I’ve just finished reading Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, a fascinating and thought-provoking book. I thoroughly recommend it to all; it was well-written and accessible to everyone, regardless of whether you consider yourself a feminist I believe you would still really gain something from reading it. There was an important issue Wolf neglected to cover though, and I was sad not to see its inclusion, because I feel it is as intrinsic a part of the beauty myth as body fat, ageing, clothing or cosmetic surgery. The issue is body hair, and for me it is as political an issue as it is personal,and the part it plays in the subjugation of women through the beauty myth is just as important.
As women are taught that ‘beautiful’ means fitting within a certain body shape and type, with clear skin devoid of lines and soft, shiny hair on our heads, so we are also told that ‘beautiful’ means being hairless on our bodies. Hair on the head and eyebrows is permissible (so long as it is plucked, coloured and trimmed to a standard deemed acceptable to society). Any other bodily hair is impermissible, unacceptable, ‘ugly’. This hair must be stripped through plucking, shaving, waxing or even more painful procedures like electrolysis, from the entire body. The upper lip, chin, armpits, pubic mound, vulva, legs – even toes, belly and chest must be one hundred per cent ‘smooth’ and hair-free. The hair on our heads must be our ‘crowning glory’; the rest of our bodies must be as bald as a newborn.
Much of this can be attributed to the fetishisation of youth. Like glossy hair, bright eyes and unlined skin, hairlessness gives the body the appearance and feel of a young girl’s, or what I once saw described on the website of a hair removal product as a ‘prepubescent appeal’. It is curious that in a society where paedophilia is so reviled and such a huge problem, it is thought of as harmless and ordinary that men live out their paraphilic fantasies by requiring that the women they are exposed to look as young as possible. Pornographic media advertises its ‘barely legal teens’. Actresses are routinely referred to as ‘girls’ rather than women. The image of the ‘sexy school girl’ is accepted and even desired, not just in pornography but in advertising, music video and themed nightclubs. Women slather on creams and apply blusher to their cheeks in order to attain a more ‘youthful’ appearance. Cosmetic surgeons and expensive underwear promise to give the illusion of the ‘firm’, ‘pert’ and ‘perky’ breasts which generally only occur naturally in adolescent girls. Most curiously of all, women are required to remove the most visible, prominent physical sign that they have entered adulthood – their bodily hair.
I once spoke with a woman on this very subject – her male partner had expressed his distaste for her pubic hair. It looked messy, he had said, it was unhygienic and he ‘just preferred’ the look of a woman’s genitals shaved (a preference borne, no doubt, from the normalisation of baldness in both pornography and ‘mainstream’ media). “I don’t get it,” she wondered, bemused. “Why on earth would he want to feel like he was having sex with a little girl rather than the grown woman I am?”
Grown women are, after all, meant to have hair on their armpits, vulva and legs. There is nothing ‘unnatural’ about a hairy woman; if there were then the hair would not grow there in the first place. Likewise, there is nothing ‘unfeminine’ about a hairy woman; if femininity is defined as ‘like a woman’ then a woman in her natural state is by definition as feminine as she can be. Indeed, one could say it is the hairless woman who is ‘less feminine’, as she removes parts of her natural, womanly body.
So why the revulsion upon seeing a woman’s furry armpit or catching a glimpse of her leg hair? Why are these same features on a man not also seen as unhygienic or disgusting? Partly because of what has already been discussed here – the fetishisation of youth in women. A man, upon the appearance of grey hair and creased skin, is not considered to be ‘past his prime’, instead he is seen as ‘mature’, ‘distinguished’. A woman, taught throughout her life that beauty through youth is her ultimate goal and that upon ageing her beauty dies, may feel compelled to remove every trace of adulthood within her control – and hair removal is so easy, so readily available, and she is so socialised to believe it is normal, that she reaches for the razor.
It is also, and perhaps more worryingly, another prominent way in which the beauty myth keeps women in their place. As fear of being fat keeps us self-loathing and self-starving, and fear of age keeps our self-esteem in check, keeps us preoccupied with ‘caring’ for our skin with expensive products that do not work, so fear of body hair keeps us worrying about our appearance rather than the multitude of more important issues we could be concerning ourselves with. We are kept busy and overtired, given a list of things we must do and not do to attempt to reach that impossible dream of ‘beauty’ and therefore be acceptable to society. For if women were one hundred per cent comfortable in our bodies without expending all this time, money and effort in pursuit of the beauty myth our new power, energy and self-esteem would make things very difficult indeed for the current patriarchal status quo.
“No woman is free until every woman is free.” Along the same lines as this truth lies the truth that no woman really removes hair purely for her own pleasure as long as there is still an obligation for women as a whole to be hairless. There is no real truth in the sentence “I shave because I like it,” when that preference is borne solely of social conditioning. So many women feel they ‘must’ shave if they are going to wear a skirt or a sleeveless top. So many women feel they ‘must’ shave before swimming or a gynaecological exam or a sexual encounter. So many women stop shaving in the winter or when they are single or at any other time when they are sure that no other person will see the hair. If they really are removing the hair purely for themselves, why should any of these exceptions apply? The reality is that if these women existed in a society where the beauty myth and the Male Gaze were nonexistent, where body hair was accepted and even celebrated, very few would continue to waste time with hair removal.
