Perspectives: Sam’s Perspective – Be Happy

I’m Sam Jones and I’m about to attempt to navigate in uncharted waters,.. for me anyway. Women in this country are constantly fighting to break through the glass ceiling in the workplace. For a woman to be paid the same as a man doing the same job, continues to be an uphill fight. It shouldn’t be. But there are a great many employers out there who feel a woman’s place is in the home or that women are the weaker sex and should be paid less. Backward thinking as far as I’m concerned.

Female self expression has also been interesting to watch as have the reactions to all of it. It took me a while to get used to the various piercings which  at first were a distraction then recognized again as expressions. I think the tatoos were the hardest for me to get my head around. With a piercing, all you have to do is remove them and everything heals. Tatoos are permanent. And while colorful now, one has to know that as we age, skin will stretch and sag. So today’s rose might resemble a portrait of Aunt Bertha in 30 or 40 years.  But again we’re talking about self expression so one has to know what the future holds and if it works for you, then I’m all for it.

But a few days ago, I came across a story in the New York Times about a new form of self expression that at first made my jaw drop. You may think it doesn’t rank up there with the economy or politics, but if the Times saw fit to devote two columns and five photos to the subject, then perhaps you need to adjust your news judgement. First, a little background. Humans have been pulling, plucking, burning, tweezing and ripping out body hair since,…well since long before cable t.v. and cell phones.  But women shaving their underarms can be traced back to a real point in time.

It was May 1915 when the popular magazine Harper’s Bazzar ran an ad featuring a young model in a sleeveless dress, posing with both arms over her head. Pryor to that time, a dress that exposed the underarms was nothing short of revolutionary. The Harper’s layout had an impact. Sears Roebuck started offering women’s razors in their catalog in 1922, the same year they started selling sleeveless dresses. And ‘Boom’ a whole new industry was born,…women’s razors. 

The theory was, if women wanted to be really stylish, the underarm hair had to go. Then came flappers and shorter skirts and hose. Meaning of course, the time had arrived for women to start shaving their legs.

Now back to the layout I found in the New York Times. It featured young women who don’t shave their armpits, not really a new thing. What was new was the fact that a movement had been embraced that involved dying underarm hair. So if you dye the hair on your head blue you can let your armpit hair grow and dye it blue as well,… or green or red or whatever color suits your fancy. There are even web sites devoted to the subject. It didn’t take long for me to see the real message here. As one woman in the Times article put it, “If people don’t think that my blue armpit hair is funny then they probably aren’t worth my time.  Its really great for turning off people who aren’t accepting.”

Bingo!  In other words these young women are promoting style disobedience to promote acceptance.  Don’t laugh at me or anyone else because we’re different. Laugh with me instead at how I choose to get my message across.   How refreshing is that. Laughing at someone because they’re different is a form of bullying and there should be no tolerance on this matter. That some involved in this movement of dying armpit hair see it as a way of promoting acceptance is an outstanding reason for all of us to pay attention to what’s really being said here.

Like the song says, “don’t laugh at me, don’t call me names, don’t get your pleasure from my pain, in God eyes we’re all the same, don’t laugh at me.”

That’s my perspective.