The Present and Future of Hairy Armpits

I shaved my armpits the other day.

I hadn’t shaved my armpits all summer. It was something I felt a kind of pride about.

As I was shaving off the growth, I suddenly started to relate my razor to Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about the medium being the message. The razor being the medium.

Shaving was the action of which I originally thought was the message. By shaving, I would buy into the media’s portrayal of beauty. I would fall into some ‘universal standard’, which would justify my buying of overpriced razors now...wrinkle reducers and age defiers later.

But maybe I was focusing on the wrong aspect of the situation.

Maybe I should have been focusing on the creation of the razor. What importance did it play in the way our culture has panned out?

My guess is that women didn’t start shaving their legs or armpits until the invention of the safety shield on the razor. I bet it started with the upper-classes, trying once again to distinguish themselves from those below them. With the advent of the industrial revolution, razors with safety shields could suddenly be massed produced on some scale, largely for sale to the ‘new wealth’ folks who wanted to be like ‘old wealth folks’.

So if this is in fact how history panned out, perhaps the razor represents how industrialization has created products that were of no use to us a priori. It created a new type of consumerism, based on the consumer’s irrational desires (to be like the rich), more so than the products actual usefulness.

This, in the case of the razor, altered our societies perception of beauty.