To hair is human

IT was the lack of fur on the bodies of Homo sapiens that prompted Desmond Morris to label the human race the Naked Ape – and to name his book exploring the topic The Naked Ape.

Yet while mankind is hairless by comparison with furred and hairy animals – the majority of mammals – there’s a considerable amount of hair on the human body.

And it’s fascinating to see the amount of attention paid to it, one way and another, in different societies, communities and families, and by individuals.

Children start out by having hair on the scalp and eyebrows only, while the rest of the body is practically naked (what hair is there is generally so fine that it is invisible). But with puberty comes the growth of hair.

It is a mark of transition from childhood to at least partial adulthood when one grows hair on the pubis, under the arms and, in boys, on the face.

Morris speculates that the Western obsession with removing underarm hair in women is motivated by a desire to be a child once more – a rather illogical desire, since this desire for hairlessness is accompanied by a craving for sexual desirability.

Something in that equation doesn’t add up.

The obsession with removing male facial hair is often motivated by similarly illogical arguments, although there are long-established practical motivations, too.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans insisted that their soldiers be beardless because it had earlier been a tactic in hand-to-hand fighting to grab hold of the beard.

And recovering from facial wounds can be complicated by the presence of hair, which is why boxers, too, are required to be beardless.

Of course, once beardlessness is an established norm, attention turns to the darker hair some women have on their upper lips, and removing that becomes an obsession.

For some reason it is thought of as being masculine, but the hairy female top lip is no more than a side-effect of vigorous growth of hair also on the pubis and underarm – it is prompted by the same hormone.

Comments are passed especially about old East European women who have “moustaches”, but while they occasionally show this phenomenon in an extreme form, it remains a very feminine hairiness, not to be compared with the facial hairiness of the proverbial (and rare) “bearded lady”.

Something one learns quite readily through exposure to naturism – whether in the flesh or through observing photographs – is that no matter how hairy a female pubis or underarm is (and whether or not it is accompanied by hair on the top lip) is that it is rarely accompanied by hair to any significant extent on the chest or abdomen.

Women with prominent hairy bushes on the pubis rarely have much visible hair on the breasts or around the belly button. Occasionally there might be a visible dark line from the belly button down to the pubis.

Even in women in whose family there is a tendency to have some hair on the breasts, you would find that the men in that family have far more vigorous growths of chest hair.

And hair on the feminine breast hardly compares with the typical hairiness of the male chest and abdomen, which typically becomes more pronounced as a man approaches the age of 30.

Some men have such prominent chest hair that they are described as having a “rug”, but most are less hairy.

The important thing to remember is that being human entails having hair – and much more on the body in adulthood than in childhood.

And it doesn’t stop on the torso. All men and most women also have hair on the forearm and on the legs.

I have never met a woman so embarrassed by the hair on her forearm that she shaves it, but most women of my acquaintance shave their legs and underarms or at least depilate them in one form or another.

You read advertisements everywhere telling you how to get rid of “ugly hair” – it’s only fashion, with its unreal emphasis on certain aspects of the body, that makes any hair ugly.

But women go right ahead and shave their legs – causing the light down that women naturally have on their shins and thighs to grow more coarsely, much more like men’s legs. Much the same happens when they shave their underarms.

And once it’s grown, the hair continues to grow more coarsely, and so the obsession with depilating waxes and creams begins.

Many women turn to laser treatment – the ultimate weapon against “ugly hair”.

And after a laser blast the treated area of skin is generally completely (and unnaturally) naked for the rest of the patient’s days.

But it makes no difference to the genes, and a woman who is generally hairier than her peers (depilated or not) will usually give birth to hairier daughters – again something that will only be noticeable when the daughters grow to adulthood.

Some women display a peach-down appearance on their faces: fine yet visible white hairs, not at all unattractive, covering a wider area of the cheeks than beard does on a man. Elvis Presley’s widow Priscilla had a very visible growth of such down, but has had it permanently removed. It is not, to my mind, an improvement.

And then again, the obsession with hair also applies to eyebrows. Adult women’s eyebrows naturally range from fairly light to fairly dense, from separate over each eye to joined over the bridge of the nose.

But fashion calls this ugly, too. So girls, even in their early teens, spend painful hours tweezing unwanted eyebrow hairs away . . . also quite unnecessarily, and often with unforeseen ugly effect.

This, too, can be made permanent (and often badly so) with laser treatment.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that to hair is human.

– Strandloper