women, testosterone and femininity

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You know, I can have plenty of fun with a nice bush, and I can ignore some hairy pits, but hairy arms and legs just get me, man....that just gets me. Can't handle it! Plz shave'em!

we don't really know what cave men chose. i know that many modern men often don't have a problem with it, as i didn't have difficulties finding partners who did not mind my body hair when i didn't shave. so in a sense i was "selected" either in spite of my body hair or because of it. whatever the reason, it didn't have any negative effect whatsoever.

so this idea that men as a whole prefer women one certain way just because that is your preference is clearly not true. some men like it, some don't.

women who have androgens are normal. women who have a deficiency may have less body hair but they have other problems as well:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16800391
androgens are integral to a normal woman's hormonal mix. thus, a woman who appears to lack androgens is unlikely to be considered more feminine on a biological level on a widespread basis - she would in fact NOT be a normal female.

if body hair because is unsanitary like long toenails, then BOTH genders should be removing ALL head and body hair.

Electrology was used to remove body hair in the early 1880's and home made remedies mixtures for hair removal were also common in the 18th century. The stuff on how nobody shaved their armpits before WW1 is BS intended to discredit hair removal.

Hairy armpits are harder to keep clean as well.

Showering frequently- Society deems it odd to shower less than once a day as an adult, but that is a higher standard than what is truly needed.

Women remove it to look better, which in turn means that they look more feminine. What precisely about toe nails make them dirtier than armpit hair?



Cave men had the same instincts as normal men, justified by the fact that they were the same species as us and that the gender dimorphism in humans is very large compared to other apes.



Low levels do not automatically denote a deficiency. Low (allthough not nonexistant) androgen levels are prefered before high levels.



Having MORE androgens than you need wont give you a greater well-being. At very low (but still reasonable) androgen levels, a woman will only have vellus hairs in her armpits.

A woman with high androgen levels is the equivalent of a man with high estrogen levels, even though men also need very SMALL amounts of estrogen.



Removing my armpit hairs would make me look less masculine.

Hair removal has come in and out of style throughout history. So what? No one is trying to discredit hair removal. If you don't like body hair that's fine. I don't know why you keep arguing with me. What is the point? To convince me to start shaving? I doubt you would care so much about a stranger, so please stop repeating your argument because this is going nowhere.

I disagree that armpit hair is harder to keep clean. I actually spend more time on my armpits if I do shave them. It's not like stuff can get stuck in armpit hair like it can under long nails, as you don't use your armpits as much as you do your fingers.

So male swimmers are not masculine.

They remove it to reduce the drag coefficient. I'm not a professional swimmer and neither are the vast majority of other men.

I know why they do, but you said if you removed your body hair that you would look less masculine because you are a guy, so male swimmers look less masculine

That was the first thing I thought.

i dunno, you tell me. why don't men remove armpit hair if it is dirty?


i left my post embedded in yours because your response made no sense whatsoever. we are not talking about dimorphism, we are talking about male preferences. and in my personal experience, many men either do not care (most likely) or they like body hair (less likely, but it does happen). we don't know what cave men liked, but we do know what men like/don't mind now.


low levels of androgens do not equal zero body hair, but a complete lack of androgens during puberty sometimes does. so women with no body hair would eitehr be genetic outliers or they could suffer from a lack of testosterone during formative periods. there's just no way to get around the fact that women need testosterone to function properly, and having testosterone contributes to the development of body hair. it doesn't equal lower levels of femininity, sorry.

and men are not actually able to tell upon visual inspection which women have higher or lower levels of androgens if they fall within the normal ranges


actually, no. a woman with high levels of androgens can be completely average in appearance and completely average in behaviour. you have yet to cite one single study that indicates that women on the high range of normal have anything visually different about them.

and we do not know if higher levels lead to greater well-being. all we know is that very low levels or absence of testosterone leads to depression and lowered levels of happiness and low energy.


so what? i don't agree, but nonetheless, that was not the context of the argument. you implied it was unsanitary for women to have hair. if that was actually a concern, you would shave it off too.

i think perhaps part of the misunderstanding may be from the term "androgen". Kurgan, maybe you don't know this, but men and women have many, many hormones in their bodies. some of them have been named according to the gender that has MORE of them. however, they exist in the bodies of normally functioning people of the opposite genders too. it doesn't make them less "masculine" or feminine". it makes them "normal".

maybe you're getting stuck in semantics or something, because we've given you clear and reputable sources that demonstrate that women do normally have varying levels of testosterone as part of their hormonal cocktail, yet you seem to be ignoring the actual facts.

i don't really understand why you're doing that. perhaps you can't believe that your own opinions don't translate into universal biological truths?

Just an FYI:

Body dimorphism between human males and human females is much less than most apes.

Human males are only about 15% larger than human females as compared to chimpanzees, which are 30%-40% larger, and gorillas, which are 100% larger.

Of course, I realize L&D has never been overly particular about facts.....

Last edited by XFilesGeek on 18 Aug 2012, 12:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

those years are part of the modern era, and we already covered the fact it was (mostly) a modern fashion. also, it was exceedingly uncommon for women to remove their body hair in 1880, compared with the expectation in more recent years.

if hairy armpits are harder to keep clean (not true, but whatever), and you expect women to shave them because of that, you should be shaving yours too.

Men have higher androgen levels than women, and masculine women have higher androgen levels than feminine women. High androgen levels do not give a woman better health than low (as in low—not nonexistant) levels; on the contrary, a woman with low levels is more likely to produce a healthy offspring.



And women have varying hormone levels, with a low androgen/high estrogen combinatipn being universally regarded as higher. Less hair denotes more estrogen.

I've already posted links that show an almost linear correlation between estrogen leels and physical attractiveness. If you want to see it again, Google it.

Last edited by Kurgan on 18 Aug 2012, 2:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

^^^ Save your breath... some people will never back down from their opinions no matter what facts are brought to the table. There's lots of possible reasons why... pride, stubbornness, needing to be right... whatever the reasons, they will not back down from their original stance for any reason.

Just ignore and move on to a more productive conversation.