When I was eleven years old, I vividly remember my twelve-year-old South Asian friends discussing their leg shaving routines. I even remember going to play at one of their houses, and waiting outside her bathroom for her to finish using Nair with her mother. My own self-consciousness started to creep in. Did I need to worry about my leg hair? My mother didn’t think so, but a year later, she made me start waxing my underarms.
We are all university students now, and I look back at that memory thinking of how young we were, too young to be worrying about our body hair. Entering McGill as a freshman, my new friends and I discussed body hair removal, from arms, legs, to upper lip — all but the hair on our heads. There is a certain expectation from Western culture for our bodies to be smooth and ridden of hair, but for the hair most prominent on our heads to be long, luscious, and “well-kept.”
As we now understand, most women experience the “importance” of body hair removal from quite a young age, but when did the idea really begin to appear in society? Hair removal ads became very prominent in the mid-1900s as hemlines and sleeves decreased in length, since there was no guarantee that someone’s clothes would cover their leg or underarm hair. For example, in 1915, the popular shaving brand Gillette released its first razor for women, advertising the importance of a smooth and hairless body. All of these ads encouraged women to buy hair removal products, establishing the start of the anti-body-hair culture and market that is still present today. Popular culture, including the rise of popular media like Playboy, increased the need for women to be free of body hair to appear sexier in the eyes of patriarchal society. Of course, no discourse needs to be had over men’s body hair as it is natural, and presents them as manly.
Biologically, body hair represents a mature woman, a woman that a man should reproduce with. A study done by Lígia Azevedo from Brandeis University examined male perceptions of female body hair. What Azevedo concluded from her study was the relationship between body hair and femininity,
with the presence of the former compromising the latter. Patriarchal society expects a hairless body from women. That same hairless body demonstrates a woman’s youth, recalling the stage before puberty. Azevedo’s research observed that men found it more attractive when a woman didn’t have body hair. Hence, she makes the connection that hairlessness perpetuates the sexualization of youth and young appearances in women by the patriarchy.
Patriarchal society has always played a big role in influencing the expected appearance of women. Women themselves have become accustomed to the idea that visible body hair is unfeminine, and thus unattractive. They are left uncomfortable, feeling the need to get rid of all their body hair. Many women resort to painful hair removal methods, such as lasering or waxing, to feed this image of femininity established by the dominant patriarchy. Society views hairless pre-pubescent bodies and desirable femininity as two inextricable ideas.
Going beyond the general female demographic and their relationship with hair removal, there are additional associations of the culture of hair removal with women of colour. In 1871, Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Specifically in relation to body hair,
Darwin made it clear that hairiness was associated with, as Nicki Butler from Mustang News words it, “deviance and uncleanliness.” In Western society, the majority of white women did not want to be associated with the image of impurity and lack of hygiene, so shaving became a way to escape that image.
Darwin’s ideas put women of colour, who typically have naturally thicker hair, in a targeted position. It wasn’t only the South Asian women I grew up with who reaped the consequences of Darwin’s ideology. Most women of colour in Western society did and still do.
The normalization of body hair removal, originally established by men but continued in practice by women, established another racial divide between white women and women of colour. Many women of colour, especially more impressionable younger girls, are left in the position of believing that to fit into the white- dominated patriarchal society we are confined to, we must obey the norms that are presented to us. Hair removal, although a tedious and sometimes painful task, is one of the easier ways to conform to white-dominated patriarchal norms. One can simply buy the materials, remove their hair, and they will be perceived in higher regard. It’s supposedly that easy, but is it really?
This entire subject continues to reduce women to only their bodies, as patriarchy has been doing for over a century. Society’s inability to embrace body hair as the natural occurrence that it is not only pits women against each other, but also continually places women beneath men in our modern social hierarchy.