2024 Hair Apparent

“Hair today, gone tomorrow” is the complaint of many of my male contemporaries. Especially the macho guys who really put a premium on manly hirsutitude.

But there's some men in some countries who find too much hair apparent hair repellent. Of course it a matter of context. They don't find hair repellent on their heads. They find it repellent on the legs of young women.

This is a story of ingénue ingenuity. Or what's a girl to do?

The problem: Women on public transit in China have been and are being subjected to rude and intolerable groping from older men. Apparently it's no big deal, from the groping rude men's point of view, to fondle the legs of any female they encounter on a bus or subway.

In many respects, like, um, respect, China lags behind the western world in matters of propriety. But like any problem, there's someone willing to come up with a home-grown solution. Or one you can pull on like a pair of tights. In this case, a pair of leg-colored nylons embedded with actual hair.

And they are rendered quite well. Not like fake fur at all. The tights make a girl’s legs look like the curling bodily hairiness of a Romanian weightlifter. Think Albanian back hair applied to formerly lovely limbs.

The result? A fashion that got legs in a hurry. A forbidden city taken to a lower extremity. Women now free from leering lecherous looks and liberated from libertine licentiousness. And fondling too. Chinese men find them disgusting. And they leave the lasses alone.

Of course, this sort of just glosses the whole thing over. Women are still objects in the oblivious men's minds, they're now just hairy objects.

It doesn't really get to the root of the problem.

Respect. 

America, ya gotta love it.