Sorry for failing the body positivity movement, but I think your intentionally hairless body is weird. Too harsh? Let’s gloss the investments, sacrifices, and motivations involved in body hair removal.
a) Costs of becoming intentionally hairless
Credit where it’s due: safety razors are, in the long run, low cost and very low environmental impact. If you can control that blade, you’ve earned a pass on this one.
But let’s say you use run-of-the-mill disposable razors, either the kind with a replaceable blade or the kind that you throw out in its entirety after several uses. Either way, you’re sending loads of plastic to landfills and maintaining a steady monetary cost. Plus you have to buy shave gel, or shaving cream, or whatever they’re marketing to keep you from accidentally slicing your skin these days.
Or you could shell out for an electric shaver or epilator, sometimes along with a supply of batteries. Or a bottle of Veet every few months. Same with at-home wax kits. Or those pricey professional sugaring or waxing sessions. Or commit to laser hair removal. (Even a set of laser sessions costs more than a mid-range electric bike—and still somehow less than buying razors all your life.)
b) Hazards associated with becoming intentionally hairless
Removing body hair hurts! Not necessarily with every method, or every time you remove it, but pain is a risk of the game. Nick yourself with a razor, get razor burn, wax, burn yourself with wax, or endure the hell of an epilator tweezing out individual hairs at high speed. Almost any method of removing your hair can cause folliculitis, ingrown hairs, and other skin irritations. And after the novel smoothness wears off, stubble hurts. These pain points are bothersome around the ankles, harrowing in the armpits, and downright horrendous between the legs.
Consider, too, the time involved in hair removal. People spend weeks of their lives shaving (think of how slowly you have to navigate those sensitive areas!), and other methods carve out entire days wrestling with those tricky spots around the knee. It also takes longer when you’re actively trying to avoid injury using higher-quality hair removal and aftercare products.
c) Reasons to become intentionally hairless
I’ll throw out some free passes: sports where aerodynamics are relevant, any medical reason, religious obligations.
Anyone can remove their body hair, but expectations for it are highly gendered. To be perceived as a woman, you need to have smooth legs and armpits; you’ll be suspect if you have noticeably hairy arms, too, and the less skin is covered by your clothing, the more areas you’re expected to de-hair. In many workplace settings, a woman with exposed leg hair would be considered unprofessional even as she works alongside a man with exposed leg hair. Similarly, the “hygiene” argument for removing body hair is rarely used to require men to remove body hair (sometimes called “manscape”), and men who do choose to shave their legs and armpits, for example, often face skepticism.
Removing body hair often means capitulating to gendered beauty standards that saddle women with the heaviest responsibilities. These standards also ostracize anyone with grooming choices outside the norm—choices often made in light of already-othered reasons like disability, sexuality, gender identity, and cultural and religious commitments.
I can sympathize with bowing to the weight of societal pressure, but the potential roots of that pressure make me deeply uncomfortable. What motivations lead you to remove all your body hair? Why do you want to manipulate your body—and let’s be specific, your pubic area—to a state only natural for a young child? If you think hairlessness makes you more desirable, what gave you that idea? What is the cultural cost of normalizing and expecting completely hairless adult bodies?
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I find selective hair removal less weird than full-body hairlessness, even if completely smooth armpits still take me by surprise. I come at this conversation as a recovered body hair remover: I understand the fear of consequences if you don’t do it, the short-lived pleasure of a truly smooth leg, the “it doesn’t even hurt!” attitude that ignores scratches and bumps. Yet having escaped those obligations, I can’t imagine going back. I think your intentionally hairless body is weird, but I bet you think my hairy one is weird, too.
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I jumped on the safety razor bandwagon a few years ago and never looked back. I mow down my leg and pit hair every once in a while during the summer with my metal razor and some bar soap. Does the trick!
I think your thinking about my body in any way at all is weird. No, I don’t actually give a single thought to your body, how much hair it does or does not have on it, or how that hair got there or was removed.
Reasons to selectively remove hair that you didn’t mention: 1) liking the way my legs feel when they’re completely smooth 2) not liking the gene I inherited where two longitudinal inches of both my legs physically cannot grow hair and so experience wind and clothes differently than the parts of my legs that do 3) not liking how much more I sweat and it stinks when I leave my armpits bare 4) because no one tells me what to do; I’ll do what I like with my hair until I don’t like it anymore, and then I’ll do something different.
