I understand there are standards for women to be well groomed. I too love nice smells, smooth skin, self care regimes. Body hair is a funny one. I remember my mom pointing out at the public swimming pool a woman’s hairy bikini line. She told me then when I start going pubic hair, make sure I ‘take care of it.’. Insinuating that its offensive to others.
God has a good sense of humor, doesn’t he? Cause I grew the biggest muff, like this baby sits three inches of my body on a tame day. 70’s Disco shit.
I was lucky to have three sister and friends who it was more common to see each other naked than with clothes on. We didn’t have a shame corner. Some of us had hair and some of us didn’t like hair.
I started shaving my armpits and pubic hair when I started having sex… welp because I am watcher. Between my legs, over my mound of pubes, I honestly couldn’t see my partners efforts during a good oral sesh. It had to go.
However when I shave my legs I get this huge rash. I just can’t. My legs are very hairy.
I have had comments. Monkey legs, man legs, hippie etc. The words don’t penetrate into anywhere I could get offended. Just like BRO, the standards that women have to not have body hair isn’t real… what is real is the rash I get when I shave my legs… so like NOT MY PROBLEM.
Truth is I have never not been fucked because of my leg hair.
- Sher (@thefakeclub)
I stopped shaving about two years ago--I was a senior in high school. I had just gone through an experience where I realized a fellow classmate, someone I thought was a friend and who was in student leadership, had been saying disgusting, verbally aggressive comments about my body. People had heard him saying them, but no one had told me, and I continued to treat him as I would a friend. As soon I heard the details of what he had been saying, I lost the sense of safety in my own skin. I realized everyone had a claim to my body before I did. This came after a year when multiple friends of mine had been sexually assaulted, and I'd struggled with mental health immensely. I felt so gross that I wanted to wear a paper bag on my head, hoping people would no longer see my boobs or butt, but instead, I stopped shaving. At the time, having leg hair was just about the most revolting thing, from a man's perspective, I could come up with to do to my body. I wanted them to see my leg hair before they saw my boobs, hoping that it would make me less sexually appealing to them.
Reflecting back on that, I realize it was a way for me to try and hide in my own skin. Covering up my body so I could fade into a darkness where no one could hurt me. Since then, I haven't started shaving, but now I do it for different reasons.
I have decided that I want to have complete ownership of my body. Before anyone else. I gave up wearing make-up and eventually stopped wearing bras too. I wanted my body to be as raw and natural as I could get it. I wanted to own who I was, before society constructed what I should be, and fall in love with my physical state.
I don’t always love my body hair, in fact some days I secretly think I’d look better without out. Or at least hotter. But I guess that’s why I’m so determined not to shave. I want to get to the point where I do feel sexy—all the time. Strutting my stuff with all my glorious body hair. I am fiercely determined to love myself and my body. To claim it as my own, not anyone else's.
-Makenzie (@minalminwaji)
I choose to let my hair grow for my of reasons.
the main one being is that i use it as an exercise in radical acceptance; this is how my body is, and i’m learning to love her that way. it’s a symbol of the greater part of all the battles that have been fought against my deeply culturally ingrained self-loathing; a sort of memorial to overcoming the time i’ve spent crying in the mirror, wishing i fit a certain mold that i’m still fighting to break through. it is another crack i’ve added to the mold. i feel more connected to myself and mother earth this way, somehow. I feel more feminine and sexy and you can question that all you want, but it’s just how it is for me.
another reason is practicality. i struggle with a chronic illness which means that sometimes doing the most menial tasks (like shaving) feels like an insurmountable climb to the top of a mountain that i’ve been asked to perform to make others more comfortable. (i also have very sensitive skin and i feel cleaner being fuzzy than i do being covered in razor burn, but mad respect to those who have the energy and motivation to shave regularly, regardless of rhyme and reason).
finally,
I feel more like me when i let my hair grow.
-M.A
I remember that I shaved for the very first time around age 11 or 12. I sneakily borrowed my mother’s razor and cut my legs a lot while shaving them. I must have been too embarrassed to ask her how to teach me. Or I thought she would say I was too young. I don’t remember why I decided to shave, but I know that there was some feelings of shame and wanting to look the same as the other girls. There was also a sense of wanting to be attractive to boys. Otherwise and previously I had absolutely no thoughts or cares about my body hair. I never thought of it.
We used to change in a locker room together before PE in elementary school and there was a girl who had dark pubic hair before many of us had any hair at all. She was made fun of. Through many small moments like this and from what I saw on TV and in movies I learned that hair on a woman was not desirable. Hair on a man’s body was fine, or rarely mentioned, if at all.
