Ugh! Not this word! It is almost as bad as “moist!” But there it is, so I’ve got no choice but to spend the next 20-30 minutes writing about it. I could go the easy route and fetch up one of the many precarious situations our foster mother had gotten us into. But that would just be an avoidance tactic. I know what this has to be about. I know what needs to be said. And it won’t be pretty. It won’t be fun.

Women are HAIRY!

There! I said it! See where this is going? We grow hair. On our legs. Under our arms. We grow pubic hair. And now, at my age, we even start growing mustaches. It’s nature.

No, I am not completely liberated from the razor. I started shaving my legs and underarms long before the first hair even had a chance, so it is too late to stop now. Somehow we girls absorbed the message pre-puberty that becoming a woman wasn’t so much about the natural process of our bodies growing in certain ways, like hips, boobs, and hair, as it was about being able to use certain products, like bras, pretty underwear, and shaving cream. I cringe to think about how much of my puny allowance and baby-sitting money went to that crap… that and cigarettes!!

And it didn’t end there. Just last week, at my mother-in-law’s celebration, my 24 year old daughter told me I’d better take a tweezer to my upper lip (I had left my epilator at home), so I spent a few painful minutes in the bathroom plucking out the darker fuzz under my nose one at time until it met her approval. “Wer schön sein will, muss leiden!” “To be beautiful, one must suffer,” so the German saying.

But to what new torture has this younger generation acquiesced?! It infuriates me that the porn industry has reached so far into the main culture, that one would be hard pressed to find a woman under, what? 40? 35? Older? Younger? that has any hair at all anywhere on her body but her head. It is not enough that they are selling women string wedgies for the price of a fine bottle of wine, but now the culture is dictating that women masquerade as prepubescent girls for the rest of their lives to appease a pornography, excuse me, a child-pornography saturated male (and female?) population. Only children well under the age of consent have no pubic hair. Growing pubic hair is what happens when you grow into an ADULT. What does that say about those that are holding this up as the new bar of beauty sex-appeal for women to order their lives around?

Obviously I am not writing an expose with any facts, statistics, or personal profiles in the half hour I give myself to write my warm ups. And of course, I’ve not seen any of this for myself. But just knowing that women are going along with this is enough for me to tear my hair out!