an infant, resplendent in holy fire and divinity, the newborn Jesus Christ, tucked His wee face to the crook of His Virgin Mother’s arm and let out a squeal at the ghastly sight of her unshaven underarms. Or if when He was installing himself in her abdomen, He gave a moment’s pause to think, “Dear Me, what am I doing, shoving myself into this horribly hairy wench?”

The answer to all of these is…No. Of course not, you fucking idiot.

Body hair exists for a reason, you stupid semi-hairless apes. Don’t you ever wonder why you still have it? I will tell you why. It provides necessary warmth, not just with insulation, but with the way your anatomy functions. Air catches the hairs and lifts them, causing a tickle that forces the follicle to swell into goose flesh, warming the skin through motion. It provides protection from the sun. And in the regions where it is thickest, it guards against the elements, keeps out parasites, and keeps your sensitive areas like your eyes, from being drowned in sweat. It even cushions and reduces the likelihood of heat rashes and chafing in the parts of you that touch. Hair is important. It wasn’t just Sampson who gained strength from it.

And I wonder, if while Sampson was laid low, his power sapped, if he looked up at the gorgeous Delilah with her treacherous shears and thought… “Why didn’t she pluck her eyebrows!”

Power is walking into a room with nothing in hand, and doing just fine.

Beauty is standing as you are, but embodying all that is graceful and powerful about the female condition.

And judging a woman on a trend that is younger then my oldest knee-length hemline is an act of such supreme stupidity and transient masculinity that I cannot even describe how ridiculous I find it. But men are the ones who are rational, yes? Men and all their manly manliness are immune to fads and trends and “girly fashion shit”, right, “bruh”?

Women have hair on their bodies same as you. You seem to do just fine wearing yours. Why do you begrudge her hers?

I say we start a new trend, where females begin to harass the worst offenders for having hairy legs. I shan’t be pleased if in 70 years, I am not seeing all men in shorts looking like the backside of a baby from the knee down. I want to see hordes of women tracking down these men who label a type of deception as beauty, and demanding they carve off their top layer of skin and fur. I want to hear these men who cannot see valor, fortitude, strength, and hair as beautiful, squeak when they walk.

Shut up.

Yes, she was likely hairless, because the Egyptian customs were heavily regarded and she, being of Greek descent, had to have that regularly attended to. However, I used her as an example of female prowess, NOT so that you “fuckboys” could come here and spout off about how one woman in an entire history abused by modern practices. And I will counter with “You were not there. You know what history tells you. You don’t have any right to presume that she was always hairless from top to bottom or that Roman men gave a damn.”

She was a metaphor, not intended to be countermanded as your ideal.

But since were on the Egyptian “kick”, please allow me to bring up Hatshepsut, the Egyptian female pharaoh who lived as a man and wore a fake beard of state- an emblem of power WHILE likely being hairless and holding tightly to her right to be the head of a nation though she had internal plumbing.

Stop splitting hairs when you know precisely what I mean.

It’s supposed to be really, really good for you to keep learning new things as you age. It helps stave off strokes and dementia and Alzheimer’s and improves memory. And hey, learning stuff is fun.

But I really don’t want to be infantilized when I try to learn something. And I definitely don’t learn the way a child does. And honestly, what adult wants to be in the same class as children? Very few.

This occurred to me recently because I’d like to learn how to actually ice skate properly. My parents never signed me up for classes, because it wasn’t a thing they ever cared about or thought about. Now I’m in my twenties and want to learn, and also don’t want to be surrounded by a bunch of eight-year-olds who probably honestly skate better than I do. Because that’s embarrassing, and embarrassment is not how you learn.

Would it be good to lose the social stigma of being worse at something than a child? Yes. Hell yes. But we’ve got to start somewhere, and like I said: adults don’t really learn the way kids do, and a lot of people use these kinds of activities to make friends, and I don’t want to make friends with an eight-year-old, either.

So.

“hurricane Katrina… more like ____”

“back at it again at ______”

“this young man has remained illiterate his whole life”

“Two bro’s are chilling in a hot tub, five feet apart because they are what?”

“the exclamation made upon discovering a bitch is empty”

“you can come on out to Del Taco and get some of this”