and now for something completely different...
I need a break from taxidermy. I dreamed about a half-bodied deer mount last night. It was lunching on a the green sprouts of a young tree. It stopped and stared at me. This is too much. So I'm taking a breather and writing something else. About shaving.
When I was 19, I decided to stop shaving. I was a budding feminist and I had decided that enough was enough. I wasn't wearing pink, shaving my legs, or painting my nails. It felt like a one-woman revolution, but one that wasn't quite joyous or liberating. In truth, no one much noticed and I felt very anti-sexy. I felt hairy. Frustrated pleadings from my mother provided the only (mild) satisfaction I gained from this grrl adventure. I went back to the razor.
Turns out that Neanderthal men were pulling out body hair eons ago to make body painting and tatooing easier, to reduce breeding grounds for lice, small rodents (!), and other wee nasties, and to eliminate the beard as a hand-hold during combat. Since the men trimmed their beards with sharpened stones to make life easier and eating less messy, superstition held that a man with a long, heavy beard was nearing the end of his life. Some men singed their hair off with burning twigs (I recently tried this on my favorite photo-maker to rid his ears of unsightly bristles. It didn't work so well. The hairs just curled up close to the skin so I couldn't get to them. We got the idea to do it from the two old men in Kitchen Stories, a gem of a Norwegian movie. They did it to each other. We ended up using scissors to finish the job).
Egyptian men shaved with copper razors to be fashionable, and women began concocting scary mixtures of arsenic, quicklime and starch to remove unsightly hair. Yikes.
Seems that the Grecians and Romans solidified the societal requirement to shave. Women began a "by any means necessary" crusade to rid themselves of body hair with regimens that included razors, pumice stones, depilitories, and crude tweezers. It is said that Alexander the Great, who went beardless to show off his striking profile, started the trend of the regular shave for men. If you conquer half the world, you get to set trends.
Women started to shave their pits around the turn of the century (they called it "smoothing"), and shaved, naked legs became the symbol of sex appeal during WWII when silk stockings became unattainable. Lest you think things have just gotten worse and worse for us, ladies, some things have changed for the better: during much of the middle ages and through the Victorian period, aristoctatic women were expected to remove all hair from their eyebrows, forehead, face, and neck. Like Whoopie Goldberg, but freakishly white. And if she was French, she also shaved her head to better wear those crazy powdered wigs.
In 1904, the first patent for a disposable razor was granted to King Camp Gilette. Sounds like a fop to me. Here is the diagram for it. I don't think I'd want it any where near my legs.
When I was 19, I decided to stop shaving. I was a budding feminist and I had decided that enough was enough. I wasn't wearing pink, shaving my legs, or painting my nails. It felt like a one-woman revolution, but one that wasn't quite joyous or liberating. In truth, no one much noticed and I felt very anti-sexy. I felt hairy. Frustrated pleadings from my mother provided the only (mild) satisfaction I gained from this grrl adventure. I went back to the razor.
* * *
Turns out that Neanderthal men were pulling out body hair eons ago to make body painting and tatooing easier, to reduce breeding grounds for lice, small rodents (!), and other wee nasties, and to eliminate the beard as a hand-hold during combat. Since the men trimmed their beards with sharpened stones to make life easier and eating less messy, superstition held that a man with a long, heavy beard was nearing the end of his life. Some men singed their hair off with burning twigs (I recently tried this on my favorite photo-maker to rid his ears of unsightly bristles. It didn't work so well. The hairs just curled up close to the skin so I couldn't get to them. We got the idea to do it from the two old men in Kitchen Stories, a gem of a Norwegian movie. They did it to each other. We ended up using scissors to finish the job).
Egyptian men shaved with copper razors to be fashionable, and women began concocting scary mixtures of arsenic, quicklime and starch to remove unsightly hair. Yikes.
Seems that the Grecians and Romans solidified the societal requirement to shave. Women began a "by any means necessary" crusade to rid themselves of body hair with regimens that included razors, pumice stones, depilitories, and crude tweezers. It is said that Alexander the Great, who went beardless to show off his striking profile, started the trend of the regular shave for men. If you conquer half the world, you get to set trends.
Women started to shave their pits around the turn of the century (they called it "smoothing"), and shaved, naked legs became the symbol of sex appeal during WWII when silk stockings became unattainable. Lest you think things have just gotten worse and worse for us, ladies, some things have changed for the better: during much of the middle ages and through the Victorian period, aristoctatic women were expected to remove all hair from their eyebrows, forehead, face, and neck. Like Whoopie Goldberg, but freakishly white. And if she was French, she also shaved her head to better wear those crazy powdered wigs.
In 1904, the first patent for a disposable razor was granted to King Camp Gilette. Sounds like a fop to me. Here is the diagram for it. I don't think I'd want it any where near my legs.
Tonight, alas, I will shave my legs. I have a much better razor than that contraption up there. Besides, it's not so bad. It's sexy, it's smooth, and everybody's doing it.
* * *
Stay tuned, my lovelies. Very soon, I will post the third and final installment of the taxidermy epic. I will answer those pressing questions. I will reflect. Check back.
posted by Jackie at 1:36 PM
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