"Fitz" wrote in message
ups.com...

Why do you shave?
I can't understand why any man doesn't want to look like a man.

I believe a cleanly-shaved chin looks perfectly manly.

How? It's masculine to have facial hair. A secondary sex thingy.

Shaving it off is tantamount to ... well, use your imagination :-)


You seem to be drawing a link between facial and bodily hair...

Not at all. I was suggesting that shaving off a beard is comparable with
castration.

Gulp. that's a bit extreme!

It is but you pressed the point.

And a little inconsistent? surely
castration removes primary sexual organs not secondary...

Indeed. But not inconsistent. They areboth sex characteristics.

Also do you only make this direct association between appearance and
'manliness' or is it behaviour as well?

Behaviour is a social characteristic, it's not hormonal.

Acually I don't think it's quite that black and white is it?
Testosterone is classicly associated with aggression.

And men, young ones especially, usually have a great amount of it sloshing
around. It can vary in men too, you can almost smell it on re-enactment
battlefields!

Ferinstance is a man not a man
unless he can kill a chicken with his bare hands?

Not at all. And a woman (e.g. me) isn't less of a woman because she can
kill
a chicken with ungloved hands.

Sorry for being dumb. Do you mean a 'man' _should_ be able to kill a
chicken?

No. I wouldn't have even thought about the example. Chicken killing is a
necessity if you're hungry and there's nothing else available, or the hen
has gone out of lay and is eating expensive grain, or the chicken is a
superfluous cockerel which need staking out because you don't need all that
many. Chicken killing is done by whoever decides to do it, you don't need a
beard to do that.



Women's breasts are their secondary sex characteristics. They vary in
size
but few aren't functional when necessary. Men's aren't. Hormones again.

Aha! A frame of reference I can associate with. ;-) This sort of
clears it up really. As you say breasts vary in size, shape and
appearance and there will be extremes of preference among us chaps.

That's not their function.

The beard thing is similar in your case you like lots of beard.

That's a bonus, in both cases. It's not a prime function, just an effect.

But...
the comment above suggests that the functinoality of breasts is
important in their use as secondary sexual characteristics

Eh?

whereas in
reality if one's beloved is lactating they tend be sore, heavy

Not for long.

and you
generally don't go near them!

They're not for you anyway.

Sorry, chaps!

Mary