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Originally Posted by CanwllCorfe
Afraid of? Threatened? I just think it's ugly and masculine, in the same way that women with big muscles and deep voices are. And yes, that does sound masculine. Are you saying I'm not masculine because I find women with body hair completely unattractive?
According to Merriam Webster, "having qualities appropriate to or usually associated with a man".
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That depends on how one defines "masculine."
I don't subscribe to the notion of "masculine" and "feminine" because I observe so much variability among people. For example, using the wikipedia definition of "masculine," I observe that all people, regardless of gender, can display "physical prowess (strength, fitness, and a lack of laziness), courage, wisdom, and honourable or righteous behavior," and those are admirable characteristics in anyone, regardless of gender.
I would say that if you are a man, then you are "masculine," however you behave or appear, because you are a man. Similarly, if I am a woman, then I am "feminine," however I behave or appear, because I am a woman. And that includes my body hair. It is female body hair, after all.
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Originally Posted by CanwllCorfe
I found this interesting:
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Cambridge University zoologist Charles Goodhart believed men have long preferred the "hairless trait" in women, ever since the existence of the "hairless trait" occurred in our hairy forebears 70,000-120,000 years ago during the last episode of global warming. Goodhart argued that humans are relatively hairless today compared to our ancestors because women who were sexually selected for their "hairless trait" passed it on to both their male and female offspring.
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Interesting, but not necessarily true.
The most reasonable hypothesis I've read about why humans are relatively "hairless" compared to other primates is that lack of fur allows us to sweat and cool our bodies more efficiently, which would have been an evolutionary advantage among early humans who began long, hot treks while hunting and gathering across Africa several million years ago:
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Nina G. Jablonski (Feb. 2010) "The Naked Truth: Why Humans Have No Fur," Scientific American Magazine.
The Naked Truth: Why Humans Have No Fur: Scientific American
Among primates, humans are unique in having nearly naked skin. Our bare skin is related to staying cool, as our superior sweating abilities suggest. Humans, in addition to lacking fur, possess an extraordinary number of eccrine glands—between two million and five million—that can produce up to 12 liters of thin, watery sweat a day.
This combination of naked skin and watery sweat that sits directly atop it rather than collecting in the fur allows humans to eliminate excess heat very efficiently.
Because humans are the only primates that lack coats and have an abundance of eccrine glands, something must have happened since our hominid lineage diverged from the line leading to our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, that favored the emergence of naked, sweaty skin.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the transformation seems to have begun with climate change.
By using fossils of animals and plants to reconstruct ancient ecological conditions, scientists have determined that starting around three million years ago the earth entered into a phase of global cooling that had a drying effect in East and Central Africa, where human ancestors lived.
In response to this dwindling of resources, our forebears would have had to abandon their relatively leisurely foraging habits for a much more consistently active way of life just to stay hydrated and obtain enough calories, traveling ever longer distances in search of water and edible plant foods.
But these elevated activity levels came at a price: a greatly increased risk of overheating.
According to the fossil evidence, the transition to naked skin and an eccrine-based sweating system must have been well under way by 1.6 million years ago to offset the greater heat loads that accompanied our predecessors’ newly strenuous way of life.
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As for why, within an ethnic group, women often have less body hair than men within that group, there
are interesting evolutionary hypotheses. However, it isn't known which selection pressures caused variation in hairiness between women and men (on average) or among different groups of people, for that matter.
Quoting from the same article above:
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The Naked Truth: Why Humans Have No Fur: Scientific American
With regard to our body hair, the question is why it is so variable. There are many populations whose members have hardly any body hair at all and some populations of hirsute folks. Those with the least body hair tend to live in the tropics, whereas those with the most tend to live outside the tropics. Yet the hair on these nontropical people provides no warmth to speak of.
These differences in hairiness clearly stem to some extent from testosterone, because males in all populations have more body hair than females do. A number of theories aimed at explaining this imbalance attribute it to sexual selection. For example, one posits that females prefer males with fuller beards and thicker body hair because these traits occur in tandem with virility and strength. Another proposes that males have evolved a preference for females with more juvenile features.
These are interesting hypotheses, but no one has actually tested them in a modern human population; thus, we do not know, for instance, whether hairy men are in fact more vigorous or fecund than their sleeker counterparts. In the absence of any empirical evidence, it is still anybody’s guess why human body hair varies the way it does.
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