- Hey, it's Rowan, and today
we're going to be talking about women and body hair.
Now the spoiler alert if you haven't read
the title of this video,
but I don't really shave my legs.
I was gonna show you my legs,
but I've realised that the cameras really high up
so I'm like, oh, no not gonna happen.
Hang on, huh, ah, that, huh.
Did you see 'em?
I'm gonna film them a little bit later
so you can see them properly.
So I think that it's pretty undeniable
that in the UK at least at the moment,
it's kind of assumed that
women will remove their leg hair
when their legs are out in public.
Like, that seems pretty normal
as an exercise that women are expected to do that,
and I think that's something we should probably break down.
It's what we're gonna be doing this video today.
And I think it's important to note
that there's gonna be a difference between
why women as a collective are expected
to do this thing,
and then why individual women choose to do it.
I think those two things can like mix and merge
and interact with each other,
but I think that ultimately,
it's going to be kind of different.
So in terms of why women are expected to do it in general,
if we were to look back in history,
this isn't something that's new,
women removing their body hair,
if we look at ancient Rome, for example,
it was often seen as a class status thing,
and the Romans, like, genuinely had a lot of technology,
I suppose, for removing hair.
It wasn't even like one method like they had creams
and, like, stones and razors,
and they were getting real technical about it.
They were into it.
But this isn't something that's remained constant. Right.
So I think that there's a really interesting shift
that happens at the beginning of the 20th century
where a lot of historians talk about adverts
that suddenly pop up.
So Gillette, for example, does this advert
where it talks about women's underarm hair
which is just called objectionable hair,
and that's something that seems like a new thing
that you had to get rid of.
And I don't think that this was necessarily just invented
randomly in order to sell razors,
kind of, but it was also linked to the fact
that the way people were dressing was changing.
So if you had styles of dresses
that went all the way to the floor,
it wasn't necessarily something had to be talked about,
advertised, but with dresses that didn't have sleeves
that was when this hair became objectionable.
If we shall think about that.
It didn't become objectionable
'til people had to see it in public,
and then suddenly, wasn't allowed to be there.
We're looking into this a little later in the video.
So let's get into the reasons why women
are expected to get rid of their hair.
Number one, it is unattractive.
So, so
let's break this down, shall we
because what is attractive and what isn't
is not an immutable truth.
It's not an objective fact.
It's heavily informed, not just by individual choices,
but also socially.
Now you may be watching this yourself
and thinking, well I don't find
women with body hair attractive.
Here's a fun fact for you if you didn't already know,
um, women can grow hair
in all the places that men can.
Wow, incredible.
I genuinely had a friend at university,
a man in his 20s who had slept with a lot of women
who on a Sunday morning
after he'd clearly slept with this girl the night before
came into my room and was like,
Rowan, can I ask you something?
Um, can women get hair out,
do women have hair on their nipples?
He was, he was a man in his 20s,
and he had slept with multiple women,
and he genuinely didn't think that women
could grow hair on their.
I just, because he'd never seen it.
The amount of women that he'd seen naked in real life,
on the internet, in porn everywhere,
and they'd removed their nipple hair
so that he genuinely thought the women
just couldn't grow hair around them.
This is how ridiculous it is
that there's thing that's completely natural
that is removed to the point
where people don't think it even existed in the first place.
So I think if you're someone who says it isn't attractive,
I think really look at the fact that it's like
these images of what is attractive have been fed to you
by people in a society and a general idea
that has been dictated to you,
that these aren't necessarily these innate ideas
that you've come up with yourself.
It seems to be linked to ideas of
self-respect or professionalism.
The time that it takes to do
and the upkeep that it takes,
it's seen as a kind of self-respect in a lot of ways.
This sort of very random if we think about,
piece of self maintenance
seems to say something externally
about what's going on internally
that it indicates something about your character
because there's such an expectation that you will shave
just as a bare minimum,
when you don't, you dip below into the negative.
You're seen as lazy
or unhygienic or dirty.
So how can someone respect themselves
and be seen as professional
when they are unhygienic and dirty?
But here's the thing,
that idea it's not rooted in any actual facts
because double standards time,
boys and men not expected to shave
their armpits or their legs,
and no one's really concerned about them being
unhygienic or dirty because of it.
So full disclosure, um, I don't shave my legs,
but I do shave my armpits,
and that's because I have something called hyperhidrosis,
and Parkes Weber syndrome.
Me shaving my armpits,
is because it helps alleviate a medical symptom.
Just being a woman isn't a medical symptom,
and I think the big overarching thing
that pulls all this together
and that explains the double standard is that
it's seen as feminine.
But here's a question, what is feminine, right.
Because the way I see it,
if we're taking women and we're saying
that they need to have no body hair,
we're essentially like de-aging them.
We're saying that they have to look like
as much like children as possible,
as young as possible
because I think that traditional ideas of femininity
are of like youth and weakness
and innocence and naivety.
And I think the idea that women should have an obligation
to make their bodies reflect that,
it's just kind of,
it's just wild when you think about it for a second.
So full, full disclosure,
this is not something that I have always,
like, thought about, been thinking about,
you know, it's not something I've always been like,
I'm never gonna shave my legs.
I shaved my legs for most of my life.
I was mortified to even think that I could go outside
and someone could see me with even like
a speck of hair on my legs.
And it was until I started to
think about these things really critically
and realised that I didn't
actually shave my hair all the time.
I shaved my hair when people would be able to see my hair.
I didn't shave it in winter
when I was wearing like jeans all the time,
and the only person you would see my legs was me.
And when you think about it like that,
it's like, oh, I'm definitely doing this for other people.
And I think for some people, we live in a society
in which the way that people view us has an effect.
And I think for a lot of people
that's reason enough to remove their body hair
that it might affect
how people see them in a negative way.
But for me I was like, why am I doing this.
And it still felt very anxious,
it's still felt very self-conscious,
and it wasn't until I was in these spaces
with queer women specifically
that that became something
that I was able to fully embrace
and be pretty open about.
And I think as well because I identify as very feminine,
as like a femme queer woman
that I had these ideas about what femininity had to be
and that shaving your body hair was one of those things,
right, that made you feminine,
that fit into that aesthetic,
that fit into that identity,
and I think going to these spaces with like queer people
and people are gender non-conforming
and just all of these ideas
are playing around with what gender means
meant that it was something that didn't have to be
necessary like a big political statement
because it shouldn't be,
and it didn't have to be something I had to do
or didn't have to do,
but it was saying that I could decide for myself.
I think it's important to note that
this is all from a point of view of just me
and I am a white sis queer woman.
And so I think it's really important
if this is the topic that interests you
to go and seek out the voices of women
who have other intersections
because I think that this
massively will change the experience for,
you know, like trans women, women of colour
so go and seek that out.
So I hope you enjoyed that video.
This was not to try and persuade anyone to do
or not do anything with their bodies.
I think that, you know, we all exist within this society
and within its history
and within its structures,
and we all have our own individual preferences
that lay on top of it.
It was just starting to think about.
So until I see you next time, bye.