One day last year, the right side of my face froze over night and I decided to grow out my body hair. There is nothing like drooling all over your t-shirt because you can’t control your lips to inspire a sudden and intense appreciation for anything that your body is still doing for you. While the facial paralysis slowly faded, I felt a new rage at all the times I had wasted trying to fix my body when it was doing perfectly normal body stuff to conform to patriarchal, heteronormative beauty standards.
In case you’re wondering, yes, my fury was fuelled by listening to ‘The Guilty Feminist’ podcast episodes for hours on end while being heavily medicated for Bell’s palsy, waiting to be able to frown again in agreement with the hosts.
Upon making the decision, part of me was immediately wary of falling into the stereotype of the thin, white girl who thinks exhibiting her perfectly groomed armpit hair on Instagram will do leaps and bounds to advance the feminist undoing of systemic gender inequalities. It’s easy to dedicate so much thought to your hair if you don’t have any other problems, I get that. But then again, ‘Hair is everything’. And not just since that epic Fleabag scene.
In the 1920s, the news of a woman cutting herself while doing something as outrageous as shaving her legs was curious enough to make national headlines in the US. And beyond the American context, hair grooming has been a symbol of class, race, desirability and cleanliness since the Roman Empire.
‘The fastidious woman today must have immaculate underarms if she is to be unembarrassed (Harpers Bazaar, 1922).
Upon reading some of the patronising ads that baked the hairless ideal into contemporary Western culture, I’m not surprised that despite its slightly navel-gazy feel (in my case a very hairy one), growing out my body hair does feel like an act of resistance against age-old attempts to control women’s bodies, albeit a small one.
So, in case there is anyone else out there ready to grow out, here are the 5 stages of my journey and how I rewrote my hair-story (yes, I went there).
01: Fur-y
The seed for my grow out journey was planted all those afternoons sitting on the bathroom floor, ripping out my leg hair, re-emerging back bent and legs throbbing after 90 minutes or so (actually timing this would be too depressing) having gotten only fractionally closer to the Western ideal of hairless beauty, but significantly angrier that I had caved again and subjected myself to this humiliating and ultimately futile exercise. Because let’s face it, with German (think Teutonic, not Claudia Schiffer) and Italian (read Berlusconi’s chest rather than Sophia Loren) blood cursing through my veins, that shit is growing back faster than Tim Allen’s beard in The Santa Clause 1.
I know only few people will immediately get this Christmas-obsessed 90s reference, but for those who do, it’ll be so worth it.
Why, oh why did I waste my precious time on this? Now my eyes as well as my legs are blotchy from irritation – skin irritation and irritation from crying at the state of womanhood respectively. And then I breathe, and I call to mind the three mediations I did with that Headspace trial and I try to treat myself with … kindness, correct, and I do remember why.
The first time I learned that I needed to fix my hair was on a bus ride home from school. I would have been ten or eleven and a group of girls (more on this later!) commented on my ‘beard’ as they put it. It was only a short remark and they weren’t particularly mean but that afternoon I tried to cut my moustache with a pair of nail scissors. Needless to say that the women in my family could tell and initiated me into safer ways of hair removal.
And so my journey began, waxing and plucking and shaving and epilating, battling with in-grown hair and shaving rashes. All the while, interactions with the real world kept me on the cleanly shaven track. Whenever I thought I had settled into a manageable routine, I discovered another area I needed to tend to: the girl I was babysitting pointed out my hairy nostrils, the guy I fancied commented on my hairy belly button. The harshest comments, however, always came from white girls my age.
All those scenes came to my mind a few years on when I learned about Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony. He writes that people are not ruled by force alone but by ideas. Hegemony describes a form of leadership based on the consent of the led, a consent that is secured by the diffusion and popularisation of the ruling class’s world view often with support from the led. I bet Gramsci would turn in his grave if he heard the theory he developed in an attempt to understand the rise of fascism in Italy while he was literally imprisoned for defending his Marxist ideas applied to the symbolic self-imprisonment of female beauty standards but I can’t help it. Read ‘ruling class’ as patriarchy and ‘the led’ as white women and you have a fancier, pseudointellectual way of saying that some women police other women and are therefore complicit in upholding hairless ideations that look to reduce women to the state of a naked mole-rat.
