The Dish

A reader writes in with a good bloody question (I’m back from England but the language is still a bit transitional):

In your latest episode of beard-blogging, you write that “Men …. will grow beards if they do nothing. The case, it seems to me, has to be made by those who want them to scrape the constantly growing hair off their face every day with a metal edge.” As a bearded man, I wholeheartedly agree with that statement (and your many others proclaiming the aesthetic, health, and philosophical advantages of beards).

However, as a bearded straight man, I find myself wishing that our culture would allow women to make the same “defer to the default” decision about their body hair. Ever since I was a teenager, I have found it really hot when women don’t shave. For a while I tried to surpress this preference, having internalized the cultural message that women’s body hair was deviant or gross. But I now realize that those who push for the removal of ever-more body hair are the ones who ought to explain themselves.

After all, our best theory about why pubic and underarm hair evolved is that it helps with sexual signaling – either olfactory signaling, by catching and concentrating pheromones, or visual signaling, by serving as a visual cue that someone has gone through puberty.

I realize that it would be incredibly problematic for me to say that women should stop shaving simply because I find underarm or leg hair attractive. People should do what they want with their own bodies, full stop. But I can’t help but think that we are in an unfortunate equilibrium where heterosexual women shave because they think they have to in order to be attractive to men, and heterosexual men don’t speak up about their true preferences because they don’t want to sound deviant or weird. I have been in several relationships with women who shaved who – when I told them that I wouldn’t mind and in fact would find it attractive if they stopped – were more than happy to stop wasting time and effort on shaving.

I just wish we could remove the social stigma surrounding women’s body hair so that women could make decisions about shaving their legs and armpits in the same way that men are increasingly able to make decisions about whether to shave their faces: based on their and their partners’ preferences, and without having to seem completely countercultural for making what is ultimately the more natural choice.

I have to say I should stay entirely neutral on this, for obvious reasons. But if I were required to shave my legs and armpits every day, I would regard it as a form of unnatural servitude. But if it objectively helps women get laid, who am I to stand in their way? It’s a woman’s choice – coerced by men. Or am I wrong?

Explanation for the above image:

ChinaSMACK is reporting that a user on China’s microblogging site Sina Weibo has invented “hairy stockings” as a way for young girls to fend off perverts. It’s hard to tell if these are real or imagined but given that some people in China have been putting dogs in pantyhose, these might just be the former.

Update from a reader:

Could a false beard to be worn by females be next?

A reader writes:

To the previous reader who took this woman to task for smoking inside her apartment: where is she supposed to go? Smoking outside is a great way to get caught. Many MJ smokers, myself included, would vastly prefer to go outside for all the reasons mentioned, but in many places it’s just too dangerous.

This is just another irritating, pointless consequence of the drug war – if it were legal, people wouldn’t need to be afraid to go out to the patio or the parking lot. They wouldn’t need to be afraid to check with their neighbors to see if their smoking is bothersome, or to make arrangements to avoid causing a nuisance. Most of all, they wouldn’t fear arrest and prosecution for what is usually nothing more than a slight inconvenience or annoyance to others. To me that’s one of worst consequences of these stupid policies – the dissolution of trust and community you see when people are afraid to live openly and publicly, despite not doing anything harmful or damaging that would actually merit the involvement of the Law. And that’s bad for everyone, smokers and non-smokers.

Another reader:

I live in Montreal and despite the fact weed is not legal, it might as well be. Reading that story, completely crazy by our standards, reminded me of the two encounters I had with cops related to weed:

One night I was in the line-up of  a club on the Main smoking a big joint with friends when a cop car stopped right in front of us, I kind half hid the joint behind my back, the cop shouted to me, “Hey what’s behind your back”, so I went on and showed him the fatty, he said with a big smile: “Hey that’s a big one” and left.

Another night, I saw two cops watching a guy rolling a joint. The guy obviously didn’t see the two cops watching him. Smiling, they waited for him to finish the joint, and just when he was about to light it up, they whistled him over, took the joint and destroyed it on the ground and left. No fine, just a smile.

So yeah, that’s what the cops are like here when it comes to weed. The Montreal Police chief already said they don’t have time or resources to waste on smokers. They’ll go after dealers and growers, but that’s it. Smoke away!

Another had a much different experience in the US:

I no longer smoke pot.  Not for any significant reasons – I just prefer bourbon.  I find it more social.  However, back in the day, I did smoke on occasion. My story starts about two days before I left for college.  My friends and I were out having a last night together (it was actually the very last time I hung out with my high school friends, in part due to the events that happened after this story).  There were two guys and a girl.  The girl and I smoked on occasion, but the other two were heavy users.  We made our way out to the boardwalk where, against my wishes, the two heavy users lit up the tail end of a joint to kill it off.  Obviously this was dumb, and this is no excuse, but we did look around and all we saw (at 11 at night) was a homeless person on the bench about 30 yards away.

