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 vitadura
Dream Seeker
Registered: 03/11/07
Posts: 451
Loc: Here, Now 
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 Females + Leg Hair? 
#7378345 - 09/07/07 01:27 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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So it's generally considered hippy or feminist or flat-out strange when a female decides to not shave her legs, whereas it is considered normal for a man to not shave his legs.
Where did this habit come from? What woman woke up one day and decided, "I don't like the hair on my legs, so I'm going to make it appear like I have none"?
I can't say I've researched this subject, but I do think about it somewhat frequently. One day when I was wearing shorts, my sister (who is getting married in a week) remarked, "Gross, when was the last time you shaved your legs? You're going to shave them for the wedding, right?" Later on that day, when the subject was brought up again, my dad stated, "Women shave their legs because they feel inferior as a gender."
What do you think?
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"You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here." -Max Ehrmann, Desiderata
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WhiskeyClone
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Re: Females + Leg Hair? [Re: vitadura]
#7378353 - 09/07/07 01:30 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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Quote:
vitadura said:
my dad stated, "Women shave their legs because they feel inferior as a gender."
Don't know if I agree with that one...
I don't know who started the women shaving their legs custom, but I like shaved legs. 
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Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it.
~ R.W. Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
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Innominate
Stranger
Registered: 06/12/05
Posts: 2,134
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Re: Females + Leg Hair? [Re: vitadura]
#7378360 - 09/07/07 01:31 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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I don't know but to be honest with you I find it pretty disgusting when I see a woman with hairy legs. I don't give a fuck if it's because of social conditioning/poisoning or whatever it is, all i know is I can't look at a girl and think she is attractive if her legs are hairy like mine. It's just how I've grown up
But then again, some guys are into that.
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Apollyphelion
Dungeon Master/Princess(1009)
Registered: 03/15/07
Posts: 13,549
Loc: Festival of Deaths
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Re: Females + Leg Hair? [Re: vitadura]
#7378373 - 09/07/07 01:33 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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Men need to be more feminine and woman need to be more masculine. I shave my body, but that is only because I am a reincarnated Roman God.
How each approaches that "philosophy" is up to them however. Would I date a hairy girl? Sure, it probably means they are an open person, and that is fuckin' sexy.
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 OneMoreRobot3021
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Re: Females + Leg Hair? [Re: vitadura]
#7378394 - 09/07/07 01:40 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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I don't know if for me shaving or not shaving legs holds any sort of political significance or anything. I don't look down on girls who don't shave their legs. But I sure as hell like the look, and indeed the feel, of a smooth pair of stems.
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Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake.
-Erik Davis
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WhiskeyClone
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stems LOL
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Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it.
~ R.W. Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
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Veritas
Registered: 04/15/05
Posts: 11,088
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Re: Females + Leg Hair? [Re: vitadura]
#7378404 - 09/07/07 01:44 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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It's just another way to emphasize the differences between the sexes. Women are naturally less hairy than men, so to increase the contrast, we shave our legs & armpits, and usually remove facial and body hair if it is dark.
It's no different from using makeup, wearing dresses or high heels, painting finger & toenails, etc... all are ways to be more attractive by means of contrast.
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d33p
Welcome to Violence
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blond body hair = sexy
blond hair on head = not sexy
The problem with girls shaving their legs is that if they usually shave and then don't shave it feels bad but if they had never shaved their legs it's fine.
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mushroomplume
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Re: Females + Leg Hair? [Re: d33p]
#7378417 - 09/07/07 01:49 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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vitadura, you should shave your legs and see how "sexy" you look 
shaved legs only look good on muscular dudes or the roman god who replied in this post somewhere.
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RandalFlagg
Stranger
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Re: Females + Leg Hair? [Re: d33p]
#7378422 - 09/07/07 01:51 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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I like girls to look smooth, hairless, and feminine.
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Atheist
Stranger
Registered: 01/24/06
Posts: 13,693
Loc: USA
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Quote:
RandalFlagg said:
I like girls to look smooth, hairless, and feminine.
no kidding 
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RoosterCogburn
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Re: Females + Leg Hair? [Re: Atheist] 1
#7378444 - 09/07/07 01:57 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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I think all female humans should be "dipped" from the neck down in some solution that prevents the growth of hair forever.
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CptnGarden
fuck this site
Registered: 05/13/04
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I got my lady to quit shaving her legs, and make-up, bleh!
now shes 500$ a month richer from not buying 3-packs of razors for 25$ and eyeliner for 20$ a stick, stupid bitches and their expensive shit 
the only person who should care what you look like, is your god (or whatever you call him/them), and you dont show him how you look by what you wear or shave. your hair is also there for a reason, one which is quite valid 
anyone who cares enough to get in the way of what you wear or shave is not a friend by any means, a mind that only sees whats on the outside all the time is not someone who thinks clearly or sees all sides of the big picture, something thats important if you want to have a relationship/friendship with someone. most people know more about how to use their mobile phones than their bodies.
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PDU
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Re: Females + Leg Hair? [Re: CptnGarden]
#7378491 - 09/07/07 02:12 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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I used to find "the rejection of cultural values" attractive.
