I gave up shaving my body hair seven years ago.
I was pregnant with my third kid, and it was winter time and I couldn’t be bothered. Shaving your legs is a pain in the ass without having a melon-sized protrusion at your abdomen that makes reaching your knees difficult, let alone your ankles. And then, there was the potential for injury due to poor visibility of my nether regions.
I let the hair on my legs grow long and untroubled by the razor, and honestly felt no remorse over it. Soft curls of fluff accumulated in the moist hollows of my underarms. My pubes formed a lush, dark pillow between my legs.
Winter became spring became summer, and my belly grew in inverse proportions to the fucks I gave about grooming.
After my child was born, my legs once again became fully accessible, but I just couldn’t convince myself that it was worthwhile to resume the constant battle against my body hair. Even if it meant I had an excuse to steal an extra five minutes of shower time, blessedly unencumbered by the needs of small humans.
Having babies does funny things to your body. (This may actually be the most devastating understatement of my entire writing career). It’s shaped differently. It contains new aches. Stretch marks and softness. Sore spots and secretions. In short, it’s no longer familiar territory. It not your own.
Maybe my decision to let my body hair continue on its natural course was a rebellion against my body’s sudden otherness. A way of reclaiming my physical form.
Or maybe I was just being lazy. Having kids is exhausting.
At the time, I had a nebulous awareness that deciding not to remove my body could be construed as a political act, and although my feminist leanings were hardly the primary motivating factor, they at least aligned with my desire not to shave.
I suppose I’ve always been a bit rebellious when it comes to fashion, or maybe I just really dislike being told what to do with my body (or in general). Shaving seemed like a symbol of gendered cultural control and I enjoyed the idea of bucking the norm.
But aside from my ideological concerns, and more fundamental in my decision making process, was the fact that I hate having to think about hair removal almost as much as I hate having to do it.
You’d think deciding not to do something would mean you’re released from having to worry about it. Unfortunately, when it comes to how you physically present as a woman in our Anglo-centric colonial, egregiously capitalist, and inherently patriarchal culture, that is not the case.
In fact, I probably think about the status of my leg hair about the same amount as I used to when I shaved it. The anxiety of bearing my fur in public has merely shifted, from worrying about how many more days I can go before the stubble starts showing to bracing for the day when someone has the audacity to mention it to my face.
It took a few years of having hairy legs before I convinced myself that it was ok to wear shorts in public. I took a photo and posted it on Facebook in triumph of my bravery. It received no negative feedback and possibly a few positive “you go, girl” type comments. I have yet to determine whether this is related to a cultural shift toward minding one’s own business when it comes to other people’s bodies (sadly doubtful) or the fact that I generally don’t keep friends who would dare to be offended (the echo chamber prevails).
It took a few more years before I felt comfortable accessorizing my mammalian pelt with a calf-bearing skirt. I realized shamefully that I was suffering from a deeply ingrained cognitive dissonance around the impossibility of being both hairy and feminine at the same time. It was as though having visible body hair negated the purpose of wearing a dress in the first place, that of “prettiness,” or failing that, at least appearing to have “made an effort;” performative femininity as a prerequisite for more formal attire. Why go to the trouble of dressing up and not bother shaving? It felt like I had missed a critical step in my preparation, like those nightmares about getting to school and discovering you’d forgotten to don pants.
This led to the realization that I needed to spend some serious time examining my biases around the concept of femininity and the ethical responsibility to behave in accordance with ones values.
To paraphrase formidable Maya Angelou “once you know better, do better.”
I’d love to say that upon deep introspection, I was immediately struck with a moral imperative to liberate my legs and by extension, the sisterhood at large. That from thenceforth, I fought the oppression of unrealistic beauty standards at every turn. Turns out, I’m not quite as evolved as all that.
In the end, I decided to just wear whatever I wanted like simply because I liked it. That clothing choices could be based on comfort and fun for the wearer rather than to appease the expectations of everyone else. I was able to convince myself that the sky wouldn’t fall, a giant sinkhole wouldn’t open me up and swallow me for breaking some fundamental social rule.
