Thursday, 15 February 2018

A hairy subject

It's interesting being a self-identified Femme sometimes in Western culture. This identity of mine comes with a lot of outdated and engrained social norms about how one should look (and, act). There is so much pressure to adhere to a certain type of appearance that it becomes kinds of an all-encompassing balancing act to look flawless while also killing it at one's career and managing relationships. The idea of the feminine as beautiful, clear-skinned, free of hair on one's face, limbs and pits, powder & pomp is ridiculous. And yet, it's the ideal that us Femmes are held against. And it's bizarrely weird and unnatural.

Femme enough for ya?

I once told my sister that I sometimes felt that my beauty routine was a constant battle against "unwanted" body hair. She agreed heartily and said that she spent so much time on body hair removal that it was insane. Being biologically half (hairy) Dutch, I am cursed with hairy arms, legs, eyebrows (that keep growing in despite plucking since the age of 15), and have several wiry black chin hairs making my life difficult. I have been removing hair from my legs since I was about 12 years old. That's when other girls in my elementary school began to take stock of our hormonally changing bodies and began to compare ourselves against each others flaws. It was shit. I remember how many times I seemed to nick my legs in those early years - I still have a few scars from those days. I bleached my arm hair a few times before the bleaching made my skin super dry and itchy.

The cartoon reads: Beauty, slightly mutilating the natural state of your body in order to be deemed acceptable.

It's not really surprising that Femme women feel pressured to shave. The cosmetic industry has been after our hard earned cash ever since the 1920's and before that, there was a pervasive negative attitude towards "hairy women." In fact, social Darwinism is a bit to blame here. During the latter part of the Victorian era, people believed that

"body hair could show the genetic superiority—or inferiority—of a person. As Herzig writes, 19th-century scientists thought that thick hair was “linked to criminal violence … and exceptional ‘animal vigor.'” Suddenly, hairlessness was en vogue for Western women. And that's about the time advertisers got involved."

quote taken from this very informative article.

Nowadays, Femmes are still pressured to be hairless to be accepted by society. Something that masculine folks don't really have to worry about (unless you are a certain type of gay boy being pressured to shave your chest or something). In fact, I worry more about how straight women react to my leg hair than men or queer folks. I know that the next time I go to get a pedicure, the nail salon ladies will be talking about my leg hair in their language so as to not insult me directly to my face. Femmes (especially women) subject one another to the most rigorous scrutiny when it comes to appearance. It's toxic, and shitty, and needs to just stop already.

To make things even more troublesome, Femmes are expected to be hairless in order to be considered desirable or even date-worthy by (mostly) men. Check out this rather sad visual statistic:
"Shave the date"? go to hell! I tried to relocate the link to this survey and failed. D'oh!
For those readers who can't make out the stats in the graphic above, a bunch of dudes between the ages of 18-22 were surveyed about dating a women who didn't shave her legs. 75% said a flat-out NO, while only 10% were totally down with it, and 15% undecided. I'm going to assume that this sample of dudes were all straight guys from Western culture. It would be interesting to see the same survey done with men aged 40-45...

The double-standard with regards to men's body hair (and legs in particular) is deplorable. Men don't have to worry about their legs being too hairy for a woman to take interest in them (that doesn't mean these men don't exist though). I have yet to meet a guy who was rushing home to shave his legs, armpits, trim the bush, and pluck his eyebrows and chin hairs to be considered attractive for his date that evening. And yet, women do this ALL THE TIME. Including when they are heavily pregnant and can no longer see their leg or pubic hair!

Usually, I will have my legs waxed about once a month during the summer months (May - September) so I can enjoy wearing skirts, dresses, or shorts without the bother of shaving. In previous years, I have also waxed every couple of months in the winter time to keep my leg hair "manageable." This year though, I have been growing it straight since the end of September (or thereabouts). As a result, my leg hair currently looks like this:

Foxy legs, photo by Yak. Legs look hairier in natural light for some reason.
Of my three relationships, the only one where my leg hair seems to be an issue is with Bear. I think that this has much and more to do with the way he was socialized as a white, cis-het male. While he says that hairless legs is a preference for him, the way he's been acting towards my hairy legs has been a bit strange. It's clear that hair legs really bothers the Bear for some reason.... On the other hand, both Birdfriend and Yak adore my leg hair. In fact, Yak is actually jealous of how thick and luxurious my leg hair is compared to her own! I think that these vastly differing viewpoints about body hair have to do with how the queer community has embraced physical diversity amongst its members, especially in recent years. Body positivity for the win!

This Carol Rossetti cartoon floated around the internet last year. It was the first time I ever saw a cartoon (or any depiction) of a Femme-identified person with hairy legs and a positive message.
There is also the issue of my chronic pain and financial wellbeing when it comes to removing my leg hair. Chronic pain makes shaving legs a fucking pain! One has to bend this way and that, potentially aggravating injuries in the process. And then there's the nicks and cuts and tiny wounds that bleed for what seems like forever. Thus, I switched to paying a professional to remove my leg hair. But to do a full set of legs every 3 weeks is about $30 at a minimum. If I were to keep that up for the entire year, I would spend around $520 before tax and tip. Just to remove hair! Many women pay much much more than that for hair removal (I'm looking at you laser hair removal industry) to be perceived as desirable. Clearly, our society needs to grow up and realize what Eve Ensler wrote in the Vagina Monologues (even though it's about pubic hair and not other body hair, it holds):


...hair is there for a reason...



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