However, aesthetically i dont like hairy legs, and im glad my girlfriend now shaves.
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jobu
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Re: Females + Leg Hair? [Re: PDU]
#7378507 - 09/07/07 02:14 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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here is the hitory, copied and pasted...
I knew if I procrastinated long enough on this often-asked question somebody would eventually do the legwork for me. Sure enough, Pete Cook of Chicago has sent me a 1982 article from the Journal of American Culture by Christine Hope bearing the grand title "Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture."
The gist of the article is that U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915. (Leg hair came later.)
The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn't know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair.
To be sure, women had been concerned about the appearance of their hair since time immemorial, but (sensibly) only the stuff you could see. Prior to World War I this meant scalp and, for an unlucky few, facial hair.
Around 1915, however, sleeveless dresses became popular, opening up a whole new field of female vulnerability for marketers to exploit.
According to Hope, the underarm campaign began in May, 1915, in Harper's Bazaar, a magazine aimed at the upper crust. The first ad "featured a waist-up photograph of a young woman who appears to be dressed in a slip with a toga-like outfit covering one shoulder. Her arms are arched over her head revealing perfectly clear armpits. The first part of the ad read `Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair.'"
Within three months, Cook tells us, the once-shocking term "underarm" was being used. A few ads mentioned hygiene as a motive for getting rid of hair but most appealed strictly to the ancient yearning to be hip. "The Woman of Fashion says the underarm must be as smooth as the face," read a typical pitch.
The budding obsession with underarm hair drifted down to the proles fairly slowly, roughly matching the widening popularity of sheer and sleeveless dresses. Antiarm hair ads began appearing in middlebrow McCall's in 1917. Women's razors and depilatories didn't show up in the Sears Roebuck catalog until 1922, the same year the company began offering dresses with sheer sleeves.
By then the underarm battle was largely won. Advertisers no longer felt compelled to explain the need for their products but could concentrate simply on distinguishing themselves from their competitors.
The anti-leg hair campaign was more fitful. The volume of leg ads never reached the proportions of the underarm campaign. Women were apparently more ambivalent about calling attention to the lower half of their anatomy, perhaps out of fear that doing so would give the male of the species ideas in a way that naked underarms did not.
Besides, there wasn't much practical need for shaved legs. After rising in the 1920s hemlines dropped in the 30s and many women were content to leave their leg hair alone.
Still, some advertisers as well as an increasing number of fashion and beauty writers harped on the idea that female leg hair was a curse.
Though Hope doesn't say so, what may have put the issue over the top was the famous WWII pinup of Betty Grable displaying her awesome gams. Showing off one's legs became a patriotic act. That plus shorter skirts and sheer stockings, which looked dorky with leg hair beneath, made the anti-hair pitch an easy sell.
Some argue that there's more to this than short skirts and sleeveless dresses. Cecil's colleague Marg Meikle (Dear Answer Lady, 1992) notes that Greek statues of women in antiquity had no pubic hair, suggesting that hairlessness was some sort of ideal of feminine beauty embedded in Western culture.
If so, a lot of Western culture never got the message. Greek women today (and Mediterranean women generally) do not shave their hair. The practice has been confined largely to English-speaking women of North America and Great Britain, although one hears that it's slowly spreading elsewhere.
So what's the deal with Anglo-Saxons? Some lingering vestige of Victorian prudery? Good question, but what with world unrest, the economic crisis, and the little researchers having missed their naps, not high on Cecil's priority list. Here's hoping some all-but-thesis Ph.D. candidate will pick up the trail.
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Be the change that you wish to see - Ghandi
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badchad
Mad Scientist
Registered: 03/02/05
Posts: 9,146
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Re: Females + Leg Hair? [Re: jobu]
#7378566 - 09/07/07 02:30 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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Thank god for mass-media and unrealstic standards of female beauty.
Without them the world would be filled with hairy, overweight women and those just aren't my type.
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...the whole experience is (and is as) a profound piece of knowledge. It is an indellible experience; it is forever known. I have known myself in a way I doubt I would have ever occurred except as it did.
Smith, P. Bull. Menninger Clinic (1959) 23:20-27; p. 27.
...most subjects find the experience valuable, some find it frightening, and many say that is it uniquely lovely.
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Veritas
Registered: 04/15/05
Posts: 11,088
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Re: Females + Leg Hair? [Re: badchad]
#7378572 - 09/07/07 02:31 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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Perhaps without media-guided standards of beauty, they would be your type.
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RoosterCogburn
Fearless,one-eyed U.S.Marshall
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Re: Females + Leg Hair? [Re: Veritas]
#7378579 - 09/07/07 02:33 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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Im pretty sure a mouthful of pubic hair would turn me off regardless of media standards...
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RandalFlagg
Stranger
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Re: Females + Leg Hair? [Re: Veritas]
#7378581 - 09/07/07 02:34 PM (5 years, 8 months ago) |
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Go shave your legs and cook me dinner.
*Randal slaps Veritas on the ass*
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Veritas
Registered: 04/15/05
Posts: 11,088
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Not if you had nothing with which to compare it. You assume that it is a natural preference, but it can be very difficult to "spot" one's cultural programming.
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