Learning to Find My Wild She-Beastie
I promised this thought piece over a month ago regarding body hair, and I am finally sitting down to hash it out. This conversation is so complex and messy for me. None of what I am sharing is meant to say I think one way of grooming is better than another, I just want us to have a choice and to analyze where the messaging comes from.
When I was in middle school, around 7th grade, I remember being out on the back deck of my childhood home with my mother in the summer sun. What felt to be quite abruptly, she told me that it was time to teach me about shaving, we began with the hair under my arms and then moved on to the white hairs on my legs. Up until that moment I had not even paid attention to hair that was on my body it was just there, and in this moment when I met them, it was to remove them. When I was 18 that was when I learned from a friend that the expectation was to also shave our vulva's to an equal level of hairlessness as the rest of our bodies. So, began my 17 year journey of being as hairless as a naked mole rat.
I was 24 when I met the 1st woman who shaved more sporadically. It horrified all my social sensibilities of what a woman is supposed to look like. It was the 1st time I got to have conversations with another woman about the choice but at that age I was still excavating my body for the presentation of men. It would be another 10 years before another woman who I positively adore came into my life and who actively does not shave. Then on my teacher training trip in Costa Rica, I spent 3 weeks around several women I came to adore, also no longer shaving. Getting the opportunity to spend time with women not shaving for such a solid period of time allowed me to begin to normalize the idea for myself. To begin to ask why if I have no judgements about it towards these women that I now love, can I not do the same thing for myself?
When I returned home from Costa Rica I stopped shaving to see what happened internally. Let me tell you this has been hard! I left the hair under my arms for maybe a month and a half, I think I was able to leave hair on my legs for about a month. The experience turned very intense for me when my 1st moon cycle arrived while conducting the hair experiment-at this time I also had some hair on my head. While tending to my blood I felt SO MUCH shame for feeling hair at the same time I was bleeding and this was followed up by a bone deep feeling of being dirty. It was so painful that I had to go back to the familiar and immediately shaved from head to toe. Then it was like I had this deep internal sigh of relief, I felt TIDY again. Never was it more apparent to me that I was deeply indoctrinated with this beauty standard. That's when I decided I would find a way to heal this part of myself.
A few weeks later I had a beautiful conversation with my soul sister about her journey with body hair and shared where I was finding myself getting hung up. We talked about giving myself grace while building new neuropathways to accept the stimulation of new body hair. After dialoging with myself I have found the balance of where I can begin to let myself grow hair and where I will keep shaving for now so that I am not overwhelmed. I now have the longest hair I have had under my arms and I even am growing hair on my head again. I try to observe where I feel self conscious about having under arm hair, am I keeping myself covered when perhaps 'normally' I would not and can I get myself to touch that edge? I still can't have fuller hair on my vulva and be on my moon cycle at the same time, the feeling of being dirty is too raw.
It is impossible for me to go on this journey and not discuss the money businesses make off of women like me and also the standards of white supremacy I am helping to uphold if I chose to unquestioningly continue to shave. As the weather began to warm, my Instagram feed adds began to be filled with fancy shave kits and creams costing over $100, adds with women wearing special glasses while they lasered hairs from under their arms at home, or another one of my 'favorites', the photo adds telling me I needed serums and creams to get rid of the "Chicken Skin" on my legs because visible pores are so unsexy. I mean the perpetual bombardment of messaging that how nature made my body is not good enough is absolutely exhausting and a billion dollar business based on my social indoctrination. I wanted to look for some stock photos of unshaved women and instead it populated skinny white women with no hair on their bodies. I would say it was bizarre if it didn't so clearly under score what I am trying to discuss here! The major piece to wrestle with is how with my eating disorder and striving to reach other beauty standards I reinforced white supremacy standards as well. Ultimately as a white women there is a level of privilege and power adjacent benefits I can reach by presenting as society wants me to. This is a standard that women of color are also held to too, but can not attain because it was design to exclude. I am giving up some of my beauty privilege by growing body hair and with that I give up a false idea of safety and power. This is something I want to do, I want to wring from my body all the ways she has been weaponized. I want keep taking steps towards the wild woman I know I am meant to be and to continue to asses what are the ways I am blindly holding up an ill social system.
~Lily <3
What has your journey with body hair been? I would love to hear!
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