I’m a woman and I don’t shave my body hair – get over it by Katherine Soper Here’s a New Year’s resolution for you: Katherine Soper has hairy armpits and the world hasn’t ended. Fun Fact: hair removal as we know it only started in 1915. Although the custom is ancient (and was usually practiced in societies where lice were an issue), European and American women maintained their full body hair well into the twentieth century. Gillette, having invented a razor for men, wanted to expand their market – and in 1915, capitalising on the fact that women’s sleeves were becoming shorter, they launched a fervent campaign denouncing the (previously inoffensive) female underarm hair as ‘unsightly’, ‘masculine’, and ‘unclean’. Adverts for razors to remove leg hair followed suit in the 1920s – but before Gillette, this market hadn’t even existed. Women had got along just fine, and displayed no innate desire for a smooth, silky leg. body hair3 Razor-wareness..Katherine Soper has stopped shaving her underarm hair Flash forward to 2013, and lots of my female friends tell me how shaving is just a personal preference, their choice, and surely that’s what women’s rights are all about, etc etc. They’re not wrong. However, I don’t think it’s possible today to grow up with a completely objective view of our body hair that isn’t influenced by both the socialised desire for smoothness, and the negative connotations we attach to women who don’t shave. The first person I talked to when I considered growing my hair out said, ‘Can we please stop talking about this? It’s making me feel sick’. So, while it’s true that lots of men shave, the crucial difference is that they can also choose to sport hair without provoking this sort of visceral disgust. There’s the illusion of choice for women, but with social conditioning and expectations rigging the scales (not to mention the fact that hairy often functions as vague shorthand for a man-hating straw-feminist) it’s a ‘choice’ akin to ‘Cake or Death?’. katherine2 Formal occasions are particularly tricky At 16, as a longtime shaver, I felt like my mindset had been so screwed over from such a young age that I could only cleanse my palate by growing my hair out properly: legs, underarms, and all. This wasn’t easy, since I had to work through my own self-disgust, whilst hearing my mum’s voice in my head, sighing that I’m “making everything into a statement”.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 14:53:27 +0000
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