Sorry, not feeling well atm…

1) Hey! I really liked that movie!

2) Seth gets over it in the end

3) I agree on both points of this being a control issue and poorly concealed pedophilia (notice the lolita rage in internet p*rn the past few years?). But I’m not sure I can really get behind calling this a completely different sexual orientation. It just doesn’t seem to compare to homosexuality, this seems way too much of a cultural/psychological phenomenon for that. Ditto w/ “Fuzzies”. Sorry, I just think that drags homosexuality (at least) down to a point it doesn’t deserve.

Although to their credit they are a pretty efficient system for removing all nutrients from a given piece of soil.

If your claim is that modification of their “natural” i.e. birthday suit appearance is common to all human societies you’re certainly right. Even in this culture none of us sticks bones through our noses or plates through our lips (although I’ve had friends with pretty damn big spacers in their ears).

What makes our beauty standards so repugnant is, 1) The extent to which they depend on toxic, often carcinogenic chemicals (Environmental Working Group just did a massive report on this, and at the Center for Environmental Oncology where I work we’re documenting the incredibly bad effects of hair-care products sold to African American women), 2) The extent to which they are directed so forcefully at women as opposed to men, so that women at best have to bizarrely modify the condition of their bodies in a way that doesn’t actually cause longterm damage, at worst have to douse themselves in poison (botox, anyone?).

The worst part of it all is that the standards of beauty come not from any organic evolution, but from distant marketers using the weapons of modern media to deliberately force people to be uncomfortable about their bodies–literally to hate themselves. And the second worst part of it is that–and I think Giuli is right in identifying metrosexualism as the new way this is hitting men, too–it is directed primarily at women.

We happen to be living in a time when hairlessness is associated with the female body. Having a body covered in hair, on the other hand, is associated with the male body. So in reality, being disgusted by a hairy female is not a sign that the person is not a true heterosexual because what that person is really disgusted by is the idea of having sex with what is to his mind another male. It’s a purely psychological association. It doesn’t necessarily make strictly logical sense. Being disgusted by females with hair makes just as much sense as starting to salivate from the sound of a bell.

I’ll be the first one to admit that the standards of beauty that women are held to today are excessive. But the magnitude to the phenomenon is not what’s at issue here. Where you lose me is when you claim that this sort of behavior is either unnatural or abnormal. To me this looks like perfectly normal human behavior, simply taken to an unfortunate extreme.

And by the way, our attitudes with regard to how men look and behave may not come even close to being as extreme as our ideas about femininity, but you’re just fooling yourself if you think they don’t exist at all. And you don’t even have to go as far as “metrosexuals” to find an example. It’s true that it is socially acceptable for men to not shave every inch of hair on their body. We seem to be in a more clean-shaven period at the moment, but it would still be perfectly fine for a man to, say, grow a beard. On the other hand, let him go a few weeks without trimming that beard, and we’ll see how much the ladies like him then. How “natural” is that? Men have simply been in the fortunate position of having the upper hand for the vast majority of history, so they have been able to demand more from their partners. But women have hardly “taken men for who and what they are” at any point in history.