Accidentally posted in last week's discussion:

 
I really got a kick out of the essay on body hair in /Body Outlaws./ I remember the slight disorientation I had on coming to college and being in a small community where virtually none of the women shaved. (Shaved their legs or underarms, that is. None of them had visible facial hair, so I don't know if any of them had to deal with that issue or not.) I quickly got used to it and it got to the point where it was disorienting to see shaved women's legs.

What's fascinating is that this social "requirement" of shaved legs is something that's been thrust upon us this past century, and is essentially a creation of marketing. It makes you stop and think that through advertising, women have come to think of features of their own body as "unnatural." And in my mind, that's a lot of what this course is about - discovering the ways in which our conceptions of women's bodies differ from the way women's bodies actually are and WHY there is that difference. Whose interests does that serve?