Hairy Guys
By W Goodwin
I still remember the evening my kid brother announced to the family, “Guess what! We’re mammals!”
He was 12 and looked it, but only a few months later his androgenic hormones began ripping the hinges off the doors of his metabolism. The spreading shadow of a beard started changing his boyish face. Every day we saw newly emergent hairs growing from his body. Chest. Arms. Axilla. Legs. Crotch (described, not shown, thank god). So far so good, according to mom. But the hair kept coming. Chest hair became contiguous with arm hair which soon spread to his fingers. Then, “Oh my god!” hair on his shoulders and back. Sasquatch was living in our house, also according to Mom. Sometimes, when her cruel streak was really cooking, she called him Cousin Itt. The memory makes me grimace.
Mammals have hair; whales a little, orangutans a lot. Our various human genders average 2,200 hairs per square inch of skin surface. That adds up to around
follicles piercing the epidermis of every male and female. We all possess more-or-less equal numbers of hairs, but other than their scalps women tend to have hair that is lighter, thinner and shorter than men’s. Some geographical and racial variations occur too, but generally speaking, humans are each allotted about the same number of hairs.
