If this forum is good for anything, it must be good for this. What is your opinion of ears? Do you like them as they are, or given the power would you redesign them for the species? Yes, they are very useful for hearing things, but aside from the functional part, how do you think about ears, your own and other people’s?
As a grade schooler, I had a very mixed feeling about ears, in particular the ears of other grade schoolers and how clean they were. I would definitely judge you if I saw earwax in your ears. It really made me sort of queasy, moreso than if you had, say, a snotty nose. I was very diligent about Q-tipping my ears, and for a short while, I used to try to sleep with my ear folded over to keep any ear stuff from falling onto my pillow. (I still clean out my ears but they always still feel to me like they should be cleaner.) I thought kids with waxy ears were unclean in other ways, wouldn’t be friends with them, didn’t want to eat near them or even think about them. With age this obsession has lessened.
Ears are seldom featured in magazine ads, album covers, or wherever they might be used to get your attention. Eyes seem to have that market sewn up. I can think of a few record jackets with big ears on them - after all, what do you do with music but feed it to your ears? - but they always look sort of weird to me, and not the sort of image that makes me want to grab that record, and not just because it’s kind of obvious. Maybe on some level I’m still checking them out for cleanliness.
I once read that police sketch artists don’t ask about or pay much attention to a witness’s description of ears; they are not considered useful in making an identification. That can’t be true. Ears certainly vary a lot in size, shape, stick-outiness, type of lobe, lots of things. I’d notice these things in any brief encounter with a stranger, would you?
Ear ornamentation is a fact of Western civilization, actually all civilization; it can be attractive but as a guy I never wanted to do that but I guess ear-piercing for girls is pretty standard stuff, even a rite of passage to some. But nix on the extreme versions, like putting big loops in your lobes, looks painful to me. And big dangly earrings - i see them and sometimes worry what would happen if you were moving briskly and one of them got caught on something. It could happen.
I could say a lot more, but I’d rather throw the floor open and see if other people think about ears as much as I do. (Can anyone wiggle theirs, how did you acquire this talent? Let’s stick to human ears for now.)