On the bench we were seated from left to right: heavy smoker 1, me, girl, heavy smoker 2.  After about three minutes of smoking, a very large van came speeding, and I mean gunning it, onto the boardwalk towards us.  Obviously this was disconcerting.  My first reaction was, “Oh my god, someone completely drunk out of his mind is speeding on the boardwalk” – we all started to scatter.  It turns out it was a van full of cops.  It also turns out that homeless person was a cop.  Well, they sped right at us, stopped short and got out and tackled us.  They thought we were trying to run away, which we were, but not from the cops.

They cuffed us.  And by us, I mean the three guys.  They let the lady go, saying that nobody saw her smoke.  Remember earlier when I told you the seating order?  Well, on that bench heavy smoker 1 did smoke, me and the girl didn’t, and heavy smoker 2 smoked as well.  The cops said they saw heavy smoker 1, heavy smoker 2, and me smoke.  How did they see me passing the joint across as me smoking, but when our girl friend did the same thing, it wasn’t smoking?  How does it get from one end of the bench to the other, passing me and the girl, but I get in trouble and the lady doesn’t?

Anyway, as they pushed me up against the van and patted me down, I explained to them that the thing they feel in my pocket is my asthma inhaler, which prohibits me from smoking anything (a bit of a lie, but can you blame me?).  They didn’t care.  We spend the rest of the night handcuffed to the seats in a van riding around picking up actual criminals. Then we spent the overnight in the local prison cell while they mocked us.  At one point, one of them came over and said something like, “Well I can see you and you are potheads (referencing heavy smoker 1 and heavy smoke 2) and you (referencing me) don’t smoke.  Too bad you got caught up with them.” They knew the whole time I did nothing wrong.  They let the girl go, but not me.

Fortunately, where I grew up, everyone knew a cop, so we were able to get six months probation and expungement thereafter. But it’s an easy collar for the cops and it fills their quotas with no danger.  It is absurd.

Barro analyzes the compromise being worked out:

The basic outline of the deal is this: Democrats agreed to spend as much money on border security as Republicans wanted (some $30 billion over 10 years) so long as Republicans agreed that there wouldn’t be consequences if the security doesn’t work.

It’s not as dumb a deal as it sounds like.

This approach substitutes for one that many Senate Republicans had previously been demanding in exchange for supporting the immigration bill: A “hard trigger” that only activated the path to citizenship for previously-unauthorised immigrants once border security was apprehending 90% of people trying to cross the border illegally.

Brad Plumer adds:

It’s not clear what all this extra staff and technology will do for border security. There are also good questions about whether the Department of Homeland Security can even train that many guards, or whether there’s actually room for 700 miles of fence — Corker called the provisions “almost overkill.” But for Republicans looking to convince their base that they’re taking border security seriously, overkill might be exactly what they need.

Yglesias is skeptical that more border enforcement will do much good:

Visa overstayers are already a large share of the unauthorized population, and creating a guest-worker program is going to increase the possibility of visa overstaying. You could build the Berlin Wall all across the U.S.–Mexico border and you’re not going to solve anything. What you need to do is either increase the number of W Visas (my preference) or increase behind-the-border security or some combination of the two. Personally, I don’t really care that a border surge is going to be ineffective. But it can get corrosive in the long term if you promise the voters something your legislation can’t deliver. If this bill passes, the immigration-enforcement problem won’t be at the border.

Reihan agrees that focusing exclusively on the border is counterproductive:

Not surprisingly, my preference would be for much more stringent behind-the-border security and for the elimination of the guest-worker program, but my preferred policy option has many serious downsides, e.g., the enforcement measurements it would likely require would be expensive, draconian, and potentially intrusive. Canada, for example, imposes a one-year mandatory prison sentence on unauthorized immigrants, which seems impracticable in the U.S. context.

And Ed Krayewski argues that, if “the Border Patrol is underfunded (big if), it’s because they have to pursue drug cartels and human traffickers operating along the border”:

Real immigration reform would mean liberalizing immigration laws to make it easier to enter the United States legally. Appropriately implemented, immigration reform should cut down significantly on human trafficking at the border. Once it is easier to go the legal route than to hire a coyote, the human trafficking problem should largely take care of itself.

Though he would prefer to deal with the drug trafficking issue by ending the war on drugs, he goes on to note that, “if the Border Patrol is mandated to pursue narcotraffickers and terrorists along the border, easing the demand for illegal entry (by lowering the cost of legal entry) ought to allow the Border Patrol to focus on those narrower problems.”