What about hair removal in men? No conversation on this subject is complete without someone piping up with “But what about men? They have to shave their faces – isn’t that equally as unfair?” No. It’s not. Men have a wide range of acceptable choices of styles for the hair on their faces just as they do for the hair on their heads. They can shave it all off, grow it all, grow a goatee, grow a moustache, style it and trim it and wax it, and still fall within the boundaries of ‘socially acceptable’. People do not look with repulsion at a man’s beard as they do at a woman’s leg hair. Women are given only one choice deemed ‘acceptable’ – hairlessness. If women as standard grew hair on our cheeks and chins, we would not be given the same options with it as men are (i.e. it being socially acceptable to remove it, grow it or anything in between), we would be compelled to remove it all – the same double standard which currently applies to the hair on the rest of our bodies when compared with that on men’s bodies.
So body hair, then, is political, and very much a part of the myth of beauty which pervades society. It is also personal; our decision as women to unnecessarily remove body hair or to leave it where nature intended is ruled by how much we mind going against the social norm and just how much we care about changing the patriarchal status quo. It has been said in certain feminist circles that body hair is a trivial issue, that there are bigger battles to fight. But I believe it to be an important and valid concern – that of women’s self-esteem and lack thereof, of the way women’s bodies are seen as public property and the way we adjust them so that they will be accepted. It is important because society cannot stand to see a woman’s body in its natural state, much less can it stand to see a woman who feels comfortable, powerful and confident in her body in its natural state. It is about the way women are perceived and the way we are ridiculed and looked down upon as substandard simply for refusing to participate in needless rituals for the sake of fitting in.
So what can be done? The first thing is for you, dear reader, to put down the razor and truly and honestly examine your ‘beauty’ rituals. When Julia Roberts exposed a hairy armpit, dissenting voices said, “Maybe she didn’t forget to shave, maybe she just had more important things to do!” Don’t you have more important things to do? Put the razor down, cancel that waxing session and let the hair on your body grow where nature intended it to. If you’re uncomfortable with the idea at first, think of it as a social experiment. Be proud of your body for looking like a real woman’s body and not the facsimile of a child’s. If people mention your hair (and I can tell you from experience that it happens a lot less than you might expect) take the opportunity to educate, to remind them that this is how an adult woman’s body is supposed to look, to ask them how often they comment on the body hair of men.
Take the opportunity to make a stand without having to do any work at all. Take the opportunity to give your poor skin a rest from the constant barrage of scraping and plucking and pulling. Refuse to conform to a ridiculous and sexist beauty double standard from which you gain absolutely nothing. Refuse to hate your body and refuse to let others hate your body – and if they do, refuse to care. I stopped shaving when I had the lightbulb moment: the realisation that I really didn’t have to. I learned to treasure my body hair like every other aspect of my womanhood, and now you couldn’t pay me enough to shave it off. Every woman I know who has resisted the hairlessness propaganda and quit shaving has felt the same way – comfortable, liberated, having taken one step further to free themselves from the misogynistic standards of ‘beauty’.
Put down the damned razor and love your body the way it is naturally, not the way you’ve been taught it ought to be. By refusing to participate personally, but becoming one more woman who challenges the status quo by loving her body hair, you become one more soldier in the army fighting towards making women’s bodily self-esteem and equality a reality.
I shave the tiny bit of hair between my eyebrows and that of the end of my nose because I believe it makes my aesthetic appeal greater to not only others but to myself. By your standards, then, am I to be considered a terrible example of Mulvey’s supposedly righteous slander?
Surely if you truly believed that anything you consider ‘unnatural’ is to be eschewed then you’re encouraging the masses to discard their manufactured clothes in non-winter (if not all) months of the year?
Sparky, you have missed the point entirely.
As a man you are not expected to remove your eyebrow/nose hair to fit in, you do it by choice. You can not seriously be comparing your choice to pull out a few hairs (which, by the way, no magazines or advertising companies or beauty gurus are telling you are ugly) to the systematic requirement placed on women to have completely hairless bodies just to fit in?
And of course I don’t believe anything I consider ‘unnatural’ should be eschewed. I believe many unnatural things – brick houses, electric trains, gas cookers – to be very useful indeed. Where I have a problem is when something very natural like body hair is rewritten so that people believe it is unnatural. Where I have a problem is when this unnatural action has no benefit whatsoever.
Hey there, I followed your link from FuckShaving. I’m The First Chibi :]
You have written a Wonderful argument and have said so many things that I myself say and think whenever I think (read: despair) about the prejudice against natural hair and beauty.
You’re right, there really is no true own-made choice to shave, but getting people to realise that is like drawing blood from a stone. -_- Damn this society.
