If you don't move in the right circles, you may have missed the tempest that's rocking the internet's nerdsphere:
In the new "Wonder Woman" movie, Wonder Woman has no armpit hair.
Take a minute, if your head is reeling.
The issue of Wonder Woman's bare pits came to extreme light when the latest trailer for the film, starring Gal Gadot in the titular role, appeared online and a strange thing happened when our female superhero raised her hands over her head in one blink-and-you-missed-it moment.
To wit:
Her armpits were exposed.
Her armpits were hairless.
Her armpits were glowing in a strange and mysterious way.
Pause the trailer at the 1:47 mark (see below), and you can revel in the curious phenomenon that is Wonder Woman's pits. The armpit area appears to have been manipulated in postproduction.
One can imagine the effort undertaken by the poor hack who was instructed thusly by a Hollywood overlord:
"I don't know who didn't get Gal's pits shaved on set that day, but exterminate any signs of hair shading, natural conturing, or sweat glands."
For some reason, this movie version of a Photoshop job is sloppy and easy to catch.
Perhaps it was done by a feminist who made it obvious to make a political statement.
We'll never know.
The real question, though, is: Why no hair, there, Princess of the Amazons?
I mean, Wonder Woman couldn't possibly have time to walk up in the morning, get in the shower, and run a razor across her armpits ... could she?
Superheroes don't shave their pits ... do they?
Men took to Twitter to express their longing for Wonder Woman's armpit hair. And leg hair.
"[S]he was raised on an island of women w/no shick advertisements!" wailed Paul Roth in LA.
Refinery29 had a more nuanced take, noting shaving is "a time-consuming process and she's a little too busy training '10 times harder' with the Amazons so that she can, you know, save the world."
Elsewhere on Forbes, fellow contributor Bruce Y. Lee has a solution: "But perhaps the best thing to do is stop using movies as a guide for your appearance."
Of course, it isn't quite that simple.
Sigmund Freud famously opined of female sexuality:
"We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a 'dark continent' for psychology"
Little has changed since those lines appeared in his 1926 book, The Question of Lay Analysis.
Indeed, women as a whole have remained something of a dark continent from which men can be found sprinting from in holy terror.
To downplay the dark continent of our bodies, we demystify them: stripping away hair, smoothing out rough contours, spreading a mask of makeup across the face so as not to complicate things with, say, individuality, complexity, or anything at all curious.
In fact, one could venture that Wonder Woman's armpits at the 1:47 mark represent the entire struggle with which a modern woman must grapple daily: I am woman, hear me roar, but so I don't freak you the you-know-what out, let me take away everything I am so I can be everything you want me to be.
Maybe one day in the future, young girls will be brought up on images of a different kind of Wonder Woman -- one who shaves nowhere and hides nothing.
