By Tim Sanders

The other night my wife and I were lying in bed, discussing the events of the day. Before we turned off the light there were a few moments of silence. She looked deeply into my eyes, sighed and then, her voice thick with emotion, said those words that every married man longs to hear: "WOW! Those eyebrows of yours sure need trimming!"

It was true. Something strange has happened to my eyebrows over the past several years. They’ve begun to sprout long, goofy-looking bristles that are much thicker than the others, and tend to grow sort of helter-skelter, in a wide variety of directions rather than lying against my brow in a decent, organized pattern the way they once did. To add to my consternation, those same kind of wild boar bristles now grow out of my ears, and the more I trim them with my little battery-powered clippers, the more they grow.

Marilyn’s comment led to a conversation about why so many of us men lose the hair on the top of our heads when we age, only to find new hairs in places we never really wanted to find hairs in the first place. I concluded that the balding process occurs when there is too much mental activity in the top part of the brain, which controls higher intellectual functions like literary criticism, scientific inquiry, NCAA football analysis, and the ability to appreciate Curly Howard’s contribution to Western Civilization. I called it the "grass doesn’t grow on a busy street" theory. She reminded me that it also doesn’t grow in cement.

The hair discussion then naturally drifted down the torso into the leg region. I asked her when women started shaving their legs, and she said usually in early adolescence. I explained that I was interested in when, historically, the practice began. She said it was probably in the early 20th Century

"Before then, women all wore long dresses, and had no need to shave their legs," she said.

"What about their husbands?" I asked.

"They probably didn’t shave theirs, either," she replied.

"Very funny. I mean, I would think the notion of climbing into bed with a woman with hairy legs would ... you know, turn a guy off. Even an old-fashioned Victorian gentleman."

"I think they all undressed in the dark back then. Maybe they didn’t notice. Besides, you don’t hear women complaining about men’s hairy legs." She was being silly.

"That is because men are supposed to have hairy legs, and women aren’t. Look at the old Classical Greek statues. The women were all slick as a whistle." I had her there.

"So were the men," she countered. "Besides, you can’t sculpt leg hairs. Leg hairs on one of those old Greek statues would just look like varicose veins."

I didn’t sleep well that night. I dreamed about long lines of hairy women marching through history, from the dawn of mankind all the way to the early 20th Century. Helen of Troy looked like a water buffalo, Cleopatra was hairy as an alpaca goat, and Napolean’s delicate flower, Josephine, was a regular muskrat. When I awoke the next morning, the notion of countless centuries of hirsute women bothered me. I decided to do some Internet research.

Being a well-trained investigative journalist, I typed "hairy-legged women" into my Google search engine. This was obviously a poor choice of words, since all it directed me to was a long list of porn sites. I decided to try "shaving history," and was gratified to find some actual information which had nothing to do with weird fetishes or naked lady lumberjacks. I learned that women actually have labored long and hard to remove hair from their legs for thousands of years.

Ancient cave dwelling women, for example, are believed to have used sharpened shells to remove leg hairs. As early as 4,000 BC, wealthy Egyptian women had their favorite bronze razors buried with them, so they could keep their legs all silky smooth in the afterlife. The Egyptians also used things called depilatories which dissolved hair above the skin line, These early depilatories were made of things like resin, pitch, ivy gum, goat’s gall, bat’s blood, and the ever popular powdered viper (still available today at Wal-Mart). For those with thicker, more stubborn leg hairs, a special depilatory paste made of natural arsenic and quicklime (used to make cement) did the trick. Some Egyptian women put beeswax on their legs, although the article I read didn't explain why.

Not to be outdone, Middle Eastern women used a process called body sugaring as a bridal ritual. This involved covering the whole body in a kind of taffy-like substance. Once it hardened and was stripped away, it pulled hairs out by the roots, which was good. On the negative side, however, in those hot climes the sugary residue often attracted large swarms of flies and yellow jackets, which made for a livelier honeymoon night than your average sheik might have expected.

Arabian women laced cotton string through their fingers and ran it over their legs to lasso and pull out the hairs. They could often be heard from miles away, performing their hygienic task and screaming, joyfully.

For awhile, ladies in Elizabethan England used a mixture of vinegar and cat’s dung to prevent leg hair growth. These ladies eventually became known as spinsters.

In 1762 a French barber named Jean Jacques Perret designed the first safety razor with a metal guard along one edge of the blade, and the following day, simply because he was a Frenchman, he shaved his own legs with it.

American Indians tweezed their leg hair between the halves of clam shells. In the early 1700s, intent on proving that they were not ignorant savages, their colonial counterparts applied caustic lye to their own legs to burn away hair.

In the 1830s, fashionable Eastern European women rubbed ambergris on their legs and then set them on fire to remove unsightly leg hair. Not coincidentally, the lively Czech dance, the Polka, surfaced around the same time.

In 1895 a traveling salesman named King Gillette came up with the disposable blade razor, and in 1915 his wife, Queenie, introduced Milady Decolletee, a razor especially for women. In 1931 Jacob Schick invented the electric shaver, and in 1940 Remington invented the pump-action 20 gauge shotgun. Sorry, I mean they invented the first electric shaver designed especially for women.

In the late 1800s, doctors tried killing the hair root by inserting and twisting a barbed needle with sulfuric acid into the hair follicle. In the 20th Century this process was refined into what we call electrolysis, which involves inserting a needle into the hair follicle and sending current into the root to kill it. Electrolysis is not very effective, but since it is expensive, time consuming, and sounds very scientific, women love it.

The first modern depilatory was introduced in 1940. Eventually called Nair, it was originally named NoHair. The name was changed in 1941, when marketers discovered that it sounded like "mohair," and realized that while nobody knew exactly what a "mo" was, ladies certainly didn’t want to put mohair on their legs.

In the 1980s, an Israeli company introduced the Epilady, an electric hair tweezing device that pulled leg hairs out by the roots. My wife had one, and tried it twice. By 1998 she’d healed completely. The Epilady is now popular with CIA interrogators at Guantanamo Bay.

Laser hair removal is the latest craze. It must be done in a doctor’s office or a licensed salon, unless you live near a tattoo parlor. We will not mention leg waxing because it makes us queasy.

In a 1990 survey Gillette found that 92% of U.S. women 13 or older shaved their legs. Of those, 55% shaved the entire leg, 31% shaved from the knee down, 12% shaved only their toes, and 2% voted a straight Green Party ticket.

Today some feminists still don’t shave their legs. It is a political statement, and another reason why I don’t care for politics, much.

I told Marilyn what I’d learned. She said, "That reminds me, I’ve got to do something about those eyebrows of yours. Would you prefer arsenic, clam shells, or cat dung?"

Everybody’s a comic.