I see these arguments being played out over & over again on the internet, often getting more & more heated & vitriolic, & I don't want to fall into that trap here. Personally, I like a little ladyfur there. In my experience there's all sorts of amazing pheromones - if that's what they are - that disappear once hair is scraped away, so the smell of a shaven armpit can be a turn-off for me.
Be that as it may, the greater point of the post was how this issue is a perfect opportunity to observe how transient & artificially created so many of our most firmly-held personal preferences actually are. This should be obvious, to all, of course, because it's easily observable if we only just open our eyes & look around this great big world, at all the wildly differing beliefs people hold in it. But somehow people never seem to do that for very long, & even when they do just for a moment, they never turn that gaze upon themselves.
If you lived a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, or a hundred thousand years ago - any other time in human history, in other words - you almost certainly would not find hair growing where it's meant to grow on a grown woman 'gross' at all. Because to be revulsed by a woman in her natural state would mean you were revulsed by all women, by the entirety of womankind. And so would never desire anyone enough to get laid.
Or another way of thinking about it: If you were stranded on a desert island with a collection of the most beautiful supermodels you can dream of, within a fortnight all of them would have the hair come back under their arms & around their sexes, just as you would also have grown a beard, because that's nature, that's how we are when we are left alone in our natural state.
Think about that. Are you really saying you would no longer desire the HB10 after a couple of days & the stubble started to show through? If so, doesn't that mean you believe that what we are in our natural state is wrong? Do you really want that to be the way you view the world? Do you really want that to be the way you view yourself?
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What interests me most about this, as with the bizarre practice of American (non-Jewish) circumcision, which I've also raged about recently, is how new & demonstrably fabricated it is, & yet how quickly & widely accepted it has become, with almost no dissenting voices. They both have taken root in really only the past hundred years, & primarily - or at least initially - in America. Why? Why America?
"The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is."
- Aristotle
The story of the 20th century (& beyond, up til the present day) is the story of the human race's move into the imagination, away from the real, actual, physical world & into the virtual, transient, manufactured & fake. It is predominantly American culture which has brought this about, the birthplace of modern advertising & the ugly consumerism now colonizing the rest of the human planet. For the story of America - modern America, at least - is that of the triumph of the artificial, temporary & disposable over the real, vital & eternal.
A rock star friend of mine once told me he couldn't make sense of the USA, & refused to play there, the place just creeped him out. It seemed to him, he said, "the white man hit the ground running". What he meant by that was there were no roots, no connection to the spot where you are standing, no real history or shared traditions that weren't imported from somewhere else across the sea. Everything there is so new that the streets in New York don't even have names, just numbers, & they are laid out straight, on a mathematical grid, rather than winding around like live roots the way they do in the old European cities of Dublin, Venice, London, Paris, York, Athens or even Rome. The place names all borrowed from somewhere else: New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York...
I can't help but think that under those circumstances, selling inessential, fabricated goods & beliefs to the masses must be considerably easier than to a tribe in the rainforest or a Bedouin tent. You can't sell snow to an Eskimo. They know who they are. If you don't know what is real, where your food comes from, what you really need to survive, then people can sell you anything. They can make you do anything. And that's what has progressively become the norm the past hundred years or so - again, due to the rise of America as the post-war empire. It's not surprising such a society should become the birthplace of fake tits, botox, cosmetic circumcision, labiaplasty & the shaven pussy.
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Let me try steer this back to the point:
The desire to fuck, particularly in men, is universal & overwhelming, & the basic mechanics of that biological imperative can't really be tampered with too much without it interfering with the survival of the human race. But the trimmings - the arbitrary individual preferences - are inessential enough to be shaped & manipulated by a society whichever way prominent voices within it choose without any immediately catastrophic repercussions. So, you can make people think sex is dirty & sinful, just so long as you give them a get-out clause where sex is allowed (marriage). You can place limits upon men's natural biological drive to spread their seed as widely as possible but you can't make the whole society of men not want to have sex at all. As long as there is some kind of outlet for the shoots of grass to break through the cement, life can still go on, & whatever you've laid on top of it will seem the most natural thing in the world.
Again, the same with circumcision: if the Rabbi or the 'doctor' took an extra half-inch off: no more Jews or Americans. But take only a little less & those same Jewish & American boys don't feel there is anything unusual at all in having their genitals mutilated as infants. They don't - can't - feel that they're missing anything, any sensations etc, because they've never known anything else. And no-one ever told them they shouldn't have to need to use hand-cream to beat off without it hurting.
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Most people, of course, are no more complicated than sheep in the choices they make & the causes they support. The herd mentality makes people defend beliefs & positions they never chose. 'Outraged monarchists' will defend the Queen, who never did anything for them, stole their land, resources & money, keeping them as peasants. She doesn't even know those individuals are alive & yet they're ready to die for her - not for the dream of something she stands for, something she represents, just for her, just... because. Because... that's what we do here. Nothing more complicated than dogs defending their masters. The thing is, though, leave anything around for three generations or more & it will come to seem not only normal & ordinary, but an inviolable fact of reality, & one that needs to be defended at all costs, perhaps even with our lives.
The same goes with religion: almost every Christian I've ever met is utterly incapable of recognizing that they would be holding equally passionate but entirely opposing views on, say, Islam, if they had only been born in Morocco, Iran, or Afghanistan, all of which are more than 99% Muslim.
But, of course, they would, & so would everyone else they know - what are the odds it could be otherwise? But still they believe that their set of assumptions, the set of assumptions they were brought up with, which only make sense within their particular culture & over a particular period of time, are the one & only Truth.
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In any culture you lived you would find women you desired & want to be with. The cultural norms of this specific age are temporary, in this instance only 20 years in the case of the scraping of the punanis, & shaven armpits are only really as old as Hollywood. These societal norms are arbitrary & have no actual value or meaning in themself. We could just as easily have been made to find eyelashes or fingernails ugly & unsightly, & so be offered the opportunity to rip them out by the roots at beauty salons.(For a fee, of course, but then beauty comes at a price. In this culture, anyway). I'm asking you to see, Anon, that much of what seems to be your own revulsion is societally created. It doesn't belong to you, even though it very much feels that way.
We all believe things we have never questioned. We all have beliefs we never chose.
If we take that as our starting point, we can at least begin to attempt to approach the universe as it is, & perhaps start to make a little sense of it. As long as we cling to rigid, codified ideologies, the only thing we can be assured of is that we will never even begin. We may not be able to transcend fully the set of neuroses we were told were normal for the society we were born into but we can do our best not to pass those hang-ups onto the next generation.
We can blindly accept the propaganda of our times & location or question how we got to where we now are. Thinking about why we think the way we do, asking ourselves 'What is this in front of me? Beyond what I have read, beyond what I have been told, what am I actually seeing here?' seems to me a far more beneficial occupation of one's time than illusion & blind obedience, & the only way we know of to liberate ourselves from that game, that lab-rat maze.
It's funny the things that can set you to thinking.
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