Yes, he’s coming to face the music. He’ll make John Bolton look like Mr Rogers.
DEMOCRACY IN JORDAN? Not yet, if ever.
FROM HAIR TO ETERNITY: The great debate continues:
I agree with the author in that I love men in their more natural state, sans wax. I just wonder if she, like me, spends thousands each year on the depilatories, eyebrow “sculpting,” ordering Nad’s green goo off late night teevee to shape her privates into a racing stripe, heart, clover, diamond, some sort of perverse lucky charm.
I once told a friend it’d be easier to be under a burqa than to be up on all fours while a large German house frau pours hot wax into every orifice to rip out all of the evidence of the passage puberty (except breasts, those should be bigger and resist all signs of gravity).
I don’t think it’s about the feminization of men, because we girls aren’t meant to have smooth legs and pits and crotches, either. I think it’s about extreme youth obsession. It’s about having a body like a 12-year old, free from fat, curves, and the evil body hair. If it were about looking like a girl, there’d be a surge in Adam’s apple removal surgery. Don’t get me started on the no-curves heroin chic look that plagued my sex throughout the late 90s.
It’s a weird sort of equality. More men suffering eating disorders, battling body demons with stackers and nautilus. It’s not what I wanted, not what I wished for my brothers, for I love them and want them to be healthy, not subjected to the weird prepubescent obsession we women have oddly agreed to subject ourselves to for the last 40 years or so.
Forty years or so? I’d say it’s a lot longer than that. Women have always done all sorts of things to their bodies – corsets, anyone? – to appeal to men. Men, on the other hand, have no excuse for “manscaping”:
I read the opus from the man with the hairy back and was moved: I am among his number. As a gay man, it has been especially difficult. For years, I waxed, shaved, hid.
Sure, the Bear Movement has helped and I’ve grown less sensitive and found lots of people that are attracted to my hirsuteness, but at 43 years old I still struggle whenever I take off my shirt in public. But I think I came into my own to a large extent at the San Francisco Bear Rendezvous a few years back. I stood across the street from the Starbuck’s on 18th Street in the Castro and looked at the picture before me. The sidewalks were bulging over with gloriously hairy men, many shirtless. Great tufts of hair were spilling over the collars of those in shirts. I was finally part of a mass where I was in the majority and those smoother boys were all wannabes. The roles were reversed. It was liberating.
And the shop standing immediately next door to Starbucks? A laser hair removal place, the lonely female tech staring out balefully from beneath a sign reading: Don’t Be Embarrassed Anymore. I took it as a divine message.
Bears of faith: we have a new category.
The Dish 