Cultural Aspects
Adolescent and adult women in many Western cultures often remove the hair from their legs. Toned, tanned, shaved legs are sometimes perceived as a sign of youthfulness and are often considered attractive in these cultures.
Men generally do not shave their legs in any culture. However, leg-shaving is a generally accepted practice in modeling. It is also fairly common in sports where the hair removal makes the athlete appreciably faster by reducing drag; the most common case of this is competitive swimming. It is also practised in many other sports, such as cycling, in which skin injuries are common: the absence of grown hair makes nicks, scratches and bruises heal faster because of the reduced microbial population on shaved skin.
Legs are often used metaphorically in many cultures to indicate either strength or mobility. The supporting columns of an object may be referred to as legs as well, as in chair legs.
Read more about this topic: Human Leg
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or aspects:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“It is always a sign of an unproductive time when it concerns itself with petty and technical aspects [in philology], and likewise it is a sign of an unproductive person to pursue such trifles.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)