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Text and Artwork by Danny Usher
I was sitting outside the Focus Department Store enjoying a tasty beverage after my workout. The scooters were singing, the horns were honking and the microscopic pollutants from the burned ghost money were slowly giving me leukemia. It was a typical Tuesday morning in Tainan.
"Ahhh this is the life." I thought to myself as I sipped my coffee.
Out of the corner of my eye, I observed a Taiwanese woman being pursued by an unseen villain. From what I could tell by her spastic movements, I assumed that a swarm of bees was chasing her. Suddenly, her antics stopped and she started to walk nonchalantly as if nothing had happened. Alas, moments later, she began flailing again, this time throwing her coat over her head and darting toward shelter.
I watched with increasing curiosity and figured out what was going on. She had found herself marooned outside on a sunny day with no umbrella. While safely in the shade of trees she could walk freely but any gap in the foliage left her running like mad from the sun's death rays. She was putting on quite a show and I started to laugh to myself at how ridiculous she looked. The woman had now reached the crosswalk and faced a terrifying obstacle: four lanes of pure, unadulterated sunlight. She took refuge under the canopies of the storefronts, psyching herself up as she waited for the light to change. As the last seven cars ran the red light, she prepared to sprint across the road. She once again threw her coat over her head and ran like hell as if an unruly flock of bats was dive-bombing her.
Victory! She had made it safely to the cover of the department store. She uncovered, smoothed out her dress and walked briskly into Focus. She was sickly pale and somewhat resembled a ghoul from a Peter Jackson movie. If ever there was a human who needed a few hours in the sun, it was this woman. Sadly, she was probably on her way to buy another bottle of skin whitener. In my eyes, the lily white skin she worked so hard to maintain made her look like death warmed over. This silly character got me thinking about what people do to achieve beauty.
Sure, she was an odd duck, but then again, I had just paid a lot of money to lift heavy objects up and down for an hour. How strange is that? I would love to meet the genius that invented the gym. One day, he was probably sitting, as I was, enjoying his afternoon caffeine fix when the thought dawned on him. "I can put a bunch of heavy things into a room, play some bad music and people will give me money to lift my heavy things up and down! I can also make a machine that they can run on for hours but never actually go anywhere. I will call this place... a fitness center." Brilliant.
The things people will do to achieve their idea of beauty is spiraling out of control. Women have worried about this for hundreds of years but it has only been in the last decade where men have finally leapt onto the insecurity bandwagon. You never would have found our grandfathers asking their friends, "Do these trousers make me look fat?" Nor would they have thought of tweezing eyebrows, moisturizing skin, shaving chest hair or using clippers to trim their nether regions. Is it a good thing that in the 21 st century men are taking a little pride in their appearances? The way I look at it, if it helps you get laid, it's not feminine and it certainly isn't a bad thing. No woman finds a mono-brow attractive and I am pretty sure there aren't too many ladies out there that want to remove your boxers to find an afro that would put Don King to shame. Yeah, that's right--I went there.
When a man begins shaving his privates to look good for the opposite sex, he's treading a thin line. If we don't trim our privates we become a man that only a German woman could love. Trim too much and we end up looking downright creepy. Women of course don't have a problem with the latter option. Hell, there is a whole industry built around balding the beavers. Men on the other hand need carefully laid out guidelines. Perhaps a pubic hair stencil should be invented to help us out.
We have all heard those clichés: "beauty is skin deep," or "it's what's inside that counts." But let's face it; those are just things we say to ugly people to make them feel better. If those things were really true, the beauty industry wouldn't be raking in billions of dollars every year. Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson wouldn't be famous. Women wouldn't allow sadists to poor hot wax on their privates and men would certainly not be risking losing a nut trimming their special places.
No matter what we do to ourselves in hope of achieving our personal idea of beauty, we will never impress everyone. The Asian woman with the radiant white skin might look like a goddess to one man and a ghoul to the next. The chubby balding white guy from Canada may not be able to get a date back home but look at what a catch he is here. You get the idea. The bottom line is that everyone's idea of beauty is different. Someone, somewhere out there, will find you attractive no matter what you do or don't do to yourself.
To tweeze or not to tweeze? That is the question. |
