Perhaps its tempting fate to say so on a bank holiday weekend, but the sun has come out! And so, therefore, have a bright and beautiful array of short skirts, colourful dresses and tiny tops.
But beware, ladies - you'd better make sure those newly-exposed legs are 'touchably smooth' and 'caressable'. You wouldn't want to be caught looking *gasp* unfeminine, would you?
Veet's new advert for de-fuzzing features a woman gazing at a room of plucked and primped lovelies, wondering anxiously if she can possibly compete with them. But lo! One moment in the shower with her hair-removal cream, and she's every bit as gorgeous as her rivals. Phew! And lucky for you, you can become "a smoother, more feminine you" too, as promised by the nation's favourite bland, blonde, unthreateningly-girly presenter and voice-over artiste, Fearne Cotton. Mmm, conformist heaven.
For a start, why is it that hair-removal advertisers are messing with the dictionary? 'Touchably'? 'Caressable'!? My spell check's having none of it. Veet and co are taking the English language in vain.
And will I really suffer if my legs look more like a woman's and less like a small child's? One does grow hair at puberty, after all. And would my life actually change for the worse if I didn't keep my legs, armpits and bikini line (which, lets face it, is only a bikini line if you tear your muff into pimply bald strips to create one...) fuzz-free?
Well, yes, if it involves giving a crap about what readers of Loaded have to say about your nasty, natural female body: "No way! Why have you got hairy legs? That's disgusting! Our readers don't want to see that!" hollered a room-full of Loaded editors, when stand-up comedian Shazia Mirza revealed her un-shaven legs in their full glory during the making of a TV programme last year.
"Reveal the goddess in you!" shrieks Gillette's Venus razor campaign, understandably concerned that, covered in a layer of natural, post-puberty fluff I could never be the truly beautiful - nay, goddess-like - woman I am inside.
"Lose it, or lose out!" cries Veet's waxing campaign, on the hunt for new generations to entice into a never-ending cycle of hair-removal and consumer loyalty. Lose what, I wonder? Hours of effort to stay hair-free? The prickly itching of new hairs growing right back again? The cash I contribute to the UK's 300 million pound hair-removal industry? The opportunity to be judged and deemed acceptable by lads' mag readers?
I think I'd rather hide my light under a furry bushel, and NOT discover 'what beauty feels like' but it's not quite that simple, is it? Once you're caught in the cycle of epilating, waxing, shaving and plucking, the hair just keeps growing back, and thicker! And I can't always make myself immune to the stares directed at my yeti-like legs on the beach or in the park, even though I thoroughly embrace fuzzy armpits and woolly calves when the sun's not out.
Perhaps we grown-ups, with our bitter knowledge that removing hair equals growing even more, should discourage our little girls from ever stripping it away in the first place?
Not so, say the thousands of web pages devoted not to saving girls from the tedium of so-called womanly rituals like hair-removal, but to timing their immersion in them just right.
And of course the more creative or rebellious of children will always do what they're told not to, however much they'll regret it in the future. When my mother banned me from shaving my legs as a nearly-teenager, I took the only sensible option and shaved my feet in protest. Now I look like a hobbit, and I began to shave my legs shortly afterwards anyway, so I ended up in the hairy tangle my mother was trying to avoid in the first place. The lure of conformity - of not being targeted by vicious kiddies in the playground, or stared at in the park for your bodily infractions - is powerful.
So we're telling children that they should grow up - wear sexy clothes, learn to look like adults with make-up and manicures - but at the same time conceal the evidence of that growing up, and remain smooth, shiny and hairless. Could it be that we're more attracted to little children's bodies than full-grown women's ones, as Germaine Greer wonders?
What's so wrong with full-grown women having full-grown hair?
Well, nothing if it's on your head. There are bizarre contradictions at work, across the world in a range of cultures, where women are congratulated for their long, flowing head hair and encouraged to beautify it, and yet we're castigated for unruly armpits and fluffy thighs. Women's natural bodies seem all too wild for the world to handle.
But take heart - some women are taking it back to their roots (d'you see what I did there?), and finding that armpits au-naturel aren't actually as horrific as Veet and co might have us believe.
So why not shave a little less often, trust your boyfriend or girlfriend to be so delighted that you're naked and you're theirs that they won't care if your bikini line isn't plucked within an inch of its life. Go on - reveal the grown-up woman in you.
