Features
t a k e b a c k t h e h a i r. . . Is choosing not shave the new norm? or will women continue to conform to society? Words By: Elizabeth James Butler
“As a young woman I never questioned this, I never understood what it meant, I grew up in a country where women were not allowed out after the sun went down because they could be raped.” However, a new generation of women have risen up, a generation of women who question the patriarchy on many things including why we shave our body hair. A recent survey on Survey Monkey, showed 91% of the women who answered felt that to some extent society had been conditioned to believe that body hair on women was unattractive, while only 9% believed that it wasn’t. 95% of these women shave, and 5% of the women I asked did not shave, however 4% of them didn’t shave due to sensitive skin and allergies. This goes a long with market research analysts Mintel results showing that 1 in 4 women didn’t shave.
Women not shaving is not a new concept. Far from it, is it the norm? However, in the last few years it has made its way into the norm. Who could forget Julia Roberts waving at the crowds at the premier of ‘Notting Hill’ showing off her unshaved armpits in all their glory? Fast forward to the present, and celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, and social media influencers like Januhairy are showing us that shaving should be your choice. You just have to search the #bodyhair and you’ll be greeted by over 92,000 posts of beautiful body hair on beautiful women. I was six years old when I first picked up a razor blade, I grew up with a mother and my sister who is 8 years older than me, from what I knew this is what women did. My mom never sat me down to explain what was going on, she just lectured me about not touching them. The next time I picked up a razor blade I was 10 years old; I started shaving my armpits behind my mom’s back, I was an early bloomer and they were hairy. The following year my mom saw my legs and told me ‘that it was time for me to start shaving them’. As a young 11 year old girl, it was the moment I had been waiting for and boy did I feel liberated, but as I’ve grown up, I look back and feel more repressed than liberated for spending my youth prescribing to what the world told me was the “ideal beauty.”
This is not an entirely new concept for us. The iconic Patti Smith can be seen on one of her more infamous albums ‘Easter’ displaying her armpit hair in all it’s beautiful glory and Harriet Lyons and Rebecca Rosenblatt who first published their manifesto for anti-shaving called ‘Body Hair: The Last Frontier’ in 1972. Almost 50 years later, we have influencers and authors such as Florence Given encouraging people to embrace themselves as natural human beings, body hair is a natural and normal thing to have.
As a young woman I never questioned this, I never understood what it meant, I grew up in a country where women were not allowed out after the sun went down because they could be raped. However, I was excited, I felt like I was on my way to being an adult; I also have dark hair so it was my chance to feel less like a freak and more like the girls I went to school with, (you know the blonde hair, blue eyed beachy girls) I never had boys swooning over me, yet I cared so much about their opinions on my hairy legs, and whether they could see my pubes poking out from my bikini bottoms. In hindsight, I was far from the freak they called me, and having now been educated on feminism, I came to the conclusion that they were the problem and despite this as the years have gone by, I found myself slave to the idea that women should not have any hair on their bodies, dress a certain way, talk a certain way, not eat spaghetti on a first date, or be anything different without being labelled a freak or a weirdo.
On the plus side, not shaving will probably not change your life as much as you think it would, I mean how often do we really shave? It’s easy to get lazy with your leg hair. For me it can take up to two and a half hours for a full body shave. In recent months I have begun to embrace my body hair in my own way. The cons, however, are itchy crotch, people who will inevitable disapprove, calling you a “smelly feminist” because they will assume you don’t wear deodorant, I have personally bare witnessed to this exact scenario on a train platform in the height of summer in 2017. In the end, no matter what you choose, someone will make a judgement on your habits. The most important thing to do is to choose something you feel comfortable with, you can shave and still respect the women who don’t shave, and are confident about it, you can also reduce how often you shave and what, or you can still be as smooth as a dolphin, but own it, be honest about why you do it, there is no shame in who you are as a woman.
M-PWR
87