02: I can’t wait for this to happen
Imagine my excitement then, at the prospect of leaving all this behind by simply doing – nothing. Looking smugly down at my recently waxed legs at the beginning of my grow-out journey, all I could feel was exaltation. I couldn’t wait for my hair to be long just so that I could point to it and say, see people, nothing bad happened.
03: I can’t believe this is still happening?!
A few weeks (and millimetres) down the line that feeling slowly morphed into fascination mixed with disbelief. Just when I thought I had reached the end of a follicle phase, the hairs grew longer still. Wiry and strong.
Upon closer inspection, I noticed that each hair had a slim end then grew thicker in the middle only to slim down again closer to the root. It was almost as if there was a moment in which the hairs were telling each other ‘Hold on folks, she’s going to rip us out any moment now, so fortify, fortify, grow as thick as you can’ and upon realising that this was not going to happen this time, they eased back into their slim shapes.
04: The big reveal (aka the part where nothing happens because I’m white and thin)
You know you’ve spent too much time alone with your hair when you start penning dialogues for them. It was time to reveal my hairy self to the world.
The fact that I struggle to remember premiering my fury stompers gives you an idea of how anti-climatic of a moment it was. One sunny afternoon I took myself and my mini skirt down to Oxford Street. Ironically, one of the places with the highest density of gender-conforming ad images in the world. Standing in the elevator in Liberty’s of all places (not to buy just to browse, of course) I could sense a man’s gaze resting on my legs. But apart from that – cricket-sounding silence. I know that this non-reaction is due to privilege. My mainstream appearance allows me to pass through the world largely unnoticed and undisturbed. But I want to believe that this is also owed in part to the ultimately inoffensive nature of female leg hair!
05: A new kind of peace or how to not think about hair as much
While the world was largely unfazed by my hair experiment, the person who couldn’t stop thinking about it was me. And this is what kicked off the concluding grow-out phase – negotiation. It was hard to admit but once the initial excitement about my decision had calmed, I could not grow (Ha!) to like my hairy look. While I saved time on my grooming routine, I started spending a lot of mental energy on fearing that I would eventually be relegated to Weird Barbie House (first Barbie reference in this blog, so cool) and judging myself harshly for this fear. Was I even a true feminist if I couldn’t accept my body as it was? How could I arrive at a place where I neither obsessed over perfect hair removal nor worried excessively about my hairiness? Whatever end of the spectrum I aspired to, somehow the patriarchy always seemed to come out on top.
It is only fitting that the cure to my hair anxiety was to be found in one of its root causes – other women. Sitting on the tube one day, I found myself opposite a pair of perfectly imperfectly-groomed legs and I had to stop myself from letting out a little cheer. Until that moment, I had overlooked an important weapon found in hair-warriors’ arsenals around the world: the stubble. Abandoning the all or nothing approach, I started to see every whisker, bristle and unruly hair as a small vote for incremental change to the idealised image of 21st century femininity.
So today I identify as a purposefully lazy groomer. I remove hair when I feel like it and without spending too much time or money, but I am not afraid of stubbliness or full-on fur moments either. I stand firmly with one stubbly leg planted in Weird Barbie House and the other in the ‘normal’ world, like an aspirationally feminist re-imagining of the Colossus of Rhodes, while my mind is free to dream and scheme of how we will move towards a more hair-tolerant and equitable world, inch by fury inch.
Further reading
With a personal topic such as this one, my perspective is necessarily limited by my own experience and privileges. Here are some writers who have broadened my understanding of all things hair:
The i-D’s article, The Problem with Feminist Body Hair, by Niloufar Haidari. Dating back to 2015, the article highlights the exclusive nature of the feminist body hair discourse and highlights that depending on its context, the removal of body hair can also signify defiance and protest.
In ‘The Politics of Body Hair’ Fabliha Anbar writes about the hair removal experience from a South Asian perspective.
In the book ‘The Politics of Black Hair’ Althea Prince offers insights into the politics surrounding black woman’s hair through personal essays and conversations with women from across the African diaspora.
‘Unshaved’ by Breannah Fah explores the story of female body hair in connection to broader cultural stories about women’s reproductive rights and global tensions about women’s place in society.
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