Just a quick note to let Salon's editors know that this Premium subscriber won't be giving hits to "Wingnut" from now on.

I gave this feature a chance. I was entirely open to hearing lucid opinions from a conservative unafraid to demonstrate reason in the defense of his principles (which hopefully would have made them more comprehensible to me). Instead, what I've found is an anonymous coward who dresses up his cynical, self-serving "convictions" in the sheep's clothing of faux rationality. Sadly, this does nothing to disguise their intellectual hollowness.

The subject of this particular column, of course, cuts straight to the heart of the problem. "Wingnut" disingenuously answers the question with a cheery "We don't!" and then provides no real evidence to support his claim, opting instead for Rovian-style, sleight-of-hand obfuscation and misrepresentation. And who can fault him? The claim is demonstrably unsupportable by all significant evidence available.

The problem his movement has at this point is that, led by Richard Nixon, they signed a deal with the devil decades ago to sacrifice logic and rationality on the altar of winning elections by any means necessary. They would divide and conquer by intentionally appealing not to voters' reason but to their most ignoble emotions, knowing -- as only rationalists truly do -- that human beings are still animals, our natures caught in an ongoing struggle between the reason of our mammalian minds and the emotional impulses of our reptilian limbic system. And knowing that the reptilian side is stronger, if only because most of us don't even know it's there. Science has no chance in this worldview; it and the intellectual approach that powers it were left behind by the Right long ago.

"Wingnut" is carrying a banner for a morally and intellectually bankrupt system of thought, and he knows it. So instead of giving us the straight dope, instead of trying to rebuild the rational case for conservatism (which even I, a raging liberal, do believe can be done), he feints in that direction with smiles and winks and distractions, hoping we won't notice that there's still no "there" there.

Well, we notice. And I'm done with his sham of a soapbox. Life's too short to listen to people who decline to actually say anything.

I really don't get the miasma of consternation that always surrounds this issue. It seems people are desperate to use it to support their own sexual-political agenda by investing it with more symbolic value than it merits.

I myself like shaving my pubic area, because it feels sexy that way and my wife likes it better. I also prefer women with shaved pubes, not because I have some deep-seated desire to reduce them to Barbie dolls -- Barbies are plastic and lifeless, two of my least favorite things in a sexual partner -- but because I am an enthusiastic cunnilinguist who is not a fan of stray pubic hairs in the teeth or on the tongue. It makes the whole process cleaner.

But more importantly, those are just my wife's and my preferences. Why must the choice to shave or not to shave, for men or women, be so fraught with political baggage?

Do what makes you feel good, and/or what gets your partner hot for your ass. At the end of the day, that's all that matters.