I remember as a little kid sitting around reading National Geographic magazine and being fascinated by all them foreign people and their interesting customs. There were women with dozens of rings elongating their necks, men in loin cloths with sticks piercing their ears and noses, Chinese girls with feet tightly bound, children running naked and unabashed through the streets of dusty villages, grandmothers gnawing on chicken feet.
I always thought these people were weird, strange, odd, or crazy because their customs and traditions were so completely different from the ones I grew up with. It didn’t occur to me until I was much older that if a photographer from a tribe in Ghana or a villager in the mountains of Peru had visited the United States to photograph the natives, they might have had their own bizarre pictures to share.
Raise your hand if you think hairy armpits on women are gross.
(Did you raise your hand? Now take a sniff. If you think body odor smells bad and wearing deodorant is normal, keep your hand up. If not, put your hand down. You stink.)
I’m pretty sure that most American men and women believe that hairy armpits on a woman are gross. Now of course there are a few naturalists who love to rub their noses in their lover’s locks, but these people also tend to be stoners and stoners think everything is awesome, even stinky pits. But the rest of us are put off by underarm hair, aren’t we?
Why does pit hair bother us so much? Does it spread disease or make us ill or put us at risk for weird sports injuries? Nope. There is no medical or hygienic reason for the adoption of shaving – somebody in the early 1900s simply thought a chick looked better in a sleeveless dress without the little Bob Marleys poking out from underneath her wings. Women have only been shaving in earnest since the 1920s and the practice didn’t become mainstream until after World War II.
But when we Americans see armpit hair on women, we grow uncomfortable, troubled, disturbed, grossed out. And we’re shocked to learn that this shaving thing, though catching on, is not par for the course around the world. We’re the weird ones when it comes to bald pits.
So why does it bother us? Because it’s different, and we humans seem to be really uncomfortable with different.
Folks seem to forget, or in some cases never realize, that we all start out exactly the same. We’re all born (with the exception of those with birth defects) with faces and hair and genitals and legs and arms and blood and skin. Our bodies in their purest form are what we come into the world with. That’s it.
Everything else is artificial – our languages and religions, what we eat, how we dress, how we adorn our bodies – these are things that our cultures have made up. They aren’t integral to our existence as human beings – they’re just expressions of where, or to whom, we were born.
I think it’s important to have an understanding of how superficial these customs we’ve adopted are because we seem to spend an awful lot of time judging each other based upon them. They don’t define us, really, do they? If I’ve got a pierce nose or a Coach bag or long fingernails that curl and twist around themselves like the limbs of a corkscrew willow, and this is all you see, you don’t really know a thing about me, do you?
Oh, we can make assumptions about each other based on these superficialities. Low-slung pants and a cap turned sideways screams gangsta wannabe. A Coach bag on your arm means you either have lots of money in the bank or not a pot to tinkle in but you’re trying to prove otherwise. A pierced nose means you’re not a committed picker. The problem is that none of these assumptions speaks to the heart of who a person is – just who a person wants to be seen as being.
So much of what we do, so much of what we use to identify ourselves culturally, is nothing more than fashion. And yet we base so many of our opinions about other cultures based on these fashions. A woman who wears a head scarf must be oppressed. A man in a loin cloth must long for Levis. We are so convinced that our way is the right way, that we fail to imagine that there exist other definitions of “normal.”
Let’s think about some of the things women in our culture do that would seem insane to a “normal” person elsewhere:
- Have you worn a pair of high heels lately? Seriously, we think it’s beautiful in this country to squeeze our feet into shoes that move our centers of gravity dangerously high putting us at risk for ankle and knee injury. With repeated use, these shoes cause corns, calluses and other foot defects that will make the simple act of walking difficult in our later years. We are deforming our feet, much like Chinese women used to, in order to be fashionable. The funny thing is, in the 20th century the Chinese finally figured out how crazy foot binding was. In the 21st century, Americans started wearing platform stilettos (because the regular kind weren’t suicidal enough).
- Because shaving isn’t bad enough, many American women go into little rooms in beauty salons, strip down to their natural states, have hot wax slathered on their genitals and muffle their screams as the wax, and their very natural hair, is ripped off. These are, of course, the same women who then hold fundraisers to end genital mutilation in Africa.
- Have you ever worn a bra or a pair of nylons or a jock strap that is actually comfortable? Seriously? Of course you haven’t.
The truth is, we’re all just playing dress up. We’re all just taking these perfect blank canvases we were born with and painting them with the colors adopted by our respective cultures. We are no better than anyone else for our superficialities because simply put, if we are stripped of our fashion, we’re all pretty much the same.
Original article: http://nancibeanification.com/tag/nora-ephron/
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