I don’t think people realise how much of a cycle the beauty industry all is. It’s not that their meeting a demand, they’re creating a demand to be met. Thats how women came to start shaving, and it’s really gone from there. Bollocks to hygiene, we were clean before we started shaving and we’re still clean now, if not cleaner due to the *soap* and non-shaving bodycare products that are around. And if we weren’t, then Men would be getting all the hackles we women/girls/females get as well.
I hope you don’t mind, but i’m gonna link people to this from my LJ. I really stand behind every point you made and, not that I fancy myself as a Feminist rights activist or anything, think more people should read what you’ve written. Because it’s right (…in my opinion :p)
We’re basically on the same page, Anji. What is most important is that women do what is best for themselves and not what men expect of them. I personally find female pubic hair erotic and agree with your friend completely – it reminds me I am making love to a woman and not a 10-year old with boobs. I have to say I am a little puzzled by Julia Roberts,though. As long as you are going to wear make-up, lipstick, nail polish and pluck your eyebrows, why not shave your pits too? Something is out of sync. In any case, I will do all I can to help you make the point that real women are sexy – siliconed, botoxed, brazilianed bimbos are not.
Reminds me of my own treatise.
http://timmytm.livejournal.com/178991.html
♥
-Timmy™
Quite frankly, this is not restricted to women alone. The “majority” of men aren’t pressured that “hairless is beautiful” — sure. In fact, most men assosciate the image of body hair with “manliness” and masculinity.
This, however, is not true of the gay community. The same “bald is beautiful” ideal is widely accepted there — where men push themselves to be hairless (pursuing extremes such as irreversible laser removal) and child-like, either in their search to appeal to others, to fit in, or even to more closely resemble a female.
Anyway, this whole argument is not dissimilar to the circumcision argument. The entire thing is just society forcing it’s “norm” on people, and (at the risk of sounding stereotypical ‘ftw’), I say screw it. Screw what society wants.
Personally I’m a gay male and I’m proud of my body hair, and I don’t care who says otherwise. If you believe the same, more power to you, I wish there were more people willing to stand up for there beliefs than there are.
When I was in High School I was an obsessive shaver but somewhere along the line I thought… why? It’s so much trouble… and look at him!
It never made sense to me why men were allowed to have hairy legs and I wasn’t. So now I have hairy legs lol Haven’t shaved them in well over a year. And I even wore a skirt in that time.
However I do shave my armpits because Armpits in general give me the willies. I hate mens armpits too especially when they are hairy…. ewww lol
Your post was very eloquent Anji. Nicely said.
The most desirable women are hairless naturally. They have smooth, shiny, lustrous skin, and little to no hair — what their they have being blonde and barely visible. Depilation is an attempt by uglier women to look like this more beautiful ideal — no different than dieting, makeup, cosmetics, and all the other fradulent tricks women use to look more beautiful than they really are, so they may have access to the social capital that beauty brings.
well it looks like there are a few people here who didn’t get your point at all (a la Alpha and a few others
). Thank you for that very down-to-earth and thorough argument against the norm of hair-removal. I grew up in an Egyptian-American family, so we’re hairier than white women, and we were often taught that we should bleach or remove the hair above our lips, shave our legs, our underarms, even our toes for goddess’ sakes. Why did el arbitro resort to calling women who shave “bimbos”? How does calling a supposed “type” of woman a bimbo pro-feminist? By using sexist terms and labels like that you are spitting down on all women.
Anyway, I wear lipstick and makeup sometimes but usually I don’t shave my legs, that doesn’t mean I am “out of sync” per se, it just means that I have been capitulating to the patriarchy in some ways and not in others. Women are complex human beings who negotiate their way through trying to find true liberation and trying to fit in to our patriarchal culture.
I think Andy’s post is interesting, I mean about the appeal of hairlessness and a boyish look among gay men. I really believe that the strong dominant adult male/weak passive boy dichotomy in the gay male community comes directly from our patriarchal culture, where the heteronormative standard for a relationship is passive person/weak person (female, male, respectively).
So, alpha, I am ugly because I have visible body hair? According to you and every other dickhead on this planet. Ah yes, according to you, women who try to attain society’s standards of beauty are a bunch of castrating tricksters, and yet you spit upon those very women for not fitting into those standards in the first place. Get a fuckin clue and kiss my hairy sandnigger feminist ass.
Keep bloggin Anji
I don’t spit upon ugly women, why should I? I’m no Adonis myself. I simply don’t find them sexually attractive, as is my prerogative. I would much prefer it, in fact, if cosmetics were outlawed, so that we could tell the actually attractive women apart from the fradulently attractive ones. Cosmetics cheapens beauty as it introduces unfair competition by way of imitation / knockoff beauty into the sexual marketplace. In any other marketplace, such behavior is regulated by laws (as in imitation brand-name goods, pirated intellectual property, etc.) and I feel that the sexual marketplace is no different in value and utility.
WOOOOOOWWWW. So to you, women are only sexual objects? Great to know.
