Subject:  BODY HAIR! Good Story... |
Author:
Bun
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Date Posted: 17:27:43 03/16/01 Fri
I thought this was a good read...made sense to me. What are your thoughts?...Bun
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by Andrea Adams
March 11, 2001
When I was 10, all the girls in my grade at school were rounded up into one classroom, told we were getting older and would soon be young women and there were a few things we should know.
We were shown a filmstrip about menstruation and then when the lights came back on, my math teacher launched an assault on our attitudes about being female. She told us we would soon be menstruating, and that it was messy and smelly and that we should all be on constant vigil lest it should happen to us in public when we were, gasp, not
carrying "supplies." We were going to grow breasts and if we ever and I repeat EVER went braless, we would sag to our knees and it would be just like National Geographic, and we would be hideous. Then we were told that we would be sprouting hair in new places and that that hair was unsanitary and unsightly and that we should shave it immediately or at least as soon as we could get our mothers to buy us razors, and finally we were told that we would start to stink and for crying out loud to use deodorant.
Now let's look at the lesson here.
Women are stinky, unsanitary, and embarrassing and require a lot of special equipment and maintenance to remain even marginally socially acceptable? Much of the unsanitariness comes from hair. Welcome to misogyny and self hatred 101! So, like my similarly mortified classmates, I started carrying pads and spare undies everywhere, wearing unneeded bras everywhere, and shaving and "deodorizing" everywhere. I also started to think there was something very wrong with the female body. I felt this way for years - until in college I found that a lot of the women I admired did not shave. I was pretty shocked and a little disgusted. I knew it was wrong but couldn't figure out how or why. Finally, in a women's history class, I learned that the practice of shaving for women was not a sanitary issue, but an advertising issue. That women did not shave until a razor company, in an attempt to find more customers, started to market aggressively to women. That following the norm in advertising, women had been told that they must buy a product because their bodies were inherently
wrong and could only be fixed with special equipment.
After much thought, I started to realize that I didn't want to be a part of that. I was repulsed by the thought of armpit hair but even more repulsed by the way that I had been manipulated by advertising and a company out to make a buck off my insecurities. So I quit.
It took a while for the hair to come back and when it did, I was surprised by it. I had imagined that it would be brillo pad-y and really masculine looking, but it was different somehow; it looked feminine. I know that sounds weird. I know that we, in America, are taught that body hair is a masculine attribute. But I swear, men's and women's body hair is a little different. Just enough.
I had always been afraid that having body hair would make me look like a man, but it turned out that having body hair made me look like a woman with body hair. Go figure.
So with my new body hair, hair I had never even seen before since I had started shaving a decade earlier, before it had ever really come in all the way, I started to reclaim my body the way it was meant to be. I was so proud. I wanted to show the world. Umm, a lot of the world did not want to see. One guy I know nearly cried when I threatened to show him. This was a little shocking. A lot of people I knew had never seen armpit hair on a woman except on the cover of a Patti Smith album and were really curious.
When they saw it, they were about evenly split between "hey, that's cool!" and "uh, hmmm, I still don't like it." That was actually a lot more positive than the response I had expected. Gradually I stopped feeling the need to flash my armpits at the world although I continued to embrace them in their natural state.
My then fiance, now husband, was really not enthusiastic at first but eventually became more positive and finally got to a point where he really opposed any more shaving. After a while, I didn't think about it anymore unless I happened on a debate between people, in real life or online. It seemed like a non-issue - armpits grow hair, thus hair belongs in armpits. I even sometimes forgot about it long enough to be completely taken by surprised when someone else mentioned it.
So why am I writing this now? Recently I moved to a much more conservative neighborhood and became the only nonshaver in the immediate area. I became self-conscious about that and about a million other things. My hard-won self-acceptance got a little shaky as I had to spend time with my new neighbors, many of whom said really nasty things.This is really sad. There is no reason to shave. I have actually had healthier skin since I stopped; the nicks and rashes I had once had cleared up immediately, and the infected ingrown hairs that had once plagued me were completely gone. Shaving serves no sanitary purpose that can't be served by washing. It's not like hair is going to hide some magic hair germs that can only be cured with a razor. If it did, everyone would shave, male or female,
and we'd shave our heads too. Also, shaving is a waste of time and money. I save quite a bit from not buying any shaving supplies and am better rested for not having to wake up earlier and denude a great amount of my body. Finally, shaving is not necessary for cosmetic reasons. Many men I know think body hair on women is incredibly attractive and I have a feeling that if body shaving was a rarity, people would react with shock and revulsion to bald bodies they way a lot of people do now to hairy ones.My body hair is there for a reason. I have every right not to shave but am often made to feel suspect about it, which is really absurd since through most of history and in most of the world, shaving ones' legs and armpits has
just not been done. But I refuse to bow to others' ignorance. I refuse to act like my body in its natural state is somehow defective. So this summer, as always, I will dress for the weather. And I will tell anyone who points out my natural, healthy, attractive hair exactly why it's there. And if you see me on the street, just ask me about my armpit hair - I dare you.
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