The Danish Delimmea (aka To Shave or Not to Shave!)

This is a lighthearted stir rather than a serious swipe at any given group or individual. I hope people take it in the tongue in cheek manner in which it's intended.

I often see polls, blogs and discussions about personal grooming habits (shaved or unshaven) and it kind of amazes me how much mileage this topic gets.

Given that there are so many individual hair styles and grooming habits in plain view everyday, I wonder what insights people expect to gain from these various inquiries into personal preference. Is there some earth shattering fact we’ve all been overlooking that’s bound to turn up any minute now?

I’m beginning to wonder if I should be more inquisitive myself. Perhaps every time I run into someone with a beard, I should quiz them why they don’t shave. In order to get an unbiased data-set, I obviously need to ask an equal number of clean shaven people why they don’t grow their beards.

It probably takes a braver soul than I to inquire of women why they do or don’t shave their legs, pits etc. It seems as though bare arm pits are a complete non-issue, but there was a time when women didn’t shave their underarms. It could well be shaving technology is so damned good these days, it’s a crime not to shave everywhere you can!

The most frustrating aspect of this research is the shifting goal posts. Within any given year people who do shave don’t, and those that didn’t do. How are we meant to get a definitive consensus on this when people keep changing their preferences all the time!

This could be the reason we need to keep asking the question and creating new polls asking the same thing. If everyone would just pick a single preference and stick to it, we might have some hope of settling the matter once and for all.

Meanwhile, I guess we must resign ourselves to being in the dark. Until people start being a little more uniform about their hair styles, let alone any other body grooming, we really don’t stand a chance of understanding why some people shave and others don’t. As to those that are neither one nor the other, they absolutely don’t help the situation.

All this individualism really is an inconvenience. Roll on the day everybody is the same, and once and for all, we can settle the matter, “to shave or not to shave?”