I suppose I owe Lara and others a word of explanation and apology. I do NOT think that women who shave are by definition bimbos. Your point, Lara, of how women have to negotiate all of the cultural demands is certainly well taken. I am not sympathetic, though, to women whose obsession with perfecting the outer shell leads them to do things that are unpleasant to the point of torture (what else do you call getting your pubes ripped out by the roots) and even dangerous (like implants). Moreover, these women might ask themselves – after these assaults on their own dignity and sanity – what type of men they are really attracting anyway. My main point, Lara, is that as you may describe your difficulties coming to grips with the patriarchy – leave some of us out. There is nothing sexier than a woman who is very bright, or athletic, or otherwise talented, and very sure of herself. BTW, I have always found middle-eastern women to be attractive. They seem to have a mysterious, seductive air about them.
Truce?
Oh lordy, what a thread! Some really um, interesting responses. Hee
I really loved this post and it got me thinking a lot. I have had laser hair removal on my legs, and I thought that once I did that I’d be “free” from shaving, free from thinking about my body hair, free from shame and self-hatred about my body hair.
Nope. Didn’t happen. I still have some leg hair, and it makes me even more mad now, because I was a fool and paid all this money to get rid of it. Now they tell me that I’ll still have to shave monthly. Mkay, why didn’t they tell me that before I spent all that dang money?!
And, now that my legs are less hairy, I’m noticing other parts of my body that are hairy. It really is a never-ending thing. And it is SO STUPID, and such a waste of energy. Still, I can’t seem to just not care.
Thanks for the great post!
To all who are posting here – the blog and thread have now moved.
I always tell the story of a friend of mine who said “you never guess what boys, right, right, my mates a designer or photoshopper or something and well, he got pictures of kelly brook that he had to re-touch and you never guess what boys, right, right, well … she had hair in her bottom?!!?! I shouted … “Fucking hair?! I’ve got a hairy arse, I’m a fucking human-being. Do you really think woman are born and remain all soft and fluff free?! What fucking planet are you on?” PLANET PORN OF COURSE!
I just sat their in utter disbelief at just how far removed men are from the realities of woman as human being. This is purely down to pornography. WHAT ELSE?
Anji, a great book which I’m currently reading is Sheila Jeffrey’s ‘Beauty and Misogyny’. It covers your topic in great detail. It’s under the chapter entitled ‘Pornochic’.
A must-read.
x
Thanks Fanny! I’ll pop it on my ‘books to buy/borrow’ list.
I also had a moment where I just said ‘no, I refuse to do this anymore’. Several years later, there is still no way I would remove any hair from my body, but I can’t seem to get past the disgust I occasionally feel about my body-hair. It’s that revulsion that we don’t want others to feel about us that makes us comply. That one’s going to take some more time to shift.
Um … Alpha, you’ve missed the point again. You’re inferring that it’s somehow natural for women to compete with each other on the basis of beauty or, more disturbingly, that they should. Revealing their true, makeupless faces won’t make the ‘competition’ more fair. The problem is the competition itself.
I’m sorry, but individuals shouldn’t HAVE to “compete” on the basis of beauty at all.
Ok, this is a fascinating story.
I work with a girl who is from the Czech Republic. She is married to a man from Albania. My friend has blond hair and fair skin. Anyway, she shaves. She told me that when she visited Albania with her husband, his female siblings were all stroking her legs in disbelief that she had smooth legs. They were amazed by it, apparently. She said she returned to the house a few months later only to find all 3 of his siblings had completely shaved their leg and armpit hair off.
It made me think about beauty practises that’s all. How, if one person can influence 3 girls (who have no idea of what beauty practises are like in the Western world as they live in poverty) then what is it doing to us women who are bombarded 24/7 with these images and pressures? However, they obviously didn’t feel pressured, they just experienced something which was ‘nice’. A hairless pair of legs? So, it lead to the question, do women do it because it’s nice or do we do it because we’re pressured? Of course, it’s the latter more these days because of consumerism/patriarchy etc. but I think my point is to not feel bad about it because ultimately, we feel or look better/cleaner and all of those things because we are hairless.
Grey area as always.
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Sing it, sister.
Very good point, the women who always get my attention are the ones who hardly wear makeup, have beautiful sideburns and hairs on their arms! If ONLY they would stop shaving their legs too! I’ve always I’ve seen hair on a woman’s arms, legs, backs, stomachs etc more attractive than the NO hair look which looks sticky to me for some reason. I realize some women don’t have body hair naturally and there not ugly but the ones that do are extra beautiful in my eyes. There aren’t too many guys like me, and most guys don’t care and wouldn’t reject a woman cause of her body hair, but theres that few and billions of ladies who just absolutely hate it (brainwashed) and try so hard to resemble mannequins.
