Hairy Legs

When you study classification of animals in biology you learn that that which makes a mammal a mammal is body hair and giving birth to live young. Those 2 features make us more evolved than other species.

The cooler weather has finally kicked in. No more shorts or capri pants or skirts without tights. It is also the time of year I feel less inclined to shave my legs. No one sees them. I have to convince myself on a daily basis to shave--I hate it. I do not do it well. I routinely cut myself and miss entire patches. And now that I am getting older I have been known to forget to shave one of my legs entirely. It is really a burden. And while I have had my legs waxed on occasion,  I am always tortured by the fact that you cannot get waxed unless the leg hair has grown to a certain length---not to mention it hurts like childbirth and a toothache rolled into one.

I recently read that but for her eyebrows, eyelashes and mane on top of her head, Kim Kardashian is completely hairless. She has had her entire body lasered. It was probably life changing. I can only imagine how much time is saved by either not going through the hair removal process or worrying about the fallout (literally) from poor technique. I’ll bet if you added up all the creams, bump preventers, gels and razor systems I have used over the past 40 years I could have had my body lasered 3 times over.

The only thing that gives me solace is the fact that it is no longer socially acceptable for men to have excessive body hair—they too now wax and concern themselves with their manscape. This is a good thing. Because not only does misery love company, but I suspect that the pain involved in man-preening will necessitate better, less painful, and cheaper modes of hair removal in the future.

I can only hope.

Because evolution has not caught up with vanity. Body hair needs to become vestigial like tails or wisdom teeth.  And while evolution is at it, maybe they might reconsider the giving birth to live young part too---women do not have time for that anymore either. We have better things to do than carry a baby in utero for 9 months and then writhe in pain for 20 hours. We need to go back to becoming more reptilian than mammalian—egg layers with hairless skin.