And you're pretty much shoving your hand in there along with that phone book? I bet he accidentally discovers a new method for hair removal while he's shredding phone books.

I'm thinking so-as with any hair-removal, an expected side-effect

I would imagine a lot of gay body-builders opt for the laser hair removal?

Comb his hair, remove the glasses and voila, you've got Clark Kent.

Sorry berticus, and dag, but based on the abstracts of those two studies, neither of them refute the points I was making. The second study does not discuss body hair. The first study discusses women's views of male body hair; but this thread was focused on men's views of female body hair, so that is what I addressed.

In my earlier post, I specifically said that evolution would drive people to favor the characteristics generally displayed by the opposite sex. Men generally have more body hair than women, women should therefore generally find attractiveness in levels of body hair higher than what women have. This idea is not in disagreement with the idea that human evolution in general disfavors body hair. "Disfavors" is relative, and feelings about body hair are not binary propositions.

If you have a species with a full coat of hair, like a gorilla, and a full coat has evolutionary advantage, then you would expect evolution to predispose the individuals to preferring the full coat. If circumstances then changed such that, for example a coat only 50% as thick provided the same benefits, and there was some disadvantage to the hair in general, then the net result is that evolution would favor the 50% coat over the full thickness coat. Given enough time, it would be natural for evolution to then predispose the individuals to prefer the 50% coat also. How this preference would manifest itself psychologically is another issue; It could be that individuals would find a 100% coat attractive but a 50% coat more attractive, or they could find the 100% coat unattractive. Repeat this process for a change to 25% coat, 10%, 5%, etc. Evolution would clearly be disfavoring body hair, even though at any point in time the individuals may prefer some amount of it.

Regardless of the specifics of how it happened, it is a fact that humans have significantly less hair than their ancestors. You must agree this is a result of evolution; the alternative is to claim it's magic. This change occurred early in human evolution, long before magazines or fashion or cosmetics industries. For our comparative hairlessness to be so universal, it had to have been a widespread issue in sexual and/or natural selection. For it to have been widespread, there would almost certainly had to have been a strong benefit.

With regards to the second study, just because one feature(body size) is influenced by culture does not mean others must be also. And even if a particular trait is influenced by culture, it does not mean that evolution's influence is smaller. You can't even use that study to say that those who prefer the thinner body type are shallow or vain or whatever. What would such a claim even mean? The only way to meaningfully argue against the preference for the thinner body type would be to show that that body type is unhealthy. You can argue that only in the most extreme cases, i.e. anorexia, but the study was not addressing extreme thinness. Nor can you make much of an argument that those who prefer thinness are being abnormally picky; a preference for larger bodies is every bit as much a preference as one for thin bodies. Due to the wording of the abstract, the best you could say is that those who prefer thin bodies are slightly more picky than those who prefer larger ones. Also, the fact that these two different cultures have different preferences could easily have a reasonable explanation behind it. Such as, it's an unfortunate fact that African Americans in general have had a lower socio-economic status than Anglo Americans throughout American history, with this problem having been much worse even in the relatively recent past. Peoples with poor access to resources tend to more favorably view displays of wealth, and a large body size is a sign of ready access to food. This dynamic can be seen in other cultures throughout history.

You accused me of confirmation bias, berticus. I could easily say the same of you. You were already in disagreement with my position, you found these two studies, at a quick glance they seemed to be ammunition against me, so you referenced them without bothering to spend time thinking about what the claims in the abstracts might mean. Indeed, you point out that it only took "2 seconds" to find them; taking two seconds to find them would be moot if it took 10 minutes figuring out what they meant. I could argue that your statement of a two second search time therefore indicates you did not take the time to carefully read or think about what you found. I don't know if this is the case or not, I'm merely pointing out that your claim of confirmation bias is unfounded and works both ways.

And in general, even if something is predominantly determined by culture, that does not mean there is something wrong with the preference. Nor does something being "natural" or set by evolution mean it must be right. Evolution could favor something that is 99% bad if what it is replacing is bad 99.9% of the time. This is the issue that started this conversation. Dag's comment stated that people who prefer hairlessness are in the wrong since having hair is "natural". But this is meaningless, because not only is it "natural" that our species is losing its hair, but "natural" has no bearing on whether something is good or bad. Our constantly increasing ability to do the unnatural is what, in part, sets us apart from the rest of the animals. Vaccines, antibiotics, computers, fortified foods, and space exploration are all examples of things that are both unnatural and good for society.

If a person wants to modify their body in an "unnatural" way, more power to them. As long as they are not harming others, you have no place to claim any moral objection. And if they are not even harming themselves, you have no means to mount any kind of meaningful objection whatsoever. In the case of piercings, you could, for example, argue that there is a possibility of infection or inadvertently being snagged and ripped out; but with modern clothing and shelter for temperature control and protection from the sun, no such argument can be made against body hair removal.

>> ^dag:

Yes, this. @sineral- it's an interesting idea- but I call BS that no hair is an indicator for biological fitness.>> ^berticus:
sineral, say hello to our friend confirmatory bias.
took 2 seconds to find this and this. don't ignore evidence that isn't what you want to hear.

WARNING GIRLS: LASER HAIR REMOVAL MAY CAUSE YOU TO ONLY TO BE ABLE TO AROUSED BY BEARDED MALE OR EXCLUSIVELY FEMALE CUNNILINGUS!

...for any of you gals who were considering taking the leap to permanently reliving your pre-pubescence-

uhhhh MG??, Yeah she's got a hot bod and all, but if you have never been reduced to demi-glace with with some Georgian babe who's been introduced to American laser hair removal, whispering in your ear,
"Удовольствие мне, морские!!", then you need to re-up and station yerself somewhere besides an above-ground, ocean bottom....

yea but if you do laser hair removal you got one less thing to worry about! if you're really serious you could kill every body hair everywhere

now that i think about this movie, If I were forced to get rid of my dna like that everyday I would just get laser hair removal all over my body first of all (maybe not the hair and eyebrows, though, everything else goes) and then just buy some kinda dremmel machine with a comfortable plugin to scrub tha shit outta me real fast.

the song is called "can't put it into words". it's a collection of things that you can't explain. for example:

- store manager meat. yummy.
- on the back of the truck, it says "i'm fish, yesterday i was in the ocean, today i'm a fishcake"
- the ex-police officer saying the criminal is either between 20~30s or 40~50s
- dag is right about doraemon statue, but actually the signs say "caution! pervert" he's a nice robot though~
- windows screen says "task manager/family:me, dad, mom, grandma on. grandpa no response.
- again, dag is right about the train notification sign. they forgot "western".
- and the last bit, the news says "threat to a (cosmetic)company: hair remover gel into hair restoration liquid!...and so on.

and yeah the doggy poses. that's our body language for expressing our mortifications. we have only two gestures: dog position and bowing.
thanks for posting this. it was really funny!