Pain for the Vain
What have we got against hair? We seem to hate it. A few weeks ago saw the incineration of someone’s face follicles, by the sinister sounding ‘flame’. This week another nouse person gets their back, sack and crack attacked with wax. Pain in the name of beautification.
Why do our perceptions of attractiveness often require procedures that are either potentially harmful or take some kind of purgatorial exertion. “Shampoo and conditioner? I just wash and go”, was the advertising slogan that was so licentious as to suggest that just one handful of gaudily coloured, retina raping goo, massaged into your hair was actually enough to clean it. Is this not perfectly obvious to anyone who only has five minutes to shower before their nine-fifteen? Conditioner seems to serve no purpose accept that, according to the bottle, it, “gives you bright and shiny hair”. Well if that’s what you really want try not washing it at all.
It seems to be inherently human to expect to have to pay, with blood sweat and tears, even for things we’ve already paid for financially and are frankly entitled to anyway. Thin is pretty so we diet, well toned is pretty so we exercise, and hairless is apparently pretty so we shave, strip or singe. Why bother? Who is likely to see you back, let alone your balls/bush? Your friends (occasionally), who are unlikely to care. Your partners, who presumably love you anyway. And the odd drunken take-home who’s only pretending to find you attractive because you were the last person in the game of musical pulls that nightclubs degenerate into at about ten to two.
Exercise is perhaps the most inane of all the above procedures. Not playing a sport because you enjoy it, which happens to have a fitness benefit, but paying hundreds of pounds a year to a gym where you run on a treadmill for forty five minutes a fortnight, making you spiritually closer to the hamster in a wheel you resemble than the other humans with whom you have no right to share a gene pool. If a compelling argument for enforced sterilisation exists it must be with regards to healthy people who need a computer to help them with jogging.
Why this need to suffer? Do we like it in a kinky masochistic way? The bunny lovers who hang around outside testing laboratories would argue our enjoyment comes from the infliction of pain, not necessarily on ourselves, but also on rabbits and monkeys. It seems unlikely to me, however, that this actually happens. Shampoo stings far too much for it to have been actually tested on anything sentient. If the rabbits and monkeys are imbibing it by the eyeful, as we are informed, it’s clearly not hurting them. Plus they must have really bright and shiny hair, to the envy of all their wild contemporaries.
My belief is that we expect to pay a prerequisite of pain for our fun, partly because it happens naturally on a lot of occasions. You eat rich food, you get the shits, you drink too much, you get a hangover, etc… It’s also part of an historically ingrained value system born out of the twin evils responsible for most of mankind’s most reprehensible activities: religion and money. In a sense Marxists are the opposite of right with their ‘opium of the masses’ idea. Religion doesn’t corrupt as much with its promises of heavens as it does with its threats of hells. This entire message seems to be based around pain in the future for an ill-defined concept of ‘sin’, much of which appears to be merely the beautification of life.
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