In essence, my body hair wasn’t a political statement, it was just that there was no real adverse consequence to not doing as I pleased.
I now realize that it is my privilege, as a white woman, and a cis woman, that allows me to make decisions about my own body without fear of repercussions.
I realize that the choices that we as women make about our bodies are inescapably political.
Forgive me Maya, I’m still learning.
Naked Eve: The Evolutionary Argument Against Female Body Hair (and why it’s a load of crap)
Darwin’s work on human evolution in the late 1800’s has been credited as being at least partially responsible for the modern paradigm in which femininity and hairlessness are mutually exclusive (Cerini, 2020). The idea that hairlessness, or fairer, softer hair evolved in females in response to reproductive preference in males, and represented more evolved forms of humanity, is so obviously racist I can’t even begin to consider it as a scientific one, although I grudgingly have to admit it is in line with cultural predispositions at the time.
Despite the more anachronistic elements of Darwin’s ideas, sexual selection pressures continue to be commonly cited as an evolutionary explanation for why hairlessness has been equated with femininity (e.g. Herzig, 2015). Unsurprisingly, the biological determinism underlying attitudes that men are ubiquitously hairier than women is an overgeneralization that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Sexual dimorphism, or when males and females of the same species have distinct differences in appearance, is evident in the body hair distribution of sexually mature humans (as shown below).
During puberty, the hormones responsible for body hair growth, largely androgens such as testosterone (which also increases in females at this time – it is not exclusively a male hormone, despite popular misconception) and also oestrogen begin the process of converting vellus hairs (the fine, soft, pale hair that exists all over your body) into terminal hairs (the longer, darker, often curlier hairs associated with sexual maturity) (Hasan et. al., 2022).
Both males and females develop patches of coarser body hair in the armpits and pubic regions. Elsewhere on the body, thickness and distribution of hair growth is largely variable, depending on genetics. The most consistent pattern in sexual dimorphism of human body hair distribution is that males develop more body hair than females across their chest and face.
If sexual dimorphism should explain why women are expected to remove their body hair on their legs, armpits, and pubic regions as a symbol of biological purity exemplifying their sex, why are those areas not specifically and consistently dimorphic?
Disturbingly, the most likely explanation is that hairlessness equates to youthfulness, and since a woman’s reproductive lifespan is limited, a lack of body hair may broadcast the illusion of a longer mating window with greater potential for reproductive success. This is consistent with the fact that maternal and infant mortality rates increase with parity (or the number of children a woman has had) (Sonneveldt et. al., 2013).
Still, while that may have been a necessary consideration in mate selection a hundred thousand years ago, the fact that the obsession with female youth persists in modern culture is at best, harmful, and at worse, perverse. Body hair is a feature of sexual maturity, in both men and women, and it’s really not a stretch to suggest that the sexualization of hairlessness has pedophilia’s unsubtle fingers all over it.
As Toerien et. Al. summarized in their 2005 paper “Body hair removal: The ‘mundane’ production of normative femininity” “[the] dichotomous construction of gendered embodiment, whereby masculinity and femininity are seen as opposites (such that the association between body hair and masculinity means that body hair cannot also be associated with femininity), is not a necessary one.”
A Brief History of the Ideal (Hairless) American Woman
We have archaeological evidence that women and men were removing their body hair for hygenic and aesthetic purposes as long as 3000 years ago, and doing so was considered to be a symbol not only of beauty, but also of socioeconomic status and moral purity (Cerini, 2020), an association that persists in many present-day cultures.
However, the modern cultural expectation around women’s hair removal is generally thought to have been engineered by Gillette, the company first responsible for marketing disposable razors to women around 1915 (Bernazzani Barron, 2017). They already had a solid hold on the male half of the population, thanks to a contract with the US military to provide every soldier with a Gillette razor, but finding a way to turn women into consumers was obviously seen as a huge advantage.
