Women shave for a reason. YEA! MARKETING AND BRAINWASHING!!!!! If you shave thats fine. Dont push your agenda on the women fighting corporate brainwashing. Which is very noble and you get a lot of backlash for. WHICH is EXACTLY WHY WOMEN KEEP SHAVING. Let’s fast-forward to more recent times. When did our modern-day obsession with silky-smooth armpits and legs first take hold? As far as armpits are concerned, we can pinpoint it almost to the day. In May of 1915, the upscale magazine Harper’s Bazaar ran an ad featuring a young model in a sleeveless, slip-like dress posing with both arms over her head. You may be thinking, “So what?” Well, up until that time, fashion – and propriety – dictated that women were covered to the wrist and to the ankle. A dress that exposed the underarms was nothing short of revolutionary. In fact, just the utterance of the word “underarm” out loud was enough to call for the smelling salts mere weeks earlier. Now, it was becoming perfectly acceptable. It also meant since underarms were body parts that had always been covered, whether or not they needed shaving had been a moot point and little discussed. If it didn’t show, why bother? And yet, here was an ad cajoling women that it was necessary to remove “objectionable” hair. To think just days earlier women had no idea such a problem even existed! There were several marketing strategies employed to lure women into jumping on the shaving bandwagon, most of which appealed to the timeless desire to be trendy. The obsession worked its way down to the middle class slowly but surely, as sleeveless and sheer dresses became popular among that demographic. Women’s razors and depilatories were finally being offered for sale in the Sears Roebuck catalog in 1922. This was the same year they started to sell – you guessed it – sleeveless and sheer dresses. By this point, advertisers didn’t feel the need to justify their product’s purpose anymore, and could instead start spending their budgets differentiating their product from their competitors. This meant that women had been won over – or brainwashed as some might say – and it was no longer a question of convincing them if they should shave their underarms in advertisements; now it came down to convincing them that a particular product was the best choice to remove the hair that women didn’t realize until recently was objectionable in the first place. The leg shaving phenomenon was a lot slower to catch on. It’s true that during the 1920s the flappers brought with them a decade of much shorter dresses coming into vogue, but by the 1930s hemlines became much longer again. There were some fashion and beauty writers loudly proclaiming that leg hair was on a par with leprosy, boldly referring to it as a “curse”. Regardless, it seemed that the majority of women were content to leave well enough alone and not worry about shaving their legs. The fashion mavens just couldn’t stir up the same frenzy this time around as they had with armpit hair. It seems that most women were a tad more hesitant when it came to shaving and therefore drawing attention to their legs, as opposed to their underarms. After all, the leg’s closest neighbors are the “private” bits. You wouldn’t want anyone to think you were that kind of girl, or give men any kind of wrong impression. Then World War II erupted, and that iconic pin-up picture of Betty Grable became part of popular culture almost overnight. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that the women of America have been shaving their legs ever since. Why, you ask? Because Betty’s legs looked amazing, and to emulate that look, you had to wear a short skirt and sheer stockings. You also had to shave your legs, as nothing killed the effect you were trying to create more than leg hair poking through your silky stockings
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 13:27:02 +0000
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