My First Controversial Essay from E2

When I started writing at E2, I meticulously avoided courting controversy. There was plenty of it to go around on this crazy encyclopedia website, and I thought, as the new guy, I should just concern myself with improving my craft. Then I found a series of mini-articles at E2 that I had to contribute to.

On E2, a single title is called a “node” and numerous people can contribute to it. This can lead to back-and-forth arguments (something the editors detest), fleshing out of main stories, or even brilliant connections. This particular node did not have any good articles…mostly crummy one-liners. And it was entitled:

Hairy Armpits on Women Are Attractive

A matter on which I have a distinct opinion…in the positive.

Now I know how most people feel on this matter. Not just here in the US, but most of the world, my opinion on this matter is distinctly in the minority. I even had some rather insulting things said to me by someone I thought was a friend because of my opinion on that matter. I’m not one for controversy, really--all that bickering and sniping just makes people hurt. But then, one night, while doing my rounds with Dining In…it just hit me, and I started writing. The resulting article came out like this:

(Hey blogger...how do I do indented margins??? doggone it...I'll just put a section marker)

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I grew up with a pretty thorough knowledge of the absurd cosmetic rituals that women have to go through. Proud possessor of two older sisters, things like lipstick, false eyelashes and a variety of facial and body care products were familiar sights around our home. One thing that puzzled me as a lad, though, was the shaving.

My father, who was born before the custom of women shaving caught on, told me that it was "classy looking" when women shaved. I was an inquisitive kid, and remained unconvinced.

I was aware that ' foreign' women did not always shave. Occasionally, I would catch a glimpse of an unshaved shin or armpit at the mall or on TV. I always thought it looked exotic. I can remember, as an adolescent, seeing an Asian woman in a swimsuit (maybe some picture from the Olympics) and noting that she was unshaven. I thought that this was very sexy.

I was delighted when Playboy, of all people, decided to run pictures of Madonna with her lightly fuzzy armpits and legs. I hoped that perhaps the sight of a beautiful, sexually attractive woman with natural body hair might inspire more men to think of this as less fetishistic and more natural. After all, I had heard that the whole custom was started as a marketing gimmick to sell more razors, so couldn't it be undone as easily? This was not to be, of course, and a lot of people found the pictures disgusting, because she had body hair. I doubt that Playboy ever ran any more pictures of women with natural body hair after that.

On occasion, certain famous women have decided to fly in the face the depilatory custom. Gillian Anderson had an infamous picture with David Duchovny and X-Files creator Chris Carter. The magazine (Rolling Stone or Spin, I forget which) decided to airbrush Ms. Anderson's pits rather than risk freaking out their audience. Susan Sarandon has likewise raised a few eyebrows by bucking convention and singer Paula Cole actually accepted a Grammy and made a video with unshaven underarms. The horrors!

The thing is, when you get accustomed to natural growth of body hair on women, the converse looks a little weird. It looks fetishistic, maybe even pedophilic, as if our society is trying to get women to look pre-adolescent. Maybe that is the point, I don't know, I'm not a trained psychologist.

I don't actually think this custom will change in my lifetime, but attitudes in some places may have shifted a little bit. While on a trip to Austin, I happened to spy about six women who did not shave within about 30 minutes on the Guadelupe strip. That is more than I have caught in Dallas in the last six years.

It is not so disturbing that someone would shave a part of their body, what is weird is the lack of any choice in the matter. A man, for example, can go clean shaven, he can even shave his arms, legs and chest. He can grow a big mountain man beard, a pencil-thin moustache or a big old-timey handlebar. At worst, he'll be thought of as a wee touch eccentric. A woman, at least here in the Bible Belt, who does not appropriately shave her body, is considered too grotesque for words. But it is the way that God, or nature at least, decided to make women. And it is beautiful, at least, to some of us.

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I set my expectations aside and posted it to everything2. To my great surprise, I got a huge outpouring of support, upvotes (we vote on one another’s work on E2), awards (we call them “C!’s”) and humourous anecdotes. Some of the people who agreed with me were (gasp) Americans, and not all of them latter-day-hippies, either! I was stunned.

Even a few people who disagreed with my basic premise found my candor and my writing interesting. I had one guy memorably tell me that he thought my premise was flawed—that even men should shave their entire bodies, but he found the essay such a great read that he voted it up anyway.

