The hair thing

It's a good thing men aren't expected to get rid of all their body hair. Some men have such jungles of the stuff it would be a Herculean labour to purge it all in favour of smooth, silky skin.

Not only that but all those men with beards and moustaches would be very reluctant to part with those cherished patches of hirsuteness (though why they cherish them so much is beyond me; for some reason beards and moustaches just make me want to laugh).

Luckily my own body hair is fairly sparse, so a sudden fashion for male depilation wouldn't be too much of a chore. But men are so proud of their corporeal undergrowth, even if it serves no purpose whatever, that I can't see a runaway desire to rip it all out any time soon.

A bit unfair though, isn't it, that men can leave all their body hair serenely intact while women are expected to remove every last trace of it (even the pubic shrubbery nowadays), with all the time and expense and nuisance that involves.

Some women go to absurd lengths to conceal those rampant thickets of body hair in places their menfolk* expect to be smooth as a baby's bottom. They dread the shock and revulsion their supposedly body-friendly bloke might suddenly display if they weren't scrupulously bald.

There's a sizeable minority of men, though, who do prefer to remove their body hair (sportsmen, gay men, models) and don't see anything odd about it. And there are quite a few women out there who like their men to be hair-free (although the men won't always oblige).

So who knows? Maybe one day men will be as preternaturally smooth-skinned as the opposite sex, and just as furtively slipping down to the beautician for an urgent waxing session.

*and womenfolk for that matter