Here's Why You Shouldn't Be Embarrassed of Your Body Hair
Picture this: You're at the gate of your school. You walk in, your uniform neatly pressed, your hair fixed, your walk perfected. You feel confident and happy and maybe there's a little more strut in your stride than you're used to, but you feel good. You keep walking, and suddenly, you come to a halt. Your eyes widen. You breathe a little heavier, because you just realized you forgot to shave, and it's been days since you last shaved and your legs probably look like their own little ecosystem down there.
Maybe it's lunch time and you just walked into the bathroom to check how your hair is doing, but you are greeted with the realization that there's a lot more stubble on your face than there was last night. It makes you feel panicky and uncomfortable for the rest of the day, a lot of the time because you're afraid someone's going to end up pointing it out, and everyone's going to laugh at you for it.
Let's face reality: not all of us were born lucky enough to have little to no hair on their body. Some of us—myself included—are very hairy and are, in turn, often ridiculed because of that.
Let's face reality: not all of us were born lucky enough to have little to no hair on their body. Some of us—myself included—are very hairy and are, in turn, often ridiculed because of that.
This causes a change in how hairier girls are treated by the mainstream media, almost always offering little to no representation for them. When you do see hairy girls on TV, it's usually as a joke or as a way of mockery.
Girls with hairy underarms are always portrayed to be dirty unclean hippies in movies, and I'm sure we've all seen those teen transformation movies where the "before" image is always someone with a hairy upper lip and bushy brows.
"Remember to wax your underarms at all times—and your face, and your arms, and your legs..."
It's a depressingly endless cycle. Often, this message is told to us by men, but sadly enough, a large number of women think and say the same. Time and time again, girls are told that having hair anywhere other than on your scalp or on your eyebrows—which, apparently, should always be on fleek—is some sort of evil man-hater taboo that should be avoided at all times.
Meanwhile, men get to enjoy #NoShaveNovember and look at body hair as a status symbol for strength and manliness. Since everybody seems to have forgotten, let me remind you all what it all really means.
Hair is actually just that: hair!
Shaving has been a practice that has become a normal routine for most woman and men, especially for those that grow hair faster than others. However, it wasn't always a normal practice.
Originally, women didn't wax, nor shave their body hair—they were always covered up anyway, so there wasn't any point to it. But at the time, the advertisements that were being published worldwide would tell women that no one would find you beautiful if you had hair on your underarms just so companies could sell their razors and waxing strips.
Just a bit of advertising and body shaming quickly got every woman on the block buying said razors and shaving them clean. Until now, many still expect females to uphold this standard of soft, smooth, flawless skin—not a bump or a scratch or a single strand of hair destroying the image of femininity. Slowly, throughout the decades that pass, girls all over are starting to break that standard little by little.
As we as a society progress, more and more girls around the world are starting to feel happy and comfortable with the hair that grows on their bodies, unafraid to go out with unshaven legs or with their arms raised up in the air, uncaring of who may judge them. Some have even gone as far as dying their armpit hair!
Hopefully this type of body positivity will grow, and women everywhere will be able to leave the house either shaven or unshaven without having to explain to anyone why they have or have not done so.
Hopefully this type of body positivity will grow, and women everywhere will be able to leave the house either shaven or unshaven without having to explain to anyone why they have or have not done so.
Sure, others may judge you—they'll say it's unhygienic, that it sets a bad example; some may even bluntly say that it's plain gross, but why should that stop you from living your life?
The next time you realize you've forgotten to shave after leaving your house, don't panic. Instead, embrace it. Keep your chin up, and keep that strut in your stride. You are who you are, and a bit of stubble on your chin isn't going to change that.