I understand the desire to remind people, “Hey, these societal norms we’re all following are not set in stone and if we examine them a little, maybe we’ll find we don’t want/need to follow them anymore.” That’s a useful thing to do and an interesting blogpost to read. We should all be interrogating the norms we think are institutions of human life and tearing them down when they don’t serve us.
What I don’t understand is the audacity it must have taken to assume that your reasons for doing something to your body are the same as everyone else’s. I also use a burr grinder for my coffee, even though I can’t tell the difference, and that grinder cost more. Should I not have bought it? Even though I like it? I bleached my hair last month and now more of it falls out in the shower. Should I not have done that? Even though I like it? I follow dress codes at weddings I attend, even though they’re dated and gendered, and I completely support people who subvert them in every way they can. Should I stop dressing up or wearing make up or flowy dresses? Even though I like it?
The answer to all of these questions is “Do what you want as long as you know why you want it. I don’t care, and the ways those decisions are affecting other people are not statistically significant.”
I don’t think your hairy body is weird. I don’t think about your hairy body, or anyone else’s. And the fact that you wrote a whole blog post about mine says to me that you’re not that different from the people who look at me funny when I wear shorts after having not shaved for a while.
Mary Margaret Healy, I agree with most of your comment and this is largely where I have landed on most body-altering decisions (even those gendered ones). But I will push back on a couple things:
1) I think it is valuable to have a blogpost where someone expresses they think this particular gendered societal expectation is weird because there are a good portion of people who haven’t thought about that. Consider that the audience here is not people who have already gone on their own hair acceptance journey as you have, but rather someone who didn’t realize remaining hairy was an option and has been becoming “intentionally hairless” begrudgingly. It is valuable for that person to read this post and realize the ‘weirdness’ of the activity is entirely dependent on our societal expectations and there are people who don’t do this. I think Gwyneth’s choice to start this by saying she thinks intentionally hairless bodies are weird is a compelling rhetorical choice because our culture has labeled women who do not choose to remove body hair as “weird” and this turns the tables for a moment which is a catchy opener and great bookend.
2) yes, the affect our individual choices about body hair removal have on others is probably statistically insignificant. However, these choices add up to have a collective impact that is not negligible – the cumulative plastic pollution from razors, mascara bottles, etc. is a not negligible is a great example from Gwyneth.
Individual choices, regardless of the (usually unstated) motivations, collectively shape our culture. If most women continue to remove their body hair the societal norm and expectation of gendered body hair removal remains. Young women growing up who do not want to remove body hair will continue to struggle against the societal pressure and spend a lot of time and mental energy on deciding how much social capital to burn on *not* removing hair, and second guess themselves on why they are making choices, etc. This gendered mental effort is also not negligible especially over the course of many young women’s lives.
I don’t believe on sacrificing one’s life on the altar of ideological purity which is why I still wear dresses to weddings and abide by other silly gender norms, but I don’t pretend that these choices don’t reinforce gender binaries that have been and can be incredibly harmful to young people. I don’t know what the answer is, just like I don’t know how to solve plastic pollution or climate change, but that does not mean it is not a problem.
The only meaningful choice I often feel like I have is to talk about it – discuss my motivations with others so at least the little girls in my own life know that intentional hairlessness is optional and that they should do what they want and know why they are doing it *while also considering the very real cumulative impact on others.* This is also why posts like this are valuable; it opens a conversation.
It seems you expect Gwyneth to provide caveats to all her statements which would have rendered the post pointless. It is not audacious to have an opinion about how what our culture should value. Nor it is audacious to guess at why individuals choose to contribute to societal norms the way they do. I think it’s a clever little post.
Would you have reacted as strongly if if Gwyneth had written an extensive post about why using certain burr grinders is a stupid choice? It seems like both you and Gwyneth feel like there is something different/more significant about the choices we make regarding body hair removal.
Body hair is fucking disgusting and unhygienic as fuck. Shave ya nasty hairy ass wook.