Body Hair

We had another fight about body hair last night, during a chilly stroll downtown for Birthday Dinner. We passed the Starbucks on Alder -- the one with tiny panes of purple glass set at intervals in its wall, littering the dark sidewalk with dirty light: "Remember Middlesex? He talks about the Hair Belt. Circling the world at a specific latitude: HAIR." But evolution, but reason! "Inuits are mostly hairless. Scandinavians too. Isn't body hair theoretically to keep us warm?" And then comes the cultural materialism from Anthro 102, the easy theories I cling to like a weak climber to a huge plastic hold: "Well I doubt humans could live in those climates without clothing, so perhaps for them body hair became useless far before it did for those populations who were less reliant on animal skins and more reliant on their own skins to keep them warm." AHA, etc. We fought back and forth until long after we'd walked past 12th, 10th, 9th, and turned down Broadway toward the towering lights of quasi-downtown, the heavy trains rumbling down Yamhill and past the Square, the short-skirted Friday-Night-Girls wobbling past the street kids with their hungry dogs - maybe hair keeps you from getting sunburned - but what would be the disadvantage of having hair up north? - well Inuits were once from Asia, so maybe body hair was not even an available trait - so then what about the Scandinavians? - and so on until we passed Salmon and Main streets and headed up the sudden, steep hill, covered in Cats and trucks and stray hard hats and wire fences that are our language for IMPROVEMENT, and decided, as usual, that the answer was simple: we'll look it up when we get home.