But wouldn't someone choosing to leave hair there mean they'd just be conforming to your standards?
Also, for some reason, this sounds oddly like an excuse to be lazy about personal maintenance. Here's a good reason: Very few people like seeing a ridiculously hairy person. Is avoiding others' ire also vanity?
Perhaps, but hair occurs ("normally", anyway) naturally. I think it's more a case of choosing to let one's hair grow than choosing to deliberately grow more hair. I don't think I'd enjoyed being "copied" in the way you suggest; other people "conforming to [my] standards", for purely aesthetic means, at least. I would be happy, however, if more people stopped caring so much about how they had to appear to other people (and how other people had to appear to them), especially from a gender-based perspective ("why aren't guys supposed to shave their armpits?", after all: equally, why
are girls "supposed" to share theirs? and countless other sensible questions with ridiculous answers).
I'm not sure I would classify myself as "ridiculously hairy"! I would also think that the point at which hairiness becomes ridiculous, it could also be classified as dangerous to health.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting by "avoiding others' ire". I was bullied at school, I suppose, about the length of my hair, and am still (albeit rarely) subjected to comments and insults about it today; but this isn't my problem—more specifically, it's not my problem if some ignorant, backwards-thinking or fashion-led folk feel sufficiently offended by the hairs on my head to want to direct personal insults towards me. Now, if I felt threatened enough by others' aggression about
hair (really, of all things?), if I really believed that not
conforming to others'
standards, would result in physical harm, I might be persuaded to lose some hair. However, this has not been the case, and in my experience the sort of people who would make it clear without solicitation that they find some aspect of your appearance to be distasteful, will likely try to find some other aspect of your self to be offended by should you attempt to "rectify" the first.
Addendum: I have trimmed/shaved/cut facial and head hair in the past when it was required by law (i.e. at secondary school, where a code of uniform was enforced) and where an "excessive" volume of hair would have potentially resulted in losing (or not gaining) a job... albeit reluctantly.