A few months ago I retired my razor to my bathroom medicine cabinet and haven’t brought it out since. I feel hairy, happy, and free. I stopped for a few reasons, the first of which are just practical ones.
First of all, shaving is expensive. Women’s razors and shaving cream are even more expensive than men’s. Razors in the Gillette Venus line can cost upwards of $10 and the replacement blades can be around $20 for a 4-pack. That adds up, especially for us college students!
Razor burn. Every time I used to shave my bikini line, it erupted in painful red bumps that were in just the right spot to get rubbed by my underwear. It is the absolute worst. I have sensitive dry skin so sometimes the bumps even showed up on my legs. It simply wasn’t worth it to try to have smooth soft skin when it ended up just being bumpy and dry.
Hair is there for a reason. Women’s pubic hair protects the vagina from bacteria and dirt, helps protect from friction and provides warmth. As the Monologue Hair from Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues put it: “I realized that hair is there for a reason — it’s the leaf around the flower, the lawn around the house. You have to love hair in order to love the vagina. You can pick the parts you want.”
The next reason is the most important of all. I asked myself, why is shaving even an expectation for women? Who decided women have to shave?
Women’s shaving became a thing in the 1910’s started by and ad in Harper’s Bazaar magazine featuring a model with shaved armpits. Razor and sleevless tops started to be sold after that ad and really picked up popularity in the 20’s. Leg shaving caught on in the 40’s and 50’s partially due to pin-up model and actress Betty Grable and her famous legs.
Even since then, companies have been trying to convince us that we need to shave not only to be attractive and pleasing to men, but even to fit in with our female friends.
These advertisements like so many others are manipulating and taking advantage of women and our insecurities. I have no problem with women who like the feeling of fresh clean shaven legs, as long as they understand that the shaving trend is founded in consumerism. I wish the decision to shave or not to shave was based more on personal preference than the feeling of necessity.
And Advertising isn’t the only industry that is pressuring us. Pornography constantly shows our society clean-shaven women. Its main consumers are men who then come to have a hairless expectation for women in real life.
I figured the best way I could fight against this unfair and patriarchal trend was to stop shaving myself. So when friends see my hairy armpits and ask WTF?? I can try to educate them.
But lastly, hair is part of our natural bodies and our natural bodies are beautiful.