The standard of beauty prevailing in America for the past 60 or so years dictates that women’s bodies be completely hairless except for their heads and pubic areas, and even that has changed with the importation of hot waxing and the rise in popularity of the Brazilian [NSFW]. I find this fascinating given the ancestral breakdown in the United States in 2000 (pdf) and the hirsuteness of the various populations.
Despite Hitler’s protest to the contrary, Germany isn’t a country made up of blue-eyed blondes. Like most of the rest of the world, brunette dominates. It dominates through eight of the top ten most prevalent self-selected ancestries turned in during the 2000 census. Not being an evolutionary biologist I have no idea why dark hair dominates but simple observation proves that it is. And dark hair has a much greater chance of being thick, coarse, and persistent.
So because of this standard of beauty that requires women, and in the last decade increasingly men though I’ve little sympathy for the whining that has resulted from the pomo-metrosexual-gayification of male beauty standards – Eating disorders and the use of steroids are on the rise among men because there’s pressure for them to conform to an unrealistic body standard? Boo fucking hoo, guys. Welcome to the 21st century. You’ve got about 150 years of catching up to do; we’re going to start with the whale-bone jockstrap. – we spend a ton of money and go through enormous pain to alter our bodies.
Beauty is subjective. It’s also about 98% false. What society deems as beautiful involves hours of artifice and the assistance of dozens of expensive products (look, more stuff to buy!) just to sell a product – yourself – that doesn’t exist in nature. And unlike other products which don’t change their nature when you remove the packaging, you’re trying to alter something that is fundamentally prone to sliding toward its neutral, natural state.
What does it say about us as a species, then, that we’re willing to spend money on procedures that we know are painful and temporary to achieve an end – the acceptance of the product – that is based on artifice? All I have to say is that when a beauty procedure as a matter of course involves the application of antibiotic ointment it’s probably not something you should be doing. It’s certainly not something I’m ever going to do again.