Unshaved and unashamed: my approach to body hair

After decades of shame and squirminess, female body hair confidence is finally growing online. From Jameela Jamil’s elegant Instagram posts to Miley Cyrus’ seductive selfies, beautiful women across the internet are gracefully stretching their arms to reveal the wispy strands under their armpits. Their skin glows and their bodies are perfect and the world loves their confidence: “So brave! So feminist! So inspiring!”, the comments cry.

Well, good to know that my everyday life is brave and feminist and inspiring. I’m not sure it makes me feel that way though. To be clear: I never shave my legs, nor my arms, and basically never have. I think I tried once and found the sensation mildly annoying. I do my armpits, belly button and pubic hair a bit though, because when it gets too long it feels physically irritating, like a scar I want to pick at. But I’m not concerned with the way it looks; for as long as I’ve known I’ve barely given it a thought and just gotten on with my day.

That said, I’ve always had an awareness that this made me different. Not enough to feel insulted or ashamed for it, but in conversations about shaving people have been noticeably surprised when I mention how little I shave – enough for me to know that this isn’t typical. I’m lucky to never have been truly judged for my body hair, whilst many women have been subjected to bullying and pressure to shave for fear of being seen as unhygienic and unfeminine.

This stigma is nastily entwined with misogyny and racism. Historical conditioning means men tend to find hairless women more attractive, whilst darker-skinned women with more prominently visible body hair are more likely to put themselves through painful measures to conform to the white standard. These stories make my stomach curl with anger: how can we be made to be so at war with our bodies, at war with ourselves?

Despite my weird, unintended confidence, body hair became an issue for me when someone I slept with told me I had too much hair down there. Confused, I found myself in a dilemma: should I change my body hair for somebody else’s enjoyment? On the one hand, this feels like the respectful thing to do for them. But on the other hand, it’s my body, and this feels like an outrageous pandering to the patriarchy.  

The deep-rooted association with unattractiveness is so hard to let go of, so of course it’s good to see body hair being celebrated online. But, perhaps paradoxically, I think that parading it on social media marks it out as different. I’d like to stop romanticising and heroizing not shaving, because it’s not badass and it’s not a statement. It’s just neutral, and we should consider it as such.