Of course, the marketing at the time targeted white women, since whiteness has long been considered not just the default in American and eurocentric cultures (consider that only within the last decade were band-aids produced in varying skin tones other than pale beige), but also a necessary component of femininity and beauty. Many more qualified authors than I have discussed the damaging impacts of an exclusively white beauty standard on women of colour in great detail (e.g. Awad et. Al., 2015; Donnella, 2019; Fahs and Delgado, 2011; McDonald et. al., 2023; Sharif, 2021; Walk-Morris, 2021; and many others)
After WWI, women’s fashions underwent major changes. Where women’s clothing had previously covered most of the body, by the 1920’s, sleeveless tops were becoming more popular. Suddenly, women’s underarms were on display. Fashion magazines, such as Harper’s Bazaar, spread the news that female armpits should be smooth and hairless “to avoid embarrassment” (Bernazzani Barron, 2017). The advertising at the time didn’t specify who had deemed body hair to be embarrassing, however.
It took a couple more decades for hemlines to catch up with sleeves in terms of how much skin women could show in public without being considered immodest. By the 1940s, removing leg hair was becoming the norm among American women, and by the mid 1960’s it was considered unusual not to do so (Hope, 1982). The razor and dipilatory industry had managed to gain traction over a previously untapped portion of the population in only a few decades.
While removal of female pubic hair was introduced to the mainstream via Playboy magazine in the 1950s, it didn’t become an expectation for women until the 1980s, when the Brazilian wax became popular and the 70’s “bush” trend waned (Braun et. al., 2013).
Fast forward to 2008, when a survey of 540 women conducted by American Laser Centers found that the average American woman spends between $10,000 and $25,000 on hair removal (Herzig, 2015), and a similar survey by a British beauty brand in 2013 suggested that women spend the equivalent of 72 days shaving their legs over the course of a lifetime (Young, 2013).
Globally, the hair removal industry is currently estimated to be worth about 9 billion dollars (Research and Markets, 2023). While this includes men’s hair removal products and services, the market is dominantly focused toward female consumers. Gender-biased pricing, otherwise known as the “pink tax” ensures that the profit margin on women’s products is higher than for men (Chang and Lipner, 2021).
It should come as no surprise that women from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds and women of colour are paying the greatest price in order for the cosmetics industry (and its predominantly white male executives) to rake in profit, year after year.
The Hospitality Industry and the Biased Economics of Smooth
In 2005, Toerien et al. wrote “women’s depilatory practices not only contribute substantially to the cosmetic industry, but reinforce the view that underpins all the body-changing procedures, from make-up application to cosmetic surgery: that a woman’s body is unacceptable if left unaltered.”
While entire books can be (and have been) written about how the beauty industry preys on women by sowing the seed of self loathing, and therefore the need to correct all the faults in their natural appearance through the purchase of their products, let’s take a moment to examine the insidious way they also impose socioeconomic control on marginalized groups. To do this, we need go no further than our local pizza joint.
The hospitality sector, comprised of restaurants, hotels, and other travel and leisure jobs, employs roughly 1 in 11 workers in the United States (Fins, 2020). According to the International Labour Organization (2011), women make up 60-70% of the hospitality industry workforce, and are more likely to hold public-facing and customer service roles than men (and are paid an average of 16% less than their male counterparts)(Haan, 2024).
As such, most of these jobs require that female employees meet implicit or explicit standards of grooming, including body hair removal, for “presentability,” “hygiene,” and “professional appearance”.
While there has been some recent blowback against making women’s grooming an explicit condition of their employment, the implicit expectation remains entrenched. Body hair is equated with “uncleanliness” and “unattractiveness,” which have a profound effect on women’s earning potential, and specifically that of women from marginalized groups and women of colour (Mcguire, 2016).
Additionally, women of colour are over-represented in the lowest-paid and highest-risk positions, which also happen to be the most insecure. This was never more evident than during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the American leisure and hospitality sector shed a staggering 50% of its workforce (Fins, 2020).
Consider that restaurant servers, almost 30% of whom are women of colour, are among the first to be let go when business drops off (Fins, 2020).
Let’s also consider that in America, servers rely on tips for a significant portion of their income.
