This essay focuses on the issue of women’s body hair in Western Europe. It observes the ritual of hair removal and it’s quasi initiation into womanhood. As well, this report examines the imagery of femininity in the Western world, and why hair is problematic to it. It also discusses the debates on hygiene, in which hair is a great part in women lives. Since this was written in 2013, the debate has evolved but the text is still relevant.
Photography credit above: Samantha Casolari
Many difficulties came while doing this report. First, and most importantly, there are not that many written analyses of female body hair and rare were the books I read that gave me insights on it. European historical and cultural constructions of beauty seem to have made female hair a tabooed subject. One would just have to look at the scandal created by Gustave Courbet’s ‘Origin of the World’. Indeed, the depiction of female pubic hair only appeared in European fine arts during the nineteenth century, and the subject has not been developed much more in theory since then. As well, even though I got many informative answers, doing research on hair is quite complicated because it is a (very) private concern that not everyone is willing to share. Moreover, I believe that some of the answers I got needed quite a lot of analysis to be comprehended. For example, when I asked my informants if they felt pressure to get rid of their hair, I received several problematic answers. One told me that “No, I do it for myself” which made me think: if she had never heard about the aesthetic ideals of the beautiful woman with smooth skin, would she have started and still be removing her hair? This essay will focus on the ritual of hair removal and the girl’s comprehension of how men and the media portray the ideal female body. I remember being so conscious of my hair when reaching puberty. Going to the swimming pool and thinking all the boys would make fun of me. This subject interest me because pilosity is constitutional of men and women’s body. However, when I was young, I felt pressured to remove my body hair and I wanted to know how other women around me felt about that.
I
When I first started this report, I talked to about 20 to 25 girls aged in between 18 and 26 years old about the subject so they would know what to expect. I then send them all a grouped email with specific questions. I told them their names would not appear on the report and that they could reply in private emails if they preferred. I was surprised by the fact that even though the big majority of the girls I interviewed knew each other and told me that they were not ashamed of their hair or what they did with them, only three of them wrote their answers on the group email. The others send me private replies. This actually helped me organize my train of thought. If the girls I knew and most trusted to give me accurate answers were altogether embarrassed to talk about their pilosity, this had to reveal a certain pressure in our society against the woman’s body. I believe the methods I used to write this report enhanced my understanding of this. By sending emails, my informants were able to write what they wanted privately and in their own way. They were able to be more reflexive in their answers because they had a longer period of time to think about the questions than in oral interviews. The first questions I asked my informants were about the pressure and the shame felt on their pilosity. Most of the girls told me they did feel pressure, a lot for some of them. The ones who did not feel pressured still removed them, as I have said in my introduction. Therefore, I was facing the fact that yes, even though some girls do not feel impelled to epilate; all of them did. This meant for me that at some point in their lives they had felt compelled to do it. And then it hit me. It was a ritual. The girl becomes woman by removing for the first time her baby hair. She feels the pressure from society, from its magazines, advertisements and sometimes from the mockery of boys who would undergo their puberty later.
Van Gennep’s Rites of Passage was clearly very helpful for my theory. From my own experience and those of some of my informants, the removal of hair is, as I have said, an important aspect of becoming a woman. Hair, unlike menstruation or intellectual maturity, is one of the physical aspects of puberty, which can be observed and compared. The girl realizes she is becoming a woman when she starts having hair as she has seen and observed the pubic hair of her mother. However she doesn’t only become woman when reaching puberty. An important aspect of becoming an adult is also knowing what to do with these transformations. The girl will therefore imitate what she has seen her mother do, how she behaves, how she takes care of herself and so on. Education and imitation are dominant parts in the art of using one’s own body (Mauss, 5). One of my informants explained that when she first started getting hair under her armpits, she stole her mother’s razor to replicate what she had once seen her mother do. Even if the mother has not instructed her daughter to the removal of body hair, the girl will herself want to do it at a time she feels conscious about them. Through my interviews, hair removal seemed to be an important transmission of knowledge from mother to daughter. “My mum taught me to shave...fun bonding times” told me one of my informants. However, not everyone I interviewed had been taught by their parent, some had learned from school, from their friends or from magazines. If even state education and magazines write about and discuss the issues of women’s pilosity, it is therefore not surprising that women feel pressured to make the effort of having smooth skin. I believe, through what I have been told, that hair, here body hair, falls into several categories of Van Gennep’s rites of passage. First, the appearance of body hair could be considered as part of his discussed preliminal phase. Indeed, the woman is separated from her childhood when she starts growing hair, which usually makes her uneasy. “I used to be self-conscious,” said one of my informants who is now undergoing a laser hair removal. The first removal of hair I would then consider as the liminal phase. Indeed, the European girl wants to remove her body hair when they start appearing at the beginning of puberty. Whether she stole a razor to do it, does it with her friends’ help, or has been advised by her mother, she will remove her baby hair and those will never be the same again. She is now a woman because she has acted upon her childhood and for some, has gone through the pain of getting rid of it. As well, the adolescent is now getting closer to the European aesthetics of beauty. She is integrating the norms as well as being “incorporated into the world of sexuality”. (Van Gennep, 67) From then on, she is in the postliminal phase where she joins the new world of European womanhood. Indeed, this “cutting away” from her ‘former’ self does not end. Now that she has become an esthetic woman, she is socially and culturally pressured to maintain that standard by continuing to shave or wax her hairy legs, armpits, groin and for some, even more. Hair removal will then become almost as a “seasonal ceremony”. The word seasonal is particularly interesting because several of my informants used it when speaking about the frequency of this particular care. This will bring me to my second part, in which I analyze the regularity of women’s shaving and waxing and why they do it.
