Virtually Painless

Watching TV at 3am is a disconcerting experience, a bit like being the only sober person in the pub.  Something that’s usually relaxing and fun now seems awkward and disjointed.  Plus you’re damn tired.  And then, maybe because all the shiny polished shows were on at 8pm and you’re now watching ‘the rest’, the dregs of the scheduler’s barrel, you get some jarring juxtapositions.

On one channel you find yourself watching an infomercial for ‘No! No!”, the “virtually painless” hair remover that the nice helpful subtitles keep telling you is “not for genitals”.  There’s a pretend-living-room inhabited by Chief Leggy McTeeth and her brood of tanned harpies, all very excited to have been freed from the shackles of creams, razors and waxing.  At one point the Chief even wheels in her “hunka hunka burning love” who cheerfully depilates his own forearm cos, hey, even men have hairy bits they don’t want.  Don’t they?

It’s all cheery and enthusiastic, so much so that you forgive the truly abysmal product name.  I mean, ‘No! No!”?  If anything, it sounds like a pet name for female genitalia for the ultra-repressed; “in the Order of the Blessed St Pudenda, one does not touch one’s no-no…”

 In fact, you’re quite enjoying it all, and you can’t really fault women who want to get rid of their moustaches, until you flick over to another channel and see that Into the Wild is on, which isn't dregs at all.  We get to see Emile Hirsch throwing off the trappings of modern life, traipsing across America, and getting hairier (and thinner) by the day.  By the end, he’s so emaciated and hirsute he’s begun to resemble the Mekon with a flamboyant toupee.  And it all seems a bit self-indulgent when taken in isolation, but then you remember the No! No! and you think fuck, that’s what he was running away from.  Suddenly, compared to a life fighting a “virtually painless”, and losing, battle against the body’s own signs of aging – unwanted hair, unwanted wrinkles, unwanted hair loss, unwanted sagginess (Christ, if someone decided that shitting was unfeminine, these women would be rushing to have their arseholes stapled shut) – death by starvation in an abandoned bus in Alaska doesn't seem so terrible.

Now try and get the stapling picture out of your head.