Wednesday 4 July 2012

On Chest Hair

A few months ago, we hired a new house girl. Let's call her Houdini, because apart from her ability to disappear in no time flat when she thinks no one is looking, she's a nice girl. She's bubbly and enthusiastic and helpful and if you show her something complex a couple of times, she by and large gets it. On Saturday night, we had a few people round convivially polishing off a bottle of red wine. I had told her she could close, and thanked her for her work that day, but when she caught sight of my pulling out my Magnolia Bakery Cookbook and ingredients to make a chocolate cake, she changed her mind about going to bed; she loves mixing cake batter. It was hilarious and I wasn't about to say no to someone offering to help, so I let her. Plus, I have been teaching her to bake, so that one day I'll be able to call her up from work and say 'I want Chocolate Buttermilk Cupcakes for dinner' and when I come home, they'll be there waiting. As she creamed the batter, I became fixated by the hairs on her chest. Now, I have seen them a thousand times. In fact I see them everyday. So ubiquitous have they become, because of her penchant for decolletage revealing tops, that I barely even notice them anymore. But it was one of those moments when you suddenly are able to go past the quotidian fact of something (i. e. the chick has a chest full of hair that some men would be proud of) to the more symbolic (the fact that she doesn't care). That's right people. This lady has a veritable patch of hair on her chest that looks like a carpet. If you were blindfolded and rubbed up against that, you'd swear it was a man. Very occasionally, she shaves it, sometimes she leaves it - but there's no running away from the fact that she is well endowed with the short and curlies. Standing there in the kitchen, looking at those hairs, I was suddenly reminded of the whole body image discourse in a different way. I thought about the bits of my body that I'm not particularly fond of and how I go to great lengths to craftily play them down, and accentuate my better features. For example, I've never been a great fan of my nose, so I play up my eyes and my lips when I'm wearing make up, so my honker is (hopefully) the last thing anyone is looking at. I thought of all my friends, and each of their body issues. There are those who hate their broad shoulders and so never wear strapless clothes, those who have been waxing their moustaches faithfully for the last 8 years, those who have such narrow hips that they have to wear cleverly tailored clothes, those whose feet are so big that they keep their toes scrunched up so they don't cantilever over the front of their dainty sandals, those who sweat so much that they have to use men's deodorant, those who are a bit bigger and have an arsenal of secret scaffolding to bear up their contours - the list is endless. Typing out these body concerns, you would imagine these ladies are a bunch of gimps and misfits, but they aren't. They are hot chicks with exciting social lives, great careers, and interesting hobbies, and on meeting them you would never ever guess that they had any serious bodily concerns to contend with. The thing is, even when one knows that no one really cares, the reason we all take such pains to hide our little bodily failures is that somehow, having them in full view of the world makes us feel a little insecure in some way. Those flaws do not fit in with how we want to present ourselves, so we mask them. But Houdini is obviously not as concerned as we are about masking her flaws. If she were, she would never wear the plunge neck, cleavage showing tops she wears because it is completely within her power to wear normal t-shirts that aren't cut so low. In any given week, she wears a normal t-shirt or top about once a week, but apart from that, she likes to wear low cut v-necks or tank tops. She rocks her chest hair like its the new in thing. On Saturday night, I learnt a lesson from her - that sometimes, it really is a drain on your energy to worry about the things you can't change. Sometimes, she shaves her chest, but more often than not, she doesn't and she doesn't stress herself out trying to hide it, even though she gets stared at. I can't say that this revelation is going to cure me of my bodily concerns overnight, but it has shown me a different way of dealing with them; a way perhaps to downgrade them from their prominence in my daily thought life. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, what difference has my nose made to the outcome of my life? None! So why stress about it? I am still sorely tempted to haul her with me to Barazahi and introduce her to every girls' best friend - a good hot wax - but while I ponder that - do you have any bodily secrets you hide? Or are you like Houdini and let them hang out? Do share...

 
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