When was the last time you felt shamed into shaving? I started being self-conscious about my body hair at a very young age. In second grade, my teacher assigned a journal entry about what we would like to change most about ourselves. I wrote about my wish to have no hair on my arms or upper lip.
I was too self-conscious about my body hair. I worried it looked dirty and masculine, so at age 12, I began using Nair hair removal to rid my body of their thick dark intruders. Eventually I upgraded to waxing, and finally shaving. In ninth grade, I would spend hours in front of the mirror plucking at my eyebrows until they were perfectly groomed and symmetrical.
When a friend of mine stopped shaving her armpits, she was applauded for her “bravery.” In American culture, going against the social standard of hairlessness seems almost like an act of rebellion. However, in my opinion, the decision not to shave is just that: a decision. So where did this arbitrary and asinine beauty norm come from?
In 1915, a campaign called the Great Underarm Campaign began pressuring women to shave their armpits, and eventually their legs. Prior to this, advertisements didn’t hesitate to display models with underarm hair. However, as American culture became more socially progressive for women, it slowly became increasingly acceptable for women to bare more skin in public. This culminated in a widespread media obsession with cosmetic hair removal. To this day, body hair is not only a stigmatized aspect of female beauty, but hair removal is almost an implicit requirement for American women. Somehow our society has evolved such that a part of a woman’s body that is natural, not to mention fights bacteria and infection, is now considered unsexy, unfeminine, and even immodest.
In the same way that magazine and commercial advertisements first influenced women to remove underarm hair, our country’s porn consumption may have a lot to do with today’s fixation with hairless pubic areas. The expanding industry of pornography provides a very specific, yet arbitrary, expectation of what a woman’s body should look like. In fact, a lack of pubic hair has become so mainstreamed that “hairy” is actually a fetishized pornographic category. In this day and age online porn is often one’s first introduction to sex, and it causes both men and women to have unnatural expectations regarding body hair.
In response to the unfair weight put on women to be hairless, a French movement has arisen to combat the shaved skin standard of beauty. French women have been shamelessly posting pictures of their hairy underarms and legs on Twitter, using the hashtag #LesPrincessesOntDesPoils, or #PrincessesHaveBodyHair. This trending topic was introduced in July 2016 by 16-year-old Adele Labo who was brutally teased throughout middle and high school for refusing to shave. Since then, the movement has inspired many women to embrace their body hair, not eradicate it.
Somehow when I came to college I stopped feeling the need to shave my legs and arms every day. Going a week without shaving would have been catastrophic to my 15-year-old self, but today I find myself forgetting to shave often. Of course not everyone is comfortable rocking armpit hair or a bush, and I’m not suggesting that you have to be. I’m merely opening a discussion as to why women feel the need to remove body hair in the first place. So whether or not you chose to shave, wax, pluck, or laser, make sure that it is a decision you are making for yourself, not for a judgmental world that overemphasizes the aesthetics of something as cute and benign as the fluff on your legs.