Natural bodies feel and look so much better and healthier. My girlfriend finally stopped shaving her legs she enjoys it now and LOVES the way it makes us feel, I’m just glad some women are normal
How does body hair turn a woman ugly I can’t understand it, only how it makes her more attractive makes since too me. I like to see any guy turn down a woman for sex if they were both stranded on a island away form beauty products or razors. Would not happen unless he was an extremely gay man. Its stupid money marketing, brainwashing shit pisses me off. I hope all women go natural one day, I know I’d be in heaven, and other dudes like me too. Overall the majority guys would still be chasing girls the same way they’ve always have, either loving the hair or accepting it.
Alpha, I simply find you stupid. As is my prerogative.
Great post. I’m reading the Beauty Myth at the moment for a project in college… it’s really interesting. Your post made me really think about the whole shaving thing… I really respect you for having the confidence to do that. In today’s culture it’s really hard for a woman to get by without shaving. I don’t think I could do it. It’s not because of society though. I just love the feel of my legs when they’re clean shaven and soft. ^_^ during winter months I don’t bother with it though… >.> Not only do I like the feeling…. but I think body hair is gross on both men and women. Well… leg hair, armpit hair, and facial hair. This, yet again, has to do with the feel of things… lol. sorry. I don’t mind hair in the pubic area at all, though. It is natural for us as human beings to have all of our hair, I just have my own preferences. I think that the lack of hair in certain regions makes people look too child-like, and… that’s not exactly something I want in a man or a woman. (I’m bi, btw.)
Thanks again for your post, I enjoyed reading it.
~Ni-chan
Great Analysis. I continues to boggle my mind why the majority of the population expects women to shave and remove body hair. There seems to be no hygenic (or aesthetic if you ask me) reason.
My opinion about facial hair for men is that it isn’t as optional as you suggest. I wear a beard, but if I didn’t trim and shave some areas frequently I doubt I would keep my job. When I attended a private all-male high school – you could be given detention for having facial hair or stubble. Many militaries and police forces prohibit or restrict men’s facial hair.
I agree that it isn’t an equivalent situation though. When I grew a beard – my mother was displeased. When a friend stopped shaving her legs – she was told by her Dad that it was a requirement of living in his house.
In order to change society’s unrealistic beauty standards women need to not only stop stripping their bodies of hair, but more importantly, they need to take away the backwards mentality that goes along with it. The best way to do this is to target girls from a younger age. I went through puberty at a relatively early age, and I thought that all of the hair on my body was completely abnormal.I wanted to shave the hair off because I thought people would think I was weird or different. I didn’t know that women were supposed to have hair on their bodies so it was my goal to hide it the best I could. Girls need to be informed that body hair is completely normal and beautiful from a younger age. By the time girls are in high school they are already conditioned to shave any hair on their bodies. Many women would like to stop shaving, but the idea of it being abnormal has been with them for so long that it seems impossible. The idea of being natural and beautiful needs to be introduced much earlier in order for liberation to occur.
we need to stop saying things like, smooth legs are beautiful, hairy legs are ugly. thin eye brows are beautiful, thick eye brows are ugly.
but we ALSO need to stop saying things like, hairy legs are beautiful, smooth legs are ugly.
our legs are beautiful regardless of what we do with the hair on them. we should not be greeted with disgust from the rest of society if we choose to keep our hair, but we also should not be greeted with disgust from the feminist community, if we choose not to.
Good point. Although hairless is considered by most to be beautiful, it is important ask yourself why? We do these things just because others do. All body hair is not considered unacceptable though. Pubic area is an example where one might not prefer hairlessness.
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Graham: There is actually a good, non-superficial reason men are required to shave in the military. Since the advent of NBC (nuclear-biological-chemical) warfare, and since better protective gear has been developed, it has become vital for military men to be able to wear that protective gear without the seals being compromised. With the NBC mask the seals rest up against the face. Facial hair = a compromised seal. So it is literally a life-and-death matter.
As recently as the 1970s some military men were allowed facial hair. I have a photograph of my father from that period with some of his fellow U.S. Navy sailors, and at least one guy had a beard. (I don’t have it right in front of me, but Dad might have had a beard too.) Some of the other branches started requiring shaving for uniformity purposes which IS a bit more superficial, but at least as recently as the Civil War, Army men were allowed beards and Marines may have been as well.
Military uniformity is nothing to sneeze at either, though. Absolute control over appearance equals absolute control over the troops, which the brass must have if the military is to operate efficiently. Not to say I agree with military values to begin with (although I am not a pacifist), just stating what is. So this was a serious enough issue to justify overriding the usual societal attitudes about male hair. If uniformity is considered a vital characteristic of a profession, or if there is a health reason for it, then sometimes men have to shave. If not, they’re left to their own devices. And the hair on their heads is the only kind, AFAIK, that society ever tries to control.
Hi Anji, this is Pierre from Belgium. My mother tongue is French, so bear with my basic English. Your argument is exacxtly why I think. My wife is bashed because of her armpit hair, which is a shame but we have always an answer. We are feminists and thus, figthting for the rights of women to handle their bodies the way they want, especially FBH (female body hair).
I would add some points from an historical point of view, as I’ve made research to understand why FBH suddenly became a problem for a lot of people.
