Why Should Women Shave? Ctd

Some dudes sound off:

Now this is an interesting thread.  I am a straight male and I personally would despise having to shave my armpits and legs every few days. So I don’t actually know why I expect women to do it.  I mean, when I have to shave my face I go old-school and make it a luxury.  I have my safety razor, my badger hair and my creams and I get a nice shave.  I do this once a month.  The rest of the time is a Monday morning once-over with a beard trimmer (I am somewhat blonde and can get away with it).  If I had to do that to a higher percentage of my epidermis, I’d be even lazier.

All that said, being in NYC I’ve seen plenty of women who have stopped shaving their legs or armpits.  I cannot explain it, but I have an absolutely visceral reaction to it.  I am immediately and ferociously grossed out by it. This is likely immature and/or neanderthal of me, but I can’t help it.

Another:

I was going to stay out of this one, but here goes: I don’t think women should have to shave, but it is the case that basically any woman who wants to date me has to shave on a very regular basis. I simply find smooth legs on a woman very sexy, and hairy legs completely off-putting. I don’t know if that’s a mere cultural construct, but it doesn’t really matter; I’m not changing my mind.

Besides that simple preference, I think the idea of shaving is really sexy. It means that a girl paid attention to her body and changed how it would look and feel, just because it might make me want her even more. That idea is hot!

I should add, I also groom myself very carefully.

I trim my pubic region and shave everything balls and below. I shave my face regularly. I moisturize twice a day. I clean the hairs out of my nose and pluck the few strays that grow off my earlobes. I don’t see this as an imposition, and I really don’t get why women or anyone find it to be such a pain in the ass. We’re talking about 5-10 minutes of effort in the shower, right? Is that really such a terrible thing? If that’s the level of problem we’re down to, I’d say we’ve come a long way in terms of women’s equality.

I also don’t think that wanting women to be hairless as a sexual preference constitutes “misogyny” per se. Misogyny properly defined is “The hatred of women by men.” Having a certain aesthetic preference, I think, doesn’t rise to that level. It’s tempting to use that word to more generally refer to anything men want women to do that some women don’t want to do, but we shouldn’t make that mistake. There are men out there who really do hate women. Those are the misogynists. The rest of us just think smooth legs are sexy to touch.

Another:

Straight man here with a preference toward women who shave their legs and pits. I applaud those in the thread who choose not to shave, but I don’t view myself as “oppressive” or “misogynistic” because I have a preference toward a cultural norm. Most people find baldness or men with toupees less attractive than men with a full head of hair (granted not to the same extent). It’s the same with men with patchy beards, or neck-beards. Nearly all of them have to regularly shave to feel attractive in the public’s watchful gaze. Do I think these are “oppressive” viewpoints? No. Do I think it sucks for bald men that want hair, neck-beards that don’t like shaving, and women that don’t want to shave? You bet.

Dreaming Of A Discharge Petition

It could allow the immigration bill to pass the House, but Beutler doesn’t expect it to materialize because “immigration Republicans who signed on would face external consequences, even if leadership tacitly give it the go ahead.” Drum nods:

A different House and a different party leader might be crafty enough to see the value in a discharge petition, but not this one. They’re true believers. They won’t secretly agree to leave the defectors alone after the vote, which is the minimum necessary for this to work, nor will John Boehner risk telling them secretly that he won’t take away their committee assignments or otherwise retaliate against them. The party leadership just doesn’t have this level of craftiness in them.

Bernstein adds his voice to the chorus:

It’s one thing to vote against the party on substance; it’s a much bigger deal to work with Democrats to gain control of the House floor.

Happily Ever After

Peter Fulham looks back at E.M. Forster’s Maurice – a novel written in the early 20th century depicting gay love – and ponders the dreams of those struggling for acceptance:

Comparisons between the gay-rights movement and the civil-rights movement can be too simplistic, but in at least one respect there is an unmistakable commonality. I remember hearing Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in middle school and being thrilled by his simple, lucid metaphor of dreaming. But it didn’t occur to me just how literal King’s words probably were.

The idle mind of a marginalized person spends a lot of time dreaming. King’s dream was of a world in which black children and white children co-existed together, uninhibited by racism. For a lot of L.G.B.T. people, I suspect the dream is also of children: the gay middle-schooler no longer terrified by the wrath of bigoted parents, the two high-school girls who no longer have to hold hands in secret.

He closes with this beautiful passage from Forster about the novel’s ending:

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood. I dedicated it ‘To a Happier Year’ and not altogether vainly. Happiness is its keynote.

The Iraqis We Betrayed

A heart-wrenching timeline of emails from an Iraqi who tried to get asylum, after helping the US during the occupation, and who is now dead. It’s from Ira Glass’s This American Life. Of 25,000 visas to the US once authorized, only 5,500 have been issued. This dead man’s emails represent just one of them.

What’s A Bisexual Anyway? Ctd

A reader takes the discussion thread on an unexpected tangent:

I am a member of the furry fandom. Recently the International Anthropomorphic Research Project has been conducting surveys to better understand the psychological, anthropological, and sociological aspects of the fandom. One of these surveys was on the sexual orientation of furries. Furries are vastly more likely to identify somewhere along the spectrum of bisexuality than non-furries. Only around 40% of furries say they are either exclusively heterosexual or exclusively homosexual. It is not clear to me (or to the IARP’s researchers, so far as I know) why this is the case, nor have I heard any reasonable hypotheses.

Even more interesting was the data they found on the orientation of fursonas – a furry’s created persona within the fandom. When asked about their orientation versus the orientation of their fursona, the biggest change was that fursonas were much less likely to be exclusively or almost exclusively heterosexual and much more likely to be dead-even bisexual than the person behind the fursona (some data here and here). IARP researcher Courtney “Nuka” Plante (himself a furry) has hypothesized this might be because some furries who have questions about their sexual identity might use their fursona as a sort of testing ground.

Can Egypt’s Economy Be Saved?

Caroline Freund encourages Egypt to institute economic reforms:

The right approach to Egypt’s economic problems would be to force it to bite the economic reform bullet now by ending wasteful expenditures, especially fuel subsidies. These cost almost half of government revenue at a time when Egypt’s budget deficit is more than 10 percent of gross domestic product and growing, and they encourage energy consumption, especially among wealthier Egyptians, while doing little to help the most vulnerable. Smart budget rebalancing would cut the subsidies, add more to the social safety net for the poor, and reduce the fiscal deficit.

Egyptians Protest The US Ambassador

https://twitter.com/ghazalairshad/status/350670119686520834

Fisher notices that “Egyptians demonstrating Sunday against President Mohamed Morsi’s first year in office waved signs singling out U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson, telling her to “get out” and accusing her of clandestinely aiding Morsi’s Islamist government”:

[T]he criticism seems most rooted in a perception that Patterson, and thus the United States, are helping to prop up Morsi even at the expense of Egyptian democracy. Partly this is rooted in recent history: the U.S. worked closely with Mubarak’s government for years, at times pressing him for reform but more often looking the other way. But it also appears to comes from a misunderstanding of Patterson’s role in Egypt. When she refuses to more roundly criticize Morsi in public comments, that’s perceived as backing him. But the United States has ongoing business with Egypt, after all, and letting relations sour might satisfy protesters’ desires to punish Morsi, but would be unlikely to help.

Egypt’s Second Revolution: Tweet Reax