This is a rat’s nest of a topic. Body hair trends and stigmas have been so endlessly adapted, approached and super- and sub-structured by culture that it’s nearly impossible to sort attitudes out clearly.
Yet I have some thoughts. I think cultural expectations surrounding body hair are really important and revelatory and worth thinking about.
I want to mostly focus on one body hair issue I find particularly unsettling: that current American women’s body hair mythology makes women’s bodies look pre-pubescent.
If you see a person of the female sex or who describes herself as a woman or who you would describe as a woman who has hair on her legs and in her armpits, and this bothers you, it is probably because you are not used to seeing the body of a grown woman but rather the body of a little girl.
The growth of body hair in our species is a biological sign of sexual maturation. A sexually mature adult human typically develops noticeable underarm, pubic and leg hair, with wide variation of course, that can also include prominent arm and chest hair and often facial hair, back hair, buttocks hair and foot and hand hair. This is a classic sign of puberty — the growth of prominent body hair. Our mammalian pelt, you might say.
Pre-pubescent humans are typically soft and smooth. We all know this. The fine, nearly invisible body hair of babies and children.
You are probably already connecting the dots. Doesn’t it seem like the cultural tradition of the removal of prominent body hair in females is clearly related to overarching female belittlement — in a quite literal meaning of that word — and subjugation? Females are made and make themselves to look like children: pre-pubescent, pure and virginal, dewy-eyed and emasculated.
And of course females — or whomever society has interpreted as female — have been treated like and are continually treated like children by American society. For a long time, females couldn’t vote, couldn’t receive the highest levels of education, couldn’t engage in war, couldn’t even open a bank account and manage their own finances.
My mom, who’s 68 now, was already 17 years old when Yale began to admit its first female undergraduate students. When I went to college in 2003, I took for absolute granted that I could theoretically attend any university I wanted to. I had no notion of that fact that Yale only began to accept my “kind” 12 years before I was born.
And how are we doing these days? It can seem pretty good sometimes. But females still can’t legally play professional baseball or football or — how can we forget? — execute their own birthing decisions. All of these limitations are seeded in an idea of a woman’s inherent inability to perform. To be a powerful “grown-up” worthy of carrying out personal action and achievement, making her own decisions and taking her own risks. Instead, she’s a delicate child in need of protection.
Males, on the other hand, are culturally celebrated in their sexually maturity. The stories in my society crown the development of male body hair and other post-pubescent markers as signs of “manliness,” maturity and strength — as it should be across the whole species, for all sexes. A “womanly” body should also be celebrated in a healthy society as mature and strong — the typical appearance of breasts, widening of hips and growth of body hair. These physical developments signal that a person is an adult and is ready to take on the associated responsibilities.
Further, in a specifically sexual scope, body hair at its root is a natural indicator to a potential mate that one is “of age,” so to speak. That a person matured sexually. It is a biological aid and cue for maintaining a psychologically and sexually healthy society.
I respect that some folks just like “smooth” bodies, regardless of sex and gender. Some men-identifying folks shave their bodies completely and prefer mates with completely shaved bodies. This is fine; everyone has fetishes and proclivities. But for the aim of greater social health and justice, might such behaviors be better performed as proclivities, not norms?
I don’t expect people to read this and change their behaviors, even if they understand and agree. A pre-pubescent female body is such a deep part of our cultural performance here in the United States that I believe a lot of people have gut reactions of something “not being right” when they see a woman with leg or armpit hair. But I hope reading this makes a few people reconsider that reaction and tell themselves — I’m seeing an adult Homo sapiens female body. This is what a sexually mature female looks like. This is not a child’s body.
On another side of this kaleidoscopic conversation, I also find it funny that women-identified and -identifying folks in my culture typically shave hair off when they already usually have far less hair than males do. I don’t shave any of my body, but I don’t think people would likely mistake my European-descent female body for a European-descent male body. I have no thick and coarse chest hair, none on my upper thighs, back, neck, or face, none on my arms or hands and little on the top of my feet or toes. Nor do I have a dense “treasure trail” on my belly. If an average female of my genetic ancestry already has way less prominent body hair than a male, why are people so worried about it in the first place? It’s not likely that if females stopped shaving their body hair they’d be indistinguishable from males.
Ugh, and if they did, so what? Another problem with these strict genderized body hair rules is that they just reinforce outdated, harmful, silly binary ways of thinking. Life does not exist on a binary. A binary is a lie. If we stopped worrying about and performing what is “woman” and what is “man,” we could allow space for everyone who can’t or doesn’t want to fit into those categories to be okay, too. To define themselves rather than be defined by the peanut gallery.
And beyond that, what’s the point in creating differences among us with gender that aren’t there biologically? Wouldn’t it be cool to see how similar we all actually are, both physically and emotionally and mentally? Our bodies may be different — judged by an imperialistic bell curve — but not that different. How are our similarities not a strength rather than a liability? Wouldn’t it be so much better if we saw more of each other in each other? If it wasn’t so obvious to an onlooker what was “man” and what was “woman”?
Lastly, I want to reveal to you that I like having body hair. I love it. I have thought time and again about reneging, about just caving and shaving my legs and underarms to meet my society’s expectations for “woman.” The habit is so categorically done and celebrated, it makes the pressure intense. I have thought about it, and since I decided to stop shaving a few years ago, I have picked up a razor a few times and shaved for a week or two, just because whatever. And I can tell you bar-none that it feels so much better to have the hair. And this can’t be a surprise, because it’s supposed to be there.
My body is so much more responsive to my environment with body hair — soft, supple, sensitive and alive — and my temperature seems to be better regulated. Again, one can’t really be surprised that our hair has a function, considering all humans come with it — and we develop it when we start sweating, growing muscle mass, having sex and doing all the other stuff mature humans do.
I know this is personal, I know this is intimate. But it’s also not. It’s also universal. It’s something pretty much every human can relate to, because we all have body hair. Let’s stop making it weird by making a thing of it.
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