FBH was taboo for centuries, it was forbidden to display it on statues and on pictures, it’s only since ±1850 that a painter has showed a woman with pubic hair visible. Then, movie industry began circa 1896 and the MPPDA, a puritan censor group from Hollywood, explicitly mentions it was forbidden to show FBH in movies, surely because it was too erotic and a woman should be equal to a man if she sports hairy armpits, as Aristophanes already described 400 years BC in “Lysistrata”. This is the reason why there are almost no movies showing FBH. Even “historical” movies, supposed to describe human life in the Middle Age show shaved women, which is as anachronistic as if they had a cellular phone !
Then, razor companies felt there was a new market : women. It all began with the May, 1915 edition of Harper’s Bazaar magazine that featured a model sporting the latest fashion. She wore a sleeveless evening gown that exposed, for the first time in fashion, her bare shoulders, and her armpits.
A young marketing executive with the Wilkinson Sword Company, who also made razor blades for men, designed a campaign to convince the women of North America that underarm hair was unhygienic and that it was unfeminine.
The first ad back in 1915 said
«Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair.»
You can see here the ad : http://femaleauthority.blogspot.com/2007/03/socialization.html
In two years the sales of razor blades doubled as our grandmothers and great grandmothers made themselves conform to this socially constructed gender stereotype.
This norm for North American women has been reinforced by several generations of daughters who role modeled their mothers. Daughters are now making choices about body image that include an awareness of the multi-billion dollar fashion industry construction of the beauty myth.
An ad from 1924 said
«Perhaps, because of an old-fashioned scruple, you have hesitated to rid yourself of the disfigurement of underarm hair. Are your arms constantly pinned to your sides? Or do you scorn to wear the filmy or sleeveless frocks that the vogue of the day decrees? In either case, He is apt to think you lifeless and behind the times. He will notice you holding yourself aloof from the swing of convention»
Such advertisements raised women’s anxiety, shame and self-consciousness, sending them scurrying to stores to purchase fashionable contraptions that scrape away hair, flesh and blood.
Disfigurement of underarm hair (for a woman of course, no problem for a man), WTH is this ? We all know that marketing uses every possible means but this was really a shame. Nowadays, ads say to women “shave and you will be attractive and feminine”. But FBH is a sign of sexual maturity and thus, a sign of femininity, as breast. So women remove an obvious sign of womanliness to be more feminine ? Am I missing something ?
Even young girls of 12 years are obsessed by body hair and as soon as they have a little hair, they are horrified and pluck it immediatly.
As there is also no FBH in advertising, magazines, video clips, it’s not a surprise to see the bad reactions of morons when they see FBH. Removing FBH is just an ancestral taboo combined to making money.
Susan Basow, a feminist and teacher at the university said in 1991
«In my research, I found that in the U.S., prior to 1915, very few women removed underarm or leg hair. Then Gillette began “The Great Underarm Campaign” to get women to shave with their new safety razor. The ads emphasized “smoothing” the underarms and had a racist tone (to make skin “white” and “fashionable” at a time when waves of “dirty” “old-fashioned” immigrants from Eastern Europe, Italy and Ireland were flooding the U.S.). In the 1920s, the female “look” was a boyish and youthful one (the flapper), but this is also when women had won the vote and were leaving the domestic sphere for the public one. Ads emphasized the importance for women to manage their appearance in order to be sexually attractive to men.
Ads emphasized attractiveness, neatness, cleanliness, and modernity. Given that women were behaving more like men (in terms of jobs and education), the gender lines became drawn on women’s bodies: men are hairy, therefore women must be hairless. Legs, leading as they do to the crotch, also have a sexual association. Shaving them can be viewed as a means to socially control (modify) women’s untamed sexuality.»
Men have decided for women’s bodies during centuries, what we see now is pure atavism. So when referring to the past, we should keep in mind that even if women were shaved, it was because of patriarchy, as for the rest of women’s life.
When you say
«There is no real truth in the sentence “I shave because I like it,” when that preference is borne solely of social conditioning»
I agree but this is very difficult for shaved women to acknowledge such a statement because they feel that being influenced is too hard and would lead them to a revolution in their life and they are not prepared to change everything.
Some feminists have an interesting point of view about this
«Very interestingly, the reasons that women cited for other women removing their body hair were more socially normative in nature. Thus women interprete others’ behaviors, as due to normative pressures, in a way they do not do so for their own. This mirrors the earlier difference in reported reasons for starting and continuing to shave. More importantly, it supports Tiggeman’s and Kenyon’s argument that women’s hair-removal behaviors are interpreted differently depending on the vantage point, weather one ist looking from the inside or from the outside, with the analysis of an observer. It appears that women can recognize the normative pressures on them in general to shave, but are unwilling to accept this as the rational for their own specific behavior.