A 2000 study by Lynn and Simons found that waitresses in a number of different countries earned significantly more in tips than did less attractive waitresses, (perhaps equally interesting was the fact that there was no difference in tips earned by male service staff based on attractiveness). This was corroborated in Parret’s 2015 paper entitled Beauty and the Feast: Examining the effect of beauty on earnings using restaurant tipping data.
Take this one step further with Guéguen’s 2012 paper in the Journal of Socio-Economics, where the author demonstrated that a waitress could make more tips wearing a blonde wig than with her natural hair. And recently, social media app TikTok has popularized the idea that servers who wear their hair in pigtails are able to rake in a higher income.
The messaging is crystal clear: If women don’t invest their personal time, money, and energy into products to make their appearance more appealing, they risk being financially penalized in a well-documented and measurable way for failing to conform to an idealized version of white femininity.
Body Acceptance, The uncomfortable inner-work of Feminism
Despite all this, hairy legs and pits notwithstanding, I’m far from a paragon of feminism.
When I wear a summer sundress that skims my knees, I still find myself casting sideways glances at all the other women out and about, at their baby-smooth legs, and have some feelings.
First of all, I’ve never been confronted about displaying my body hair, publicly or otherwise.
Part of me is horribly disappointed about this. I have a few choice comebacks waiting to be flung about at the first unfortunate soul who tries to tell me what to do with my body. I can imagine myself delivering the following lines with sardonic swagger:
“Can I get your badge number? You’re with the body police aren’t you? (Blue Lives Matter, ammiright?) I’d love to call down to the station and tell your superior officer what a bang up job you’re doing.”
Realistically, though, I’d more likely stammer something far less eloquent and with more swearing, or just walk away, eyes downcast, too shocked and shamed for words.
Another part is relieved by the possibility that no one actually cares that much. While this may feel immediately comforting, science doesn’t support such a generous assumption.
In their 1998 study of attitudes toward removal of body hair among young Australian women, Basow and Braman found that the outlook for the sisterhood is rather bleak when it comes to making appearance-based judgments. Overall, they found that “[women] with body hair [were] viewed as less sociable, intelligent, happy, and positive,” and that body hair had the effect of making a woman appear “less sexually and interpersonally attractive.” Disturbingly, they also observed that feminist attitudes among the female participants in the cohort were not a predictor for less critical attitudes about body hair. In fact, there was no measurable differences in responses between male and females, despite many of the women claiming to have less negative views on body hair conceptually.
The collective cultural revulsion against female body hair is so deeply conditioned that it is automatic, unconscious, and visceral. The animal part of us howls from the shadows of our evolutionary history “fit in or perish!” The female beauty standard, and our disgust at all those who fail to meet it (especially ourselves) may as well be encoded in our DNA.
So it’s likely that when I venture forth into the scorching heat of Perth with my hairy legs protuding from the hem of a skirt, when I raise my hand to wave to my child across the schoolyard and display the follicular fecundity of my axillary region, the lack of feedback probably doesn’t represent a lack of judgment. People aren’t becoming more accepting. They’re just getting better at hiding their disapproval.
An awkward teenage part of me experiences a squirm of shame in her belly at the thought that I am purposefully presenting myself as repulsive, is horrified at my unwillingness to conform.
Of course acceptance isn’t going to happen until female body hair is normalized, until it becomes unremarkable. And as it stands, it’s far from normal to be a woman who doesn’t shave her legs.
Maybe it’s just the company I keep, or maybe it’s more to do with the fact that Australia is culturally rather “traditional” (read: patriarchal), but in the past seven years, I’ve only come across maybe two or three women who proudly bared their natural leg hair.
It’s not a surprise, really. I do understand how hard it is to cast aside a lifetime of cultural expectations, and accept the social and economic consequences thereof, but I can’t help myself from feeling a little disappointed, not just in the oppressive system, but in the women it oppresses.
I want to take each woman by the shoulders and stare into her eyes and say “You don’t have to remove your natural body hair to be a valid and acceptable woman!”