So, just today I was recalling this little essay, and it occurred to me with humourous irony, actually none of my girlfriends ever have had the natural look. I mean, not since college anyway. I had one very special lady who said she’d be fine with it…but her genetics served her in such a way that she never really had to shave her pits or her legs.

And so we come to today, I have met a woman who is very precious to me. And guess what? She’s European. And, as the gods of irony would have it, she stays completely clean-shaven at all times. And she’s made it plain to me that she’ll never change that habit. Oh well, I suppose true love has no eyes for such trivial superficialities anyway.

My Adventures in Danish, part one

(I have decided, at Annie's suggestion, to start putting some of the more interesting anecdotes from my studies down on the blog and simultaneously to Everything2.)

Part One: Al begyndelse er svær
(The beginning is always tough)

Here in the US of A, people who speak a second language are something of a rare commodity—let alone those who speak a third or fourth one. The reasons for this are myriad, way beyond the scope of this article, but it offers a few disadvantages to us monolingual Yanks.

There is something uncanny about hearing someone switch gears from your native language to another, unfamiliar one. It is almost eerie—the voice is the same, although the accent changes, but suddenly the words are incomprehensible. There’s an odd feeling as if your brain just lost its ability to process words altogether. Perhaps there is just a mild drop of helplessness too...or at least self-consciousness.

I vividly remember the occasion when I introduced a wonderful German client to a coworker whom I knew spoke some German. It was a very odd experience, hearing two women I knew pretty well as they happily chatted...barely a word of their conversation comprehensible to me.

While visiting London with Annie, I had several occasions to remember that my own tongue is not her first or only. She would show me texts—-absolutely undecipherable to me—peppered with strange-looking words like ‘og’ and ‘på’ I told her it looked like moon-man language.

I will confess that I had next-to-no background in Danish. As much as I love languages, I had never studied the Nordic ones at all. I just knew a bit about their taxonomy and the high degree of mutual intelligibility among them. I knew the word ‘bastard’ in a couple of them (I used to collect that word in foreign languages—don’t ask, I can’t explain these things). I had seen “the Kingdom” (Riget in Danish) and heard a lot of the language because of that, but all I knew was it sounded a touch like German.

One afternoon, I sat at the end of my bed in our room at the Lynton Hotel in London, and Annie napped peacefully on the other bed. I went to wake her gently with a hand massage. I sensed consciousness returning to her. She sighed and said something like this:

“Vudehklogeh?”

The three pound meat computer between my ears went “Database search—not found. Alert: Data received contains no information.”

I think I awkwardly said something like, “Honey, are you awake?”

Upon which, she opened her stunning blue eyes, looked me in the eyes and said, “Vudehklogeh?”

For an instant, I had the irrational fear that the English lobe of her brain had shut down and this could put a real dent in our holiday. But mercifully, she blinked her eyes slowly, stretched prettily and said, “Was I speaking Danish?”

Soon after the end of our vacation, I resolved to learn some Danish. Who knows? I love learning language, this could be fun!

Next time: Hvaba'?

Grammatical Goofiness with Lum and Suzi

Recently, I purchased a big bag of Bit-O-Honey candies for my occasional sweet tooth. In case you aren’t familiar, Bit-O-Honey is like sticky taffy, flavoured with the oddly organic sweetness of real honey. They’ll pretty much pull the fillings out of your teeth, but…mmmmmm… honey…. so delicious… so strangely funky…. try not to think about the fact that an insect made it…

Deciding to have a bit-o-fun with the name, I told Suzi “Now that we have Bits-O-Honey, we can share them with our guests. It’s too bad that Kofi Annan and Boutros-Boutros Ghali don’t drop in more often—we could have Bits-O-Honey with the Secretaries-General.” I thought myself awfully clever for that.

Without missing a beat, she retorted “We could take ‘em to Burger King for some Whoppers Junior.”

(She admitted that this was borrowed from The Onion. Still funny though.)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go get a couple of Cokes Zero to drink.

For more information on pluralizing postpositive adjectives, see the following article on Everything2: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1717187 or visit your local library. Reading opens up an amazing world of wonderment and knowledge and whimsy and other things like that.