Thursday, October 24, 2013

The trouble with being a girl. (No, not that one. A different one.)

My house had many selling points when I bought it, neighborhood cemetery and ghosts notwithstanding.

The ghosts were actually kind of a selling point before creepy faces started showing up in the window condensation
One of the selling points was that it boasts two full bathrooms, one on the first floor and one on the second floor.

However, what this statement fails to take into consideration is the fact that, rather than both full bathrooms possessing a tub/shower combination, one bathroom has only a bathtub with no shower (albeit, a cool claw-footed bathtub from the 19th century), and the other bathroom has only a shower stall.

To make this even more inconvenient (considering that I really prefer showering over bathing), the shower is in the downstairs bathroom.

Then add to this the fact that the shower stall in my downstairs bathroom would seem claustrophobia-inducing to someone who lived in a camper.

Photo enlarged to show detail. Actual shower smaller than pictured.
Years ago, I remember debating with a male friend whether women or men have it worse in the parts of our bodies that we are expected to shave, wax, or otherwise render hairless. His weak argument was that men's faces and necks have contours and ridges where it's easy to accidentally nick the skin, and shaving is therefore worse for men.

I call bullshit on this argument, for many reasons.

First of all, shaving is often optional for men, as facial hair is often seen as attractive on a man. (Yeah, yeah, shaving is optional for women, too. Unless they want to wear a skirt. Or shorts. Or a sleeveless top. Or a bathing suit. And it's all very well to say that it's still optional, but find me anyone, man or woman, who would actually find a woman with caveman leg hair wearing a skirt attractive. God, you are so full of it.) Meanwhile, men can not only sport a full beard and moustache and still be considered socially acceptable, they can also just skip shaving for a few days. Stubble is also often seen as attractive on a man.

Women simply do not have that same luxury.

Secondly, there is the issue of surface area requiring to be shaved. Admittedly, some men are hairier than others, and so feel compelled and/or have it requested of them by significant others to remove hair from other areas of the body besides the face, such as the back. However, body hair removal still isn't really compulsory for men the way it is for women, and as such, men generally have far less skin that needs to be shaved than women do. Not only are we girls expected to shave our legs, we are also expected to shave underarms and the bikini area, at minimum. Let's not even go into what women who are not of Scandanavian descent have to go through, shall we?

Finally, for a man to shave his face requires him to simply stand up straight and move his head around slightly while also moving the hand that is holding the razor and coordinating these movements. He can even do this in front of a mirror, so presumably, this will reduce the likelihood of unfortunate nicks and cuts.

Women, on the other hand, have to twist and bend and perform feats of acrobatic skill, and try to reach places that we can't even see so that we can run a sharp object that is designed to cut things over the skin of the most sensitive areas on the body.

All of this was true even before I moved into my house, back when I had a full-size shower/tub combo in which it was not nearly so difficult a task.

In my tiny little shower stall, shaving is an acrobatic feat of Olympic proportions, and I deserve a goddamn medal every day that I actually choose to shave my legs.

I expect I'll be getting that medal in the mail any day now.

1 comment:

  1. Right? Like, it shouldn't have even been open for debate, should it?

    ReplyDelete