I was interested to know how often women groom and what they would do first. I believe this reveals the intensity of the pressure as well as the politics of body hair. However, it was a hard task because hormonal differences distribute the hair differently for each individual (Synnott, 112) and hair type and color influence the woman’s choice and timing to remove her hair. I observed that women who were born with darker and thicker hair shave, wax or epilate more often than those with finer and lighter colored hair. This is due to the fact that if the hair is darker, it is more visible and therefore, it is considered from a Western point of view, less attractive. (Synnott, 113) All women I interviewed told me they would not let their body hair grow too long, which shows that in any case, they do not consider it beautiful. All of them told me they first and always make sure their armpits are clean, as it is the most visible area that is hairy (excluding the head). “Armpits essential” as one girl told me. Moreover, when I asked in what order they would shave, the general answer I got was “ I shave my armpits first, then my legs, then my pubic hair. I guess it is because the armpits are the most visible, then legs, and only the people I’m sleeping with will see my pubic hair anyway.” This shows us that women themselves do not consider visible body hair within the norms of beauty. “It is much more acceptable to have hairier legs than to have hairy armpits for a girl!” I will now try and understand why hair is so problematic for women, and why it is considered, as my informant implies, almost “unacceptable”. “The shame of one sex is the glory of the opposite sex” as Synnott writes drawing from a quote of St Paul (103). Indeed, this is interesting when discussing hair. Whereas chest and leg hair are symbols of virility and sex for males, it is quite the contrary for females. “I realize hair are not considered attractive by men, and other women judge you on your pilosity” affirmed one of my informants when I asked her why she shaves. She here confirms the general belief that hair is not acceptable for women. The idea of judgment is particularly interesting as well because it comes from the pressure of society on how women should take care of themselves. Hair is an important aspect of this maintenance as it is one of the most powerful symbols of individuality and of group identity. It is physical therefore it is personal. However, it is public as well because it is visible. (Synnott, 103) The norm wants women to have long and beautiful head hair while the man has short ones. Body hair will be the contrary though; men should be hairy whereas women should not. Visible hair on armpits for example, can create embarrassment or shame. “I consider that as long as they are absent, the fact that you could have them have you not shaved/ waxed doesn't matter.” In this statement, one of my informants clearly shows the issues of women’s hair. They exist but have to be absent in order for them to be unimportant or even, accepted.
