Hair (or: To shave or not to shave?)

The last week I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my hair. Not about the hair on top of my head (that’ll stay as long as it is, and will grow longer over time, for looks and headbanging purposes) but my bodily hair. I’m one of those women who is “blessed” with a lot of hair all over my body from a very young age on (my pubic hair started to grow around my 8th year). I started shaving my armpits when I was 12, and my legs when I was 14. By then I had already heard other girls whispering behind my back “how I dared to go to gymclass with shorts and unshaved legs”. I still don’t know if they meant it degrading or admiring, but I do know I started wearing pants which didn’t show my legs shortly thereafter.

Bodily hair is not considered feminine. It used to be a very masculine thing, but even that is under debate now: look at all the metro-males out there, with their hairless chests. If you have hair on your belly, your breasts, your legs, your armpits, or god help us, in your face, you are an abomination of femininity and you should be punished. By being called names, being called ugly, a lesbian, a feminist, a man in disguise.

We might have forgotten along the way that real women do have hair on their bodies, just as men have. This forgetfulness is not that weird since we only see pictures of hairless women in magazines, only hairless women on television (I always wonder how the women in programs like “Expedition Robinson” achieve their hairless armpits and legs). If you would believe the media, women have no hair. The one thing which could prove the opposite are the commercials for all kinds of ways to get rid of the hair under your armpits and on your legs: all kinds of ladyshaves with special lotions to make your more feminine, epilators which don’t hurt (*ahum*) and creams and waxes and many more. For some reason the women on these commercials always look very happy and hairless, even while demonstrating the product. Something must be wrong here.

So I’m taking a stand here. I stopped shaving my belly, which is now quite hairy. I have a somewhat “masculine” body-hair pattern (too much male hormones, probably), so you can imagine how it looks yourself. I still do my armpits and my pubic hair, because I think that is nicer. For me, not for “the rest of the world”. I still shave my legs, but not as much as I used to do. This probably won’t make much of a difference in the larger picture, but that’s not the point: I am showing my stand in this debate, and I’m acting it. For me personally this small act of defiance against the societal pressure on female hairlessness means quite a lot. Besides the fact it also saves me a lot of time and money.