I want to shake her and cry and demand answers. “Why are you so blindly willing to follow an outdated convention that serves no purpose? What if you woke up tomorrow and decided you wouldn’t buy into that idea any more?”
I want to paint her a picture of the world without shaving and waxing and IPL. “We’d all be hairier and richer and less time-poor and less anxiety-ridden and a few Wall Street Douchebags would have a Big Sad because they can’t make money off making us hate ourselves any more.”
In my criticism of the judgement machine that is the beauty industry, I find myself atop an extremely high horse, spitting out judgement, the taste of my moral superiority bitter in my own mouth. My righteous indignation wears the face of one of those sad clown paintings in dentist office waiting rooms. Tears smearing grease paint and the distant “womp womp” of a trombone.
I am disgusted by my hypocrisy.
I have no business telling anyone else what they should do with their bodies, just like they have no business telling me what to do with mine.
My body-hair hypocrisy doesn’t end there. I pluck my pre-menopausal chin hairs. I get my brows done. And I justify it by claiming that it adds value for me, whereas removing my body hair doesn’t.
People will inevitably equate my personhood with my body shape (curvy), the clothes I choose (eccentric), my tattoos (nerdy), my brightly coloured hair (non-conforming), and rather than distracting from those messages, my body hair is just another aspect of that whole; it is consistent with the narrative of my self image.
But my face feels more formal, more personal, somehow. It’s my mask. While my body is a vehicle, my face is the portal to what I think and feel. I’ve always struggled to be understood, and I don’t want any stray hairs to distract from my ability to communicate what really matters.
And at the root of this cognitive dissonance, the elephant in the cluttered closet of my feminism, is how much I dislike my own body.
The fact that this self-loathing is institutionalized, that I know it is systematically and purposefully perpetrated against women, that it is not a personal failing but a mass delusion of worthlessness spread far and wide, doesn’t make it easier to bear.
When I was younger, I admired women who had the confidence to colour their hair in outrageous shades, to unabashedly show off their fuzzy armpits, but I never thought I had the looks to pull it off. I had this weird idea that if you were conventionally attractive in other ways, if you were skinny, had aristocratic bone structure, and great posture, (conditions I have never been able to meet) then it was acceptable to make unattractive choices about how you present your body. That you had to earn the right to be ugly with prettiness.
Of course, this system is built around the faulty premise that the purpose of women’s bodies is to be observed by others, and not to be a safe and comfortable residence for the soul. It’s the system that holds women’s value to be conditional upon their appearance and how well they can train the unruly aspects of themselves into submission using whatever products are available. It is a misogynistic and racist system of oppression and economic control. It’s the system that begins whispering in the ear of every girl almost as soon as they are born “you are unworthy as you are.”
And while my brain knows this to be fuckery of the highest order, my body still quails at the terror of discovering what I’ve always feared the most is true. That I am not, will never be, enough.
It took me until my mid thirties to realize that if I’m already unattractive, I can do whatever I want with my body’s appearance; I certainly can’t possibly make it worse! This is certainly still problematic. Even though it may be liberating to embrace my ugly rather than continue to strive toward an impossible ideal.
Perhaps it’s a step in the right direction to say “I’m ok with being ugly” rather than “the system is wrong for making me feel ugly.” Maybe incremental progress toward the state of body acceptance that genuine intersectional feminism requires is better than no progress at all.
Maybe it’s like grief, and I have to move through denial, and anger and bargaining before I can meet my body – all bodies – exactly where they are.
In any case, I don’t forsee a future for myself in which my legs are smooth and hairless as a pre-pubescent child, in which I am dropping regular fistfuls of cash to fight my own biology, in which I am supporting an industry that manufactures female insecurity and shame as surely as any hair removal product.
If it’s easier to just shake your head and mutter “she’s really letting herself go,” just make sure you don’t do it within my earshot. I’ve got my comebacks all queued up.
In the mean time, I’ll keep learning, in hopes that one day, the doing better follows naturally, gently, inevitably. Like the wind blowing through my gloriously long leg hair.
References
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