II
“The body becomes… the site at which women, consciously or not, accept the meanings that circulate in popular culture about ideal beauty… the female body comes to serve as a site of inscription, a billboard for the dominant cultural meanings that the female body is to have with postmodernity.” (Balsamo, 1996, 78 in Reischer, 300)
This is an important concept when talking about hair. Indeed, the close relationship between the physical and the social is clearly shown through this part of the body. (Synnott, drawing from Douglas, 123) Since the sixties, feminists have reflected on the fact that the removal of body hair for woman is linked with the oppression of male and the ‘stereotypical ideal of female’. (Synnott, 118) However, I have seen through my interviews, that the socio-cultural and historical constructions of female softness have not yet disappeared. The women I interviewed are independent, strong, and most of them are not ones to be stamped on by men. However, several of them informed me that they had gone through the experience of a man making a comment, or actually asking them to shave or wax. None of them seemed too traumatized by it, but they did say that it was because they had been letting themselves down a bit on the hair issue, and that the “mutual understanding” within their relationships had made it all right. The few boys I interviewed as well added a bit of perspective to my research even though I am focusing here on females. They told me that they had personally never asked their partner to do anything with her pilosity “but if she started growing lots of publicly visible hair I would feel a bit uneasy about it”, one told me. I once again am confronted to the idea that women should maintain her smoothness and not grow visible body hair. Even if it wasn’t that much of an issue for the girls who have been asked to shave, they agreed to do it because they thought it was not nice on their body. This shows us once again that even if the pressure does not always come from men, women pressure themselves or are pressured by other females. Indeed, women and girls, as well as the media and the accepted historical and cultural norms, “play a critical role” in the formation of body ideals and what is acceptable. I believe that if we, women, did not care about our hair and we let it grow naturally, our pilosity would not be an aesthetic issue. Indeed, the women who had never been asked to epilate by a man were shocked by my question (Have you ever been asked to shave by a man you were sleeping with? If so, did you do it/ would you do it?). The answers were quite blunt “I would tell him to fuck off… and find someone else to fuck” or “I’d tell him to go wax his balls and see how it felt”. However, they all told me that even though they “would be quite offended”, they would be embarrassed, even “awfully ashamed” if someone ever asked them that question. As well, some of them told me that they did it “instinctively anyway” or made sure a man “never had to ask” therefore reproducing the norms of beauty. But what I felt through my interviews is that more than being pressured by boys or boyfriends, most women seem to care about what everyone thinks. First, the fact that mothers teach their daughters show that they feel it is their duty to educate their girl to the standards of the beautiful body. This beautiful body is “the primary site for the construction and performance of gender, and specifically femininity.” (Reischer, 297). Therefore it seems that to be feminine one has to be beautiful and to be beautiful one has to be hairless. The women I interviewed echo this common belief, which requires quasi discipline and at least preparation. In situations where they want to be desirable, such as parties or when they are ‘expecting’ sexual intercourse, most tend to shave, wax or epilate. “I would maybe try to find a way to shave before anything happens”. However, those in relationships do not seem to care as much but as we have seen it is usually because of a “mutual understanding”. However, sex or parties are not the only reasons women will remove their body hair. Hygiene has been mentioned by a few of my informants who believe hair to be something related to dirt. “I don't like my leg/arm hair n unwanted pussy hair - makes me feel dirty n smelly n frigid” as one of the girls informed me. As Douglas says, “where there is dirt there is system” (35) and dirt offends the order. I believe that because the history of men have created this idea of unwanted body hair on females, (Synnott, 113) some European girls tend now to consider that their hair is unhygienic and even dirty, although they wash regularly. Because hair on a female body is not part of the norm of aesthetics and of the ideal woman, it has therefore been confined as “disgusting”.
From the imagery of femininity and what my informants have told me, we have observed that there is definitely some pressure on the woman’s body in the West. Its shape, its color and also its softness have been set into the framework of the ideal woman. I have focused here on pilosity because it is something inherent yet malleable of our body. It has been put under quite a lot of pressure throughout history, symbolizing more masculinity than femininity and even representing dirtiness. Indeed not only are we women constantly reminded to shave or wax by advertisements on television but as well the historically and culturally constructed ideals of women’s beauty do not include our body hair. My informants have proved to me that hair is something they are constantly aware of and that they are often waxing, shaving or epilating in order to keep with the standards set out in the European conception of the beautiful body.
Bibliography
Bonner, Frances; Goodman, Lizbeth; Allen, Richard; Janes, Linda and King, Catherine (eds) (1992) Imagining Women: Cultural Representation and Gender, The Open University
Bordo, Susan, (1989) The Body and the Reproduction of Feminity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault. Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing.
Eds. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP90-110
Douglas, Mary (1991) Purity and Danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo, Routledge
Conboy, Katie; Medina, Nadia and Stanbury, Sarah (eds) (1997), Writing on the body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, Columbia University Press
Foucault, Michel, (1984) The History of Sexuality III: The Care of the Self, Penguin books, London, 97-145
Hubbard, Ruth (1990) The Politics of Women’s Biology, Rutgers University Press
Martin, Emily, (1992) The Woman in the Body, Beacon Press, Boston
Mauss, Marcel, (1973) ‘Techniques of the Body’ Economy and Society 2; 1, 70-88
McGrath, Roberta, (2002) Seeing her sex: Medical archives and the female body, Manchester University Press
Reischer, Erika (2004), “The Body Beautiful: Symbolism and Agency in the Social World, Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 287
Suleiman, Rubin Susan (ed), (1986) The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, Harvard University Press
Synnott, Anthony, (1993) The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society, Routledge
Van Wolputte, Steven, 2004. Hang on to your Self: Of Bodies, Embodiment and Selves, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33, 251-69n
Weinbaum, Alys Eve; Thomas, Lynn M.; Ramamurthy, Priti; Poiger, Uta G.; Yue Dong, Madeleine and Barlow, Tani E. (eds) (2008), The modern girl around the world: Consumption, Modernity and Globalisation, Duke University Press