I usually don’t let telephone solicitation calls go quite that far, but the hook was intriguing enough that I listened to a representative of a Des Moines-based research company that wanted to pay me to shave my legs.

Immediately suspicious, I demanded clarification. “You’re talking about actual money and not a year’s supply of those flimsy disposable razors?”

Yes, the woman on the phone assured me, she was talking about real dollars, 25 of them. All I had to do was agree to use razors the company would provide for six weeks and allow them to ask me questions about the “experience.” All these years of shaving my legs has been that, a fact illustrated by the Band-Aid splotched legs in every picture of me taken between junior high, when I first started using my dad’s razor on the sly, to … OK, let’s just say a picture snapped at any given point in time would leave no doubt about what I find problematic about razors.

“Six weeks, you say?” I asked, suddenly remembering the time my college roommate and I, drunk with power over the chance to boot “Charlie’s Angels” off America’s airwaves and into another hemisphere, signed up to be a Nielsen household. Our enthusiasm paled when we realized that we would be slaves to the small black-and-white set that only worked when aluminum foil was fitted over the rabbit ears or, failing that, one of us stood near the set with a limb extended. (Don’t ask.) In our eagerness to hold sway over what programs people get to watch, we downplayed the part about having to record our every television-watching moment in a diary. So, at the end of the week, we tried to remember what we’d watched and filled in the slots we couldn’t recall with PBS programming because we thought that was socially important. (This explains why the staffs at lower-tier television stations in small markets like Des Moines start spitting green foam when they hear the words “diary market.”)

There it was. The C-word, commitment, was required here.

“Well, you know,” I said, playing along, “now that it’s cooler weather and the shorts have been packed away, I might not shave my legs but once during that six-week period. Or at all.”

“We’re looking for women who shave every other day,” she said emphatically.

There are women who do that?

I was thinking about my friend Liz Garst, a very smart woman who mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the Iowa Senate in 1994. She fell prey to a nasty whisper campaign by a bunch of other women, and probably some men, too, who questioned whether a woman who refused to shave her legs truly shared their wholesome American values. Though gratified that they weren’t raising arguments questioning a woman’s ability to serve in public office, I still wondered how not shaving her legs made her unfit. Were they afraid she might sponsor a bill outlawing leg shaving?

Now, I hear it’s becoming über cool for men, especially athletes, to shave their legs, too. I don’t know if Patty Judge shaves her legs. Better put, I don’t care if Patty Judge shaves her legs. But if her shaving her legs or her failure to shave her legs becomes a campaign issue, Mike Blouin, Chet Culver, Ed Fallon, Sal Mohamed, Greg Connell, Jim Nussle and Bob Vander Plaats should be held to the same scrutiny.

“I probably wouldn’t be very good at this,” I finally ended up telling the solicitor.

Not that I wasn’t giddy over the prospect of affecting which razors make it to the retail shelves.