Female body hair! Interesting topic, Tracey, and your light touches with regard to it are entertaining. Actually, I have to return to the European model in this context, where up until the proliferation of American culture’s erstwhile sexual ‘norms’ (brought about by massive post-war exportation of American beauty products, etc.) throughout the world, body hair was considered perfectly natural in most cultures. I well recall, when a child, reading illustrated books about French and German life and culture that were filled with images of women who sported luxurious bushes in both axillary and genital areas of their bodies. At that time it was somewhat of a shock for me to learn of it, since I was still learning about the normal architecture of the human body, but it also prompted me to wonder what it was about this aspect of hormonal physiology that spurred women (and I suppose especially men) to consider it disgusting (or at least undesirable).

In France (for example), underarm hair is considered a normal (perhaps even complementary) component of natural body odor, since it catches and captures pheromonic glandular exudates that give each individual a distinctive ‘aroma’. This has led some vehement aesthetic critics of that practice to condemn it (and to accuse the French of perhaps being ‘less hygienic’ than in other societies) as repulsive, but there’s little argument that different cultures have different standards and ours are usually in marked variance to most.

In terms of convenience and comfort, you are spot-on, in my opinion. ‘Shaving’ is surely a barbaric custom, typically adopted purely for capricious aesthetic reasons only (I reject the notion that shaving has hygienic utility in most applications, health care applications excepted) and the bristly stubble it leaves must be incredibly annoying. It furthermore requires constant maintenance, which (I can only guess) is an outright bother of the first water.

While there is arguably something tactiley attractive and pleasing about smooth, hair-free skin, let’s face it…that wasn’t nature’s intent when she constructed our bodies. Hair, whether in the pubis, on the face (on men), or in the long, luxurious strands that crown many women’s heads, has its aesthetic appeal, but any attempts to codify or enforce certain uniform standards of female anti-hirsutism are, I feel needlessly fascist and should best be left up to the individual (beauty-industry be forewarned!). Of course, there’s a definite and profound difference between female hirsutism (an abnormal medical condition involving male-pattern hair growth on women) and ‘natural’ female hair growth (in the usual places, just mentioned).

I once went with a gorgeous, brunette creature (a nurse at my hospital) who had hairy areolas! I admit it took a while to get used to this, but accustom myself I did. Besides, she had a lovely, well-toned body that could kill at 50 paces. But then, this was back in my Berkeley undergrad days and body hair was a dead-normal part of the hip cultural scene back then.

Today, my attitude is ‘whatever’, regarding body hair on women. If the chemistry is right, unimportant aesthetics (such as the debate over female body hair) are far less important than the overall totality of the functional organism (note: I said ‘organism’ and not ‘orgasm’, LoL). :)

Let’s not forget ‘animae’ and modern ‘deviant art’, wherein anthropomorphic creatures (or alien life forms, etc.) are often depicted with luxurious fur and humanised ‘animal’ features. They prompt the imagination to wonder about the fanciful possibilities of human/alien sexuality, although one shouldn’t take any of that seriously, given the complexity of the quantum and so forth. But still…could a human be sexually interested in an alien life form that resembles a mix of human and fox-like qualities? We can only smile as we ponder such imponderables and confine our thoughts to the far more down-to-earth question of female body hair…

Thanks for more fascinating explorations of these important (and real world) nuances of human sexuality, Tracey!