On Wednesday the following tweet popped up in my timeline by @trixslock:
‘Ik bereid me mentaal voor om aan de schoolpoort te gaan staan. #okselhaar #crocs #teva #hairylegs’
Loosely translated: when people stop believing in personal landscaping and standards the school run can be a horrific experience of the sort that makes you want to scratch out your eyes forever.
Which, for some reason, reminded me of another tweet about June being ‘skirt month’, an initiative of the ladies at ‘Blote Benen‘. In their endeavour to encourage you to bring out the woman in you, the ladies are asking women to eschew trousers in favour of skirts to release their legs out into the wild. Never mind if your legs haven’t seen sunlight since the dawn of time, or if you have cankles, you too can and should wear a skirt and foist your legs upon the world. All in the name of womanhood.
This gave me quite some food for thought because I am a woman whose pins have been compromised since early youth by my mother’s advice to only use your toes when pedal pushing because ‘that is what ladies do’. I have unfortunately been ‘graced’ with muscular calves as a result of this recommendation and it has taken me a whole lot of gym bunnying before I would even consider exposing them in wintertime, and even then only encased in tights and knee-high boots. As for summer, most of you will agree that legs tend to take at least one month longer to tan than the rest of one’s body maintaining a surly pallor while your arms and face colour a fine boiled lobster red.
Now while the idea of going bare-legged isn’t awful per se, it scares the shit out of me. Do I want to see legs with hair so long it can be braided? How will I cope with one-legged specimens, given my fear of amputees? What about my own legs?
In a bid to assuage my fears I turned to that Bible of non-news also known as the Daily Mail for my daily dose of smack to keep my brain cells afloat and the first story to catch my eye was that of Mara-donna: the elephant with football skills.
Sometimes the power of association is stronger than you want it to be. Sometimes you wonder why you read the Daily Mail anyway. And sometimes you wonder why you care about other’s people’s legs in the first place. So sod it all and wear a skirt if you must… but please do us all a favour, love, exfoliate, epilate and hydrate. Not necessarily in that order. You know you can do it. There’s a good girl.