Such rationalization or failure to acknowledge more fully the effect of normative pressures on their own behavior may carry negative implications for women. Attributing their own hair-removal practice to feminity/attractiveness reasons is exactly the kind of rationale that serves to keep women insecure about their bodies. If women were able to give more explicit recognition to the normative pressures they are subject to, the problem of unwanted hair could be located more squarely at the societal level, rather than as a problem with the individual woman’s body. (Marike Tiggemann and Christine Lewis in “Attitudes toward women’s body hair: relationship with disgust sensitivity”, 2004).»
BTW, the veil for Moslim women and the removal of body hair for Western women have the same goal : hide hair which can be seen as erotic by others, especially men. When porn directors say that porn stars must be shaved for aesthetic, they rejoin Moslim integrists, requiring women to shave armpit and pubes because of hygiene. Two opposite worlds maintaining women in a childish look, this is not a surprise.
I don’t ask that women stop shaving but that women who choose not to shave would be left alone.
Pierre.
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Brilliant! I’m of Indian descent, and for me, it means body hair is a genetic default but a cultural no-no and has spawned all sorts of hair removal remedies, from the use of herbs and spices (turmeric is a biggie) to the ubiquitous presence of threading at any salon you may go to. It’s almost maddening.
It’s nice to see that there are still some women that are sane!
Great post! A while back (when I first read it), I translated your text for a friend who isn’t very familiar with the English language and I wondered if you’d be OK with me posting the translation on my blog (now that I have one!). Of course I would credit you and put a link to this post.
Of course, do give me a link to your translation once it’s done so I can link to it here.
Here it is: http://rechtimbett.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/the-politics-of-body-hair-ubersetzung/
In Islam, removal of pubic and underarm hair is required once every 40 days, with hygiene being the main reason why. What I find interesting, however, is that it is required of both women AND MEN!! So even if the “hygienic reason” for hair removal has any merit to it, male hair is not immune to germs and odors.
I truly wish that I could, not only believe, which I do, but ACT upon the belief, that women do not need to be hairless save the scalp, eyebrows, and eyelashes. But as a female with PCOS and severe hirsutism (facial and body hair literally everywhere–and I mean EVERYWHERE except palms of hands or soles of feet), I just cannot.
How does one cope with the genuine abnormality of the hair on one’s face, chest, tummy, back, thighs, butt, hands, feet, etc., when living in a world that demands women have no hair even in places were ALL normal adult women do?
It shoves my self-esteem and sense of self-worth, femininity, and beauty down so freaking low that I just give in to the societal requirement, and still isolate myself in my apartment for fear of being seen, despite wearing long-sleeves and jeans and having shaved/waxed/plucked everything away.
It makes me feel like a hypocrite, but even more so, it makes me feel trapped. And angry.
A brave and bold expression of a mother showing affection and care to her child and a woman as a true symbolic representative of Mother Earth who bears and cares all live species including “Human Beings”. If not for the most pernicious desire of big business promotion setting aside all human values and even forgetting what is natural to be as highly evolved human beings we are falling prey to our own self styled distorted existence of unobserved perversion. In my opinion hairs are to humans what vegetation is to the earth. Consider the following:
1)Hair of different texture and lengths format and grow in a chronological manner on body because only human beings are conscious of time and posses an intellect of conceptual tranformative reckoning.
2)Beginning as delivered babies with well developed hair on head and eye brows and a fine ‘vellum’downy hair all over body which soon depletes itself naturally but keeping on head 7 brows the “Baby Form”grows as gendered he/she in years with a newly formatted and inconspicuous vellum hair all over the body. Wikipedia can be consulted for full info including Anagen,Catagen and Telogen fomatting period processes.
3)Reaching the age of puberty both boys and girls undergo individual genderd body developments but show a conspicuous growth of hair of thick terminal texture over pubis(hence puberty) and shoulder pits in common heralding maturig physical stature. Thus the “Baby Form” grows into “Hairy Form” of either gender.
4)The teen children in hairy form are still minors in mental faculties and mature to the age of franchaise at 18y when they become majors to wield personal opinion with a choice of freedom and eligible to lead a life of trials and tribulations.
5)The years between 13 to 18 is an age of accelerated development both physically and mentally. The fast cellular growth and decay of increasing body area requires need for fat soluble vitamins and cleansing of accumulated toxins through follicular bulbs into terminal hair structures holding a higher volume than the vellum irrespective of procreative gender. Hence the visible thicker hair on legs and hands.
6)The thick and bushy terminal hair covering the inner angle of shoulder pits is probably to store more follicular fat to lubricate the best turnstile ball & cup shoulder joint having many degrees of freedom. Also all blood circulating vessels to hands are folded through pit angle for flexibility of operation and the extra sweat glands to keep joint and blood temparature control with sweat held in position by hair.
7)As both man and woman have to shoulder the burdens of life jointly in matrimony and the woman being vested with the natural responsibilty of bearing and rearing babies of either gender the pit hair serves an added purpose of preventing creepage of salty sweat on to feeding nipples to the disgust of suckling. Also a non toxic spray of mild perfume can hold wetted longer than shaved spreading evoparated quickly.
