Back in the spring of my junior year of college, I was dating my first feminist boyfriend. After my fair share of sexist douche bags who objectified women (myself included) like it was their job, I had met a guy who encouraged me to voice my opinions rather than silencing me. One night, we were hanging out at my apartment when he turned to me and asked me if he could be honest with me. I of course welcomed what he had to say, but what came out of his mouth was definitely not what I was expecting. He asked me why I shaved my body. I was completely caught off guard by this and I really had to think about what I was going to respond with. As a feminist and someone who has put a good amount of time and energy into researching gender inequality, I am aware of the history of internalized misogyny that surrounds hair removal. Most of my outwardly feminist friends don’t shave and I have always thought that they looked beautiful no matter what their arm pits looked like. However, I still shave on a regular basis and I don’t plan on stopping my routine.
I started shaving during the end of sixth grade, after I begged my mom to let me. At the time, I thought that having hairy legs was juvenille and I wanted to be mature as all 13-year-olds do. My hair removal continued into my teens and now twenties, as I dabbled in various shaving and waxing techniques. And with the exception of an extrodinarily painful brazillian, I have never once regretted my decision to remove my body hair. I love the feel of smooth legs, arms, and bikini line and I don’t see anything unfeminist about it. But the difference is that I do this for me, not to impress another human being.
There is nothing wrong with shaving your body, wearing high heels, experimenting with makeup, and even getting cosmetic surgery, just as long as you are doing it for yourself and it makes you happy in the end. I find it rather simple minded to expect women to decide between femininity and feminism, because there isn’t one way that a feminist looks. If we looked back fifty years, to the days of The Feminine Mystique, we would find that a “feminist” by second-wave standards could only be a white, straight, middle class, cis-gendered female, when obviously that is not the case. It is important for both society and feminists alike to recognize that there are different approaches to feminism and that a feminist doesn’t need to check off every box to be considered progressive. Just because I shave my legs, it doesn’t mean that I am not aware of the ridiculous standards that our society puts upon women to look a certain way and if ever I decided that I didn’t feel like shaving anymore, I would do so with pride and gusto. There have been times where I have let my body hair grow out longer than my usual clean shaven apperance and I have never once thought of myself as more or less of a feminist. Just as a side note, my partners at the time also never thought of my body as more or less feminine depending on the amount of body hair I had going on at the time.
Just like you can’t tell someone’s sexual orientation and gender identity based on the way that you look, same goes for their views on universal equality. You wouldn’t tell a black woman that she was ashamed of her heritage for relaxing her hair or wearing a weave or scold an Islamic woman for wearing a hijab, therefore you really shouldn’t tell a feminist what they should be doing with their own body. At the end of the day, our bodies are our temples and we are the goddesses of said temple, therefore we have complete and total say of what we want our bodies to look like. Some feminists shave and wear makeup, some don’t. Some wear heels and rock hairy armpits, others shave and stick to flats. It is impossible to narrow down what a feminist looks like because every woman has her own ideals of beauty and we should be celebrating the freedom of creative expression. I think that the reason that a lot of women deny being feminists is because they are afraid of being put into a box by society and men, because in their eyes feminists all have the same look. Yet if these same women were to step back and take a look at the millions of women making changes to better our planet, they would realize that there is a place for everyone in the world of gender equality. Because when it comes down to it, there are so many important issues surrounding the women’s rigjts movement that extend beyond physical apperance and it is unfair for women to feel excluded from conversation because of the way that they choose to modify their apperance.