Only later in life when I had taken some women’s studies courses and received direct instruction about feminism did I realize how twisted up the expectations were around a woman having hair. (And about women’s bodies in general.) I became very passionate about and dedicated to loving myself in my early twenties and that was the first time I experimented with growing out my leg hair. I did feel ashamed and embarrassed when I saw people looking at my hairy legs. I told myself that I had been conditioned to be ashamed but that truly there was no reason to feel any negativity towards the natural state of my body. My body grows hair. My body has rolls, marks, cellulite, freckles, stretch marks, smells etc. I am a human. Accepting and loving my body is constant work.
I do shave different parts of my body from time to time now. Sometimes regularly and sometimes sporadically. Whenever I do shave, it is because I truly want to and prefer to for whatever reason I feel in that moment. I refuse to shave for anyone else anymore. If a man can’t accept and love my hair as part of my human form then he is not the man for me.
It’s a delicate issue to bring up in a romantic relationship for me. As much as I can understand that everyone has sexual preferences, if a man doesn’t understand the inherent sexism motivating his preference for me to be hairless and how damaging beauty standards are for women, then I can’t accept his request. If he does understand and has done the work to learn and reverse the conditioning then I’m willing to have the conversation and perhaps even shave for him.
Ultimately, each woman will have a different relationship and set of experiences with her own body hair. Every woman should feel free to do whatever they want with their bodies including with their pubic hair. Braid it, dye it, get rid of it! Do your thing you beautiful beasts!
-Sacha Raino
Tickling my very alive skin, my body hair reminds of my aliveness... Of my womanhood. Of my desire to live fruitfully, connected to Gaia and liberated in the body in which I’ve chosen to come here in
Dark and fuzzy
Some straighter,
some curls
The tantalizing touch of my own fingers or a lover gracing my fuzz without a fuss like wind against tall grass
My body hair as choice reminds me,
my body is mine.
She is gorgeous.
She is womanly.
She is one who would dance in the garden of eden, or the temples of Isis... Undyingly devoting to the rich beauty in which she so naturally is, without force or contortion
My body hair shows me growth. She shows me pride, worthiness, deconstruction of social norms and unconscious patriarchal desires. My body hair makes shaving or trimming a celebration. And her growth and grooming, that of the same.
Whatever I choose to do with my divine feminine humanity, with my body as my temple and all the magic that she is... She is first and foremost, mine.
Belonging to my soul.
My chosen life.
My destined arrival in the feminine embodiment of pleasure, purpose and power.
And she is secondly, of earth. Bones, flesh, waters and radiant sunshine.
Like the moss the touches the soils, deep green & deep brown... She grows naturally and purposefully. I take pride in each sprout of life, my body hair graces.
————————————-
I Brittney, am an Embodied Feminine Mentor who guides woman through immersions of liberating the deep and divine feminine power and living in service to truth. I speak love to myself and the universe through poetry. And in this piece above, I speak love to the radiance of my flourishing, fuzzy womanly body.
Body hair is not just a choice and truly, isn’t something racial. Body hair acceptance/celebration/love... Is a remembrance of the profound womanhood I live within and embrace
--
Brittney Guimond
Reiki Master/Energy Healer
Feminine Embodiment Guide
Portrait Photographer
Yoga, Tantra, 1:1 Rituals & Workshops
WomynWithHeart.com
When I became pregnant, it became time to ask myself how I wanted to be seen by my son, what I wanted to teach him about the world and the people in it. Being a hairier person, body hair has always been a topic for me, since I was a child; and mostly I'd come to terms with myself, but there were still some bits that bothered me... and it bothered me that I was bothered by them. Why should I be bothered by my hairy legs, when I find them attractive on other people? Why does it make me feel inelegant, unfeminine? I decided it was time to start rooting out these ideas, and get used to my body, the way it really is.
9 months after my son was born and my body is unfamiliar to me now. I've lost a lot of weight from breastfeeding and my body looks and behaves in ways I don't recognise. Funnily, because the rest of my body has changed so much, my hair has now become a constant, familiar. The tide is turning on what I automatically think of as a "normal" feminine body in terms of hairiness.
I am, however, still asking myself why my own ideas of femininity exclude parts of myself, and why feeling totally comfortable in my own hair seems so unattainable. So I keep growing my body hair, even though it bothers me on some level... BECAUSE it bothers me.... until it doesn't.
-Leticia
