"What Accounts for This Increasing Antipathy Toward Body Hair?"

"Although overtly coercive hair removal has a long history in the United States, the more widespread practices of voluntary hair removal evident today are remarkably recent. So, too, is the dominant culture's general aversion to visible hair. From the first decades of contact and colonization through the first half of the nineteenth century, disdain for body hair struck most European and Euro-American observers as decidedly peculiar: one of the enigmatic characteristics of the continent’s indigenous peoples. In sharp contrast with the discourse surrounding bearded detainees at Guantánamo, the beardless 'Indians' were described as exceptionally, even bizarrely, eager to pluck and shave. Only in the late nineteenth century did non-Native Americans, primarily white women, begin to express persistent concern about their own body hair, and not until the 1920s did large numbers begin routinely removing hair below the neck. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the revolution was nearly complete: where eighteenth-century naturalists and explorers considered hair-free skin to be the strange obsession of indigenous peoples, Cold War–era commentators blithely described visible body hair on women as evidence of a filthy, 'foreign' lack of hygiene. The normalization of smooth skin in dominant U.S. culture is not even a century old."


Salon runs an excerpt from Rebecca M. Herzig's Plucked: A History of Hair Removal.

"Male Substitute Teacher With Ponytail Cloaked In Mystery"

"'We didn’t really do any work. He told us he wanted today’s lesson to be more of a "conversation," whatever that means.'"

From The Onion.

Yes, It's Mine; I Bought It

"Cut to now. Women are boldly sporting more mega-tons of fake hair than Lady Bunny. Instead of Charlie!, it’s more about Charles II. That’s right, I’m getting historical on your asses, because today’s shoulder length mega-tresses have only one precedent: the man-wigs of 17^th-century Europe. Instead of trying to look merely healthy—just naturally lustrous—women now strive to look as much as possible like a bewigged aristo of yore. Every gal is coiffed with the powerful pompous abundance of the Sun King. Grab your periwigs, girls, because the Duke of Marlborough is totally back!"

Simon Doonan in Slate contemplates hair extensions.