Am I the only one who is much less bothered by stray hair if I know whose hair it is, and I like the original owner?
A hair in my soup at a girlfriend’s house, that can be reasonably identified as originating on the girlfriend’s person, I don’t mind at all. But a hair in my soup at a restaurant is super gross.
The above goes double for pubic hairs.
Whether I’m home or out, I will stop eating if I find a hair in my food. It turns my stomach.
Most people’s feet don’t bother me, but my step-father’s feet, oh boy. When he fell at home, and had to be admitted to the hospital, we had a good look at his feet for the first time in years. His toenails were yellow with some type of fungus. They were so long that they were curled under and sticking in the bottom of his feet. I would say the nails were about 4 inches long. :eek:
He had been walking on them like that for years, and never complained or even mentioned it. His doctor had a podiatrist come in to trim them. He sure earned his money that day.
I felt bad for him, but it really was one of the grossest things I’ve ever seen.
Eh, people just like the drama. Feet are not gross, they are just feet. Hair is not gross. I don’t particularly like it in my mouth. but I have really long hair, so if it does get in my mouth, it takes a while to get it out. That is gross.
I won’t ever put my feet on you, but simply having feet is not gross. I take good care of them and don’t wear shoes that are ridiculously tight on me.
I don’t mind other people’s feet, either, as long as they are clean. I don’t really look at them.
Hair in restaurant food bugs me not because of the hair itself but because theoretically, good restaurant operating procedures should prevent it so if I’ve got hair in my food, what else are they slacking on?
Feet are feet. No one likes dirty feet but no one likes dirty anything. Frankly, while my feet wouldn’t win any beauty contests, I kind of like looking at them. The foot shape itself is one of the more alien parts of the human body and it’s kind of cool to stretch and flex them and see where the muscles under the skin are moving or curl the toes and imagine what it would be like to really grip something like a tree branch with them.
Hair grosses me out not of itself, but because it implies the possibility of:
No real emotional depths. When you have too many grown men crammed into a hot, noisy vehicle, it behooves all concerned to respect each other’s space. Deciding you are going to put your filthy bare feet in another guy’s lap is basically begging to get punched in the face.
Former touring musician? 
Chain gang?
Close.
Well, that’s just personal space. If you lean on my shoulder like it’s an armrest (I’m a small guy): I’ll elbow you moderately, and explain to not do it again. The second time, you’re getting bruised ribs.
You don’t like any of that?
scraps soup recipe
I love feet. Feet and knees. They’re like the only part of female anatomy which have been overlooked by sexual selection and left entirely to the dictates of natural selection. Glorious efficient mechanical devices.
Have to agree with the OP, or at least the sentiment implicit in the post. I don’t have a fetish about either hair or feet, but on balance I think both are cute. More so than tongues or nostrils for example.
That’s pretty much what I was going to say. In food prepared by others, it’s a warning that there may be other inappropriate crap in my food.
At home, occasionally I’ll find a hair of mine or my wife’s in what we cook. But it rarely happens, and I’ve got no reason to believe the problem goes beyond the hair, so I pull it out and continue eating.
The only problem I have with feet is when people touch their feet, then without washing their hands first, touch stuff that shouldn’t get foot germs. (Don’t rub the sole of your foot, then make me a sandwich - the floor that foot has been on isn’t exactly fit to eat off of.)
But it’s so easy for a single hair to go astray. If there’s hair in the food every time, that suggests lax procedures. A single hair now and again? Just life.
“Ever look at your feet? Really, really look at them?”
Say, how do people close to the state of nature – Cro Magnon, say, or people in a tribe in the depths of the Amazon – deal with toenails? You can chew your fingernails, but the flexibility to chew your toenails sorta depends on youth. How do the adults get a frontier pedicure?
Apropos of nothing, but Naflgar, the mythic norse ship that would carry the opposing forces to battle the gods at Ragnarok was believed to be made out of the nails of dead people. Vikings were admonished to keep their nails short so that when they died, they added as little material as possible to the ship’s construction. Delay the apocalypse, cut your nails!
My WAG would be that toenails among the habitually barefoot and out-of-doors keep themselves trimmed, for the most part, just from general wear. My cite for this is my dogs, whose toenails require regular trimming in the winter (when they go outside only to potty) but not so much in the summer (when they run around and go on walks all the time).
My toenails, when CroMagnon long, are pretty easy to split and pull off with my fingernails.
Usually I get pedicures, though. An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age. (And cheaper than a podiatrist to prevent ingrown toenails instead of treating them.)
As late as three generations ago, dying of an infected ingrown toenail was not unheard of. My great-grandfather died from one, pre-antibiotics.
Shoes and hair care are relatively recent. Our aversion is more instinctual, and probably predate this development.
For most of our history, feet were on the ground and dirty, and then were replaced with being smelly from bacteria. For most of our history, hair was bathed in our natural oils and dirt and junk. So we developed an aversion, and it hasn’t went away in everyone.
I’m also pretty sure that’s the reason foot fetishes work, too. Butts are historically dirty, but are sexual. Feet are historically dirty, so they wind up being sexual to some people. Hence why a lot of foot fetishists like dirty or smelly feet.
(The crossed wire explanation doesn’t really wash. It might explain why some people like having their feet massaged, but not enough for it to be advantageous to develop such a fetish. More likely, it had to do with the lack of disease transmission.)