8) The pubic hair is symbolic verility in the case of males as that of male lion and symmetrical beauty as contouring an inverted triangle of female pubic girdle symbolizing the boon of highest evolved subtle Mind and Intellect of human beings as the two upper vertices merging into a single physical form of creation delivered through the lower one.
9)That women are only delivering both human physical forms goes to show that all natural laws of creation are embedded in their reproductive system giving birth to either gender and hence should be revered than exploited to synthetic aesthetics of distorted human minds.
I have never wanted a woman to be bald – for me it’s immensely erotic to see hair under the arms or on the belly. But the politics of the matter is more important – well said, but it’s mostly the over-loud USA that has this obsession. Many of these men are keen on anal sex – they are happy to put their penis into a tube of excrement yet hair under the arms is “gross”. Hairy armpits are normal in Africa and India, rural Chinese womn don’t bother, the French, Germans and Italians are easy and even the Americanised British aren’t surprised to see them.
Not sure I agree about “girls”. Older working-class women in Britain always call their group “the girls”. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still far to go for women’s equality. Let’s keep to the important things, not get side-tracked into stuff that often doesn’t translate into other languages anyway.
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I…actually find it attractive to see hair on women’s arms, legs, and armpits.
I once hung out with a woman who, on top of already coming off as attractive to me in other ways (glasses, multicolored hair, among other things), she had underarms whose hairiness rivaled that of a typical male’s, and it made my heart race whenever I caught a full view of them.
Also, I’ve come to observe that while hairiness is considered unacceptable by men when it’s on women, the reverse applies for men. Men look at fellow men who shave anywhere other than their face–be it their legs, their chest, their armpits, or down south–and deem them unworthy of being part of the male gender. Heck, there are women out there who think un-hairy men deserve as much of a chance with women as the amount of hair they permit themselves to have.
So basically, the slighest amount of below-neck hair is unacceptable on women, but gorilla-level hair on men is not only acceptable, but mandatory for a man to “retain his ‘man card’.” I get it, society. I fucking get it.
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I first off must say, this article was incredibly thought- provoking for me. I myself am on the fence on the concept of body hair; I am all for au natural, but I would find it incredibly difficult to stop removing any body hair altogether. I am , in this aspect, a product of my culture; when I see a girl with, for example, unwaxed eyebrows, I think, “she should go get those done”; a second later, I wonder, “why did I think that at all? Who cares?”
And that is one of the biggest points of this: who cares?
To me, body hair is too much engrained in social consciousness for women to let it all out as this post says we should. I personally think nothing of waxing my upper lip or eyebrows or legs, but at the same time, I abhor the idea or shaving arms or stomach or whatnot, because really, WHO CARES?
This may seem a little ambiguous, but this concept is such a complex one that all we really have are shades of grey. And thoughts on body hair are different from household to household, culture to culture. I am half- Asian , my mother being Japanese- American and my father being Caucasian. Because of this, I had a unique experience with body hair when I hit puberty. Like my mother, I grew pubic and armpit hair, but then my leg and arm hair also seemingly miraculously sprouted thicker and blacker than I had ever seen, indeed, especially in comparison to my mother, who, being Asian, has little enough eyebrow hair to really be considered eyebrows and pencils them in every morning. My father, of course, being a Caucasian male, has plenty more body hair than my mother; but, with him being male, and I being female, I did not even begin to compare each other; “that’s what guys are supposed to look like,” I told myself at such the young age of eleven.
But in comparing myself to my mother, and other media outlets like tv shows, I found myself woefully incompetent, and in a craze, one day shaved off all my body hair: arms, legs, pubic, armpit, even part of my stomach. This continued for about a year; mind you, I was in sixth grade when I did all of this.
One day in the bathroom my mother walked in (my mother and I are lax about nudity in our household, just between the two of us) and asked me, “Why did you shave… everything?”
I said, “I don’t know.” I wanted to say, “Because I wanted to be like you.”
After that I let my hair all grow back out, for at least a little while. Then came middle school, and the hair-removal regime, at least on the legs and armpits and eyebrows and lip, began once again.
So you see, body hair is such a deep concept for young girls of all races and cultures, that it’s not something you can really teach; even if my mother had celebrated body hair (and she still frequently tells me how jealous she is of my long, thick eyelashes and full eyebrows, unlike hers) I still would have gone to school and seen other girls with shaved legs, or seen commercials for razors on the TV, or perhaps the hairless legs portrayed in TV shows. Body hair is something all women must come to grips with, on their own; no one else can tell you what to think about it. I do hope that one day women can all disregard body hair as just something that is there to keep us warm, and not worry about it as a sexual hindrance. Like I once told a guy friend of mine while we were swimming at a friend’s pool, and he commented on my two day’s growth of armpit hair, “of all the places to look at an almost- naked girl, you look at her armpits?”
Again, I am on the fence about body hair. I don’t care about it, actually kind of like it, but I fear the comments and stares I would receive from refusing to shave it all, as I have a few times in my teenage years. But I do think we should not have to bother with it. Maybe one day.