Why do feminists not shave

In September at the Maison Margiela show in Paris, for example, designer John Galliano made it nearly impossible to tell whether the snake-hipped models wearing his spring collection were boys or girls. Cheers from the online throngs ensued. This kind of back-and-forth relationship with body hair is new. Either you were a shaggy feminist or you were a pawn of the patriarchy, goaded by the pink plastic shaving-industrial complex into spending your money and your time maintaining a key feminine ideal—an ideal of relatively recent vintage.

But, legs are hairy. What to do? Almost immediately, I realised the internalised misogyny evident in my remark, and apologised profusely — more to myself, than to her. To shave, or to wax — is a question of Shakespearean proportions that the modern woman must answer. My first waxing experience literally ended in a bloodbath. Regrettably, my adolescent self was repulsed by any good advice. In the eighth grade, I read an interview of a leading Bollywood actor in a leading English daily, where he joked about how it was an instant turn off for him when this gorgeous firangi foreigner woman he had been hitting on took off her shirt and revealed her hairy armpits.

Now, all of a sudden, I was on-trend. Among both celebrities and the masses, female body hair is sprouting all over. In some ways, this phenomenon harks back to the second wave movement of the s and s, when feminists began to challenge restrictive beauty standards.

At a famous march outside the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, protesters ceremoniously discarded their bras and stiletto heels; many feminists of that era also ditched their razors and tweezers. Unshaven women in often meet other criteria for traditional feminine beauty —they have sculpted eyebrows, wear lipstick or sexy lingerie — while proudly displaying their armpit hair. If the ethos of the 70s was a refusal to spend time and effort on cosmetics, the more common approach today is for women to curate different elements of their appearance, remaining conventionally attractive while deploying body hair as a feminist fuck-you: half-statement, half-ornament.

Since its launch in November , Billie has positioned itself as explicitly feminist. Strange, huh? She is smoothing the hair on her head back with arms raised, revealing undisturbed axillary fuzz. Hale hit puberty early, she told me, and her body hair was dark and noticeable. Now, she sometimes, but not always, removes hair from her legs and other body parts, but never from her armpits. We were saying shaving is a choice. Back in the s, the conversation sounded quite different.

The very first full issue of Ms. The time, money and psychological energy required for depilation were oppressive. Hairlessness was also infantilizing — it made women look like prepubescent girls. But another faction of feminists, led by Betty Friedan, had a different take. Friedan believed the preoccupation with body hair was counterproductive.

She considered these concerns a trivial distraction from more important issues, such as professional opportunities and subsidized childcare.

She also thought they harmed the cause of feminism by casting feminists as hairy, ugly, man-hating weirdos. I came of age in the s, a midway point of sorts. My two best friends and I stopped shaving in high school. For me, this decision was not explicitly about feminism, but about an allegiance to my idea of authenticity not to mention my allegiance to laziness.

I wanted to be attractive, but I did not want to invest effort or enlist artifice into making myself so.