MALE-TO-FEMALE CROSSERS CAN STILL DEVELOP PROSTATE CANCERS.

Once upon a time, those beards men started growing in the fall served the practical purpose of insulating the face against the Gales of November, whether in the deer stand or in the grandstand.  Somewhere, though, the people who have to turn everything into a Political Statement glommed onto the practice, for a while calling attention to prostate cancer (see the beards, make a note to schedule the screening, drink orange juice and eat lettuce) and more recently the Political Statement has become Movember, with mission creep.  "To take on mental health, suicide, prostate cancer and testicular cancer."  I don't know, if the women of the fevered brow and the near men who couldn't carry water for a patternmaker would just, you know, stop nagging on about "toxic masculinity" and let guys work on their cars and go hunting, mental health among men might improve immediately.

Let's add cultural appropriation to the mission creep.

No-Shave November is here, and it’s time we all participate – this month’s tradition isn’t just for cisgender men. Body hair activism is on the rise.

The human body has around five million hair follicles from head to toe, according to Better Health Channel, and body hair activists like Esther Calixte-Bea aren’t afraid of them.

Calixte-Bea is the creator of the Lavender Project: a self-photography project embracing femininity and body hair. The photos are perfect inspiration for No-Shave November and push against a beauty standard that’s clearly rooted in sexism.

But, the body hair stigma isn’t only an issue for cisgender and transgender women.

As Molly Holmes, director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, explains, oppressive beauty standards affect everyone negatively, including non-binary people, trans-masculine people, trans-feminine people and even cisgender men. It’s crucial to understand where the body hair stigma comes from and how it’s impacting each individual personally.

“I’m always gonna think a little bit more about being critical in our understanding, or educating ourselves, to not only think about like a stigma, or what we might have been taught or told, but, like, what is true and what is right for a person individually,” Holmes said.

Body hair removal has been practiced across cultures and centuries for countless reasons. However, today’s stigma is closely related to racism, white supremacy and social Darwinism in the 19th and 20th centuries, according to Rebecca Herzig, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College, who investigated the stigma in her 2015 book “Plucked: A History of Hair Removal.”

I suppose showing solidarity with a campaign to improve mens' mental health by signalling that you're not into the dating pool might be a good thing.  Demonstrating that culture studies is empty wordnoise is also a good thing.

“I think if we can kind of get to a place where we have and give ourselves that, that gentleness, to say: ‘Hey this is a, this is something that’s been going on for centuries, and it’s not our fault if we have, you know, challenges around, you know, body image – you know, hair, etc,’” Holmes said. “It’s okay to at least give ourselves a space to wander and to be curious about, like: ‘Is this serving me?’”

When razors for women reached the market in the early 1900s and began appearing in public ads, the standard spread like wildfire, causing many of us to hate those beautiful little forests of hair on our skin, according to the Smithsonian.

We can stop that still-raging inferno – and protect our little forests – by acknowledging the normalcy of body hair.

Left unsaid in that story: any consideration of the possibility that there was evolutionary advantage to be gained from participating in that "raging inferno."

So it goes with culture studies.  I suppose we should be grateful that the columnist didn't bundle keeping that body hair with showing solidarity with starving Palestinians.  The standard wordnoise of culture studies can so quickly be repurposed, can't it?

The [University of Colorado's] Department of Ethnic Studies in its mission statement says it works to advance "the epistemologies, histories, and lived experiences of marginalized communities of color and Indigenous nations in order to challenge and critique all forms of oppression and to advance emancipatory, self-determining futures for all people." In addition to its argument that Hamas did not commit "terrorism," the department's Oct. 23 statement framed the war in Israel as a "feminist issue."

"As a department whose work is informed by intersectional, anti-racist, and decolonial feminist, queer, and trans scholarship and activism, we join the scholars and activists of the Palestinian Feminist Collective in affirming Palestine as a feminist issue," the statement said. "Building on our prior commitments to antiracist feminist perspectives in our scholarship and activism, we amplify the legacy of Black, Indigenous, Arab, Muslim, and Jewish feminist and queer scholars and activists, in support of the long Palestinian struggle for liberation."

I wonder if those 72 virgins the jihadis are dying for have shaved their armpits.

Cold Spring Shops headquarters is on land that was in Wisconsin Territory before Illinois became a state. We recognize the labor applied by those settlers marking the trails that contemporary Illinoisans use to visit Lake Geneva, the Dells, and Door County, and to watch their teams get owned in Green Bay.