Can Brands Be Activists, Too? We Think Yes

A few weeks ago, a few of my closest friends and I were sitting on the back porch of my friend’s lake house. We were chatting and sipping White Claw classy beverages when the topic of body hair came up. Someone asked the guys in the group if they’d feel weird dating a woman who chose not to shave. The general consensus was that yeah, it’d be a little weird.

Over the next few days, I thought a lot about that conversation. I examined my own internalized sexism. I boiled my feelings down to a few thoughts:

• Body hair on women should be normalized.

• Society should support people having as much or as little body hair as they want.

• A selectively hairless standard for women is time-consuming, expensive, oppressive and stupid.

I, myself, have a complicated relationship with depilation. You see, I’m a self-proclaimed feminist-in-progress, à la Jameela Jamil. Over the years, I’ve read many articles about how “real feminists” don’t remove their hair because it’s just conforming to oppressive and outdated Eurocentric beauty standards and/or catering to the male gaze.

However, I’ve noticed that whenever I ask the women in my life, they often tell me that they like shaving. That there’s no better feeling than sliding into clean sheets with silky smooth legs.

Bullshit.

Well, at least partially.

I, too, love that feeling. But I also love the feeling of my arms sliding through those same clean sheets. Arms that still sport all the natural hair my momma gave me.

So do I prefer shmexy, freshly shaved legs to the stubbly bullshit that happens when I’ve gone a few days sans razor? Obviously. But what I’d prefer even more is if I’d never been conditioned to shave that hair in the first place. Because then it’d still be soft, flexible and would never cross my mind when I was climbing into bed. I wouldn’t have to try to convince myself that I’m “shaving for myself” when I know full well that if leg hair was as commonplace as arm hair in the U.S., I’d be a wealthier, fuzzier, more confident woman with a third degree because of all the extra time I’d have had on my hands.

Yet, I choose to shave. I do this because at the end of the day, you have to pick your battles and there’s so much wickedness in the world that this one just didn’t make the cut. It’s exhausting to keep up with all the creative ways humans have devised to fork one another over.

Not shaving in the U.S. in 2019 would require me to constantly process other people’s disapproval and outright disgust, while also battling my own internalized notions of “beauty” which is often conflated with worth.

So I spend precious time and money ridding my body of random patches of hair according to whatever standard our patriarchal society has deemed acceptable this year. 

But despite where it may seem like I’m heading, this is not a blog about how marketers are or are not to blame for shaving. If you want a history of the pointless practice, Chelsie’s been there/done that. According to her, the marketing industry didn’t create society’s rule that women have to consent to light torture whenever they want to hit the beach. But even if that’s true, it sure as hell has capitalized on it.

Growing up seeing beautiful, aspirational women with invariably slick, hairless bodies plastered across billboards and TV screens teaches you something. Body hair and beauty are mutually exclusive. I mean Jesus, even advertisements for shaving, waxing, laser hair removal, etc. show women “removing hair” from an already hairless leg, or armpit or upper lip.