My sister and I are quite hairy, but this bothers her more than me. I shave my legs and wax my moustache but she's gone for full laser treatments. She came round to my flat the other day and was horrified to see I hadn't shaved under my arms for a few days. I say, if it's good enough for Julia Roberts, it's good enough for me! Who's right?
Amina, London
You are, Amina, of course, but this is not to say that your sister is in the wrong. The issue of women's body hair, and specifically the significance of divesting oneself of it or keeping it, has been in the news again of late, as it often is, sporadically. At Arizona State University, Breanne Fahs, professor of women and gender studies, has been offering her female students extra credit if they stop shaving under their arms for 10 weeks and write a journal about the experience. Male students, meanwhile, can earn extra credit, too, if they indulge in what magazines call "under-arm manscaping" (no explanation needed, presumably). According to Fahs, this is to help students "think critically about societal norms and gender roles". Meanwhile, there has been a sudden burst of coverage of the four-year-old Hairy Legs Club on Tumblr, which is the Ronseal of Tumblrs, as it does just what it says: women post photos of their proudly unshaven legs.
Both the Hairy Legs Club and the Arizona State professor are ultimately saying the same thing: not that women should universally stop with the depilation, but that they should question why they they think they should be hairless. And maybe the best way to question it is to give up the razors and the wax for a while and see how it feels to be totally au naturel.
There is, unquestionably, plenty of sense here. There is no reason at all, really, why women should be expected to shave their legs and under their arms and men not. Yet the link between femininity and hairlessness is so strong that even the most well-intentioned feminist can flinch a little at seeing photos of hairy gams and pits.
There is a brilliant scene in Bridget Jones's Diary (the book, not the far inferior film) in which Bridget spends an entire day "harvesting and crop-spraying and farming" herself in preparation for her date with Daniel Cleaver. "Sometimes I wonder what I would be like if left to revert to nature," she writes. "With a full beard and handlebar moustache on each shin, Denis Healey eyebrows, face a graveyard of dead skin cells, spots erupting, long curly nails like a Struwwelpeter …" (This is one of the many reasons why the book of Bridget Jones's Diary is so much better than the film: the film merely reduces the story to Bridget's love life whereas the book captures so perfectly the various neuroses so many thirtysomething women have, from body image craziness to obsession with the tidiness of their married friends' homes.)
As Helen Fielding subtly – and maybe not even all that intentionally – signals here, it's not that Bridget spent her day tearing her body to shreds in preparation for her date that's the problem, it's that she feels she has to; because she is so full of self-loathing that she imagines that if she doesn't she'll look like Chewbacca.
Like most women who have grown up in the western world, I have spent a significant portion of my adult life torturing every single hair on my body, from those on my head (blow-drying, straightening, curling) to those everywhere else (waxing, shaving, plucking, threading). I could probably have found a cure for cancer in the amount of time I've devoted to all the crop rotation I do on my body. And yes, I know this makes me, to borrow the title of Roxane Gay's brilliant new book, a Bad Feminist. "I shave my legs! Again, this mortifies me. If I take issue with the unrealistic standards of beauty women are held to, I shouldn't have a secret fondness for fashion and smooth calves, right?" Gay writes. But I feel that there are more important things for women to worry about than whether it's right or wrong to shave their legs, and one of those things is for women to stop beating themselves up so much. You want to shave your legs and under your arms? Great, do it. You don't? Fantastic, don't. All that matters is why you're doing it and you're making the choice for you. Like Amina, you may find that you can be bothered to shave some things (moustache, legs) but are not overly arsed about others (under your arms), and that's just fine. We're humans. No one can ask for consistency here.
Of course, the tricky part is parsing the why. When you grow up in a society that places such a value on female hairlessness, it can be tricky figuring out whether you're shaving your legs because you genuinely want to or because the message is ingrained in your brain. But the only way to figure that out is to give up the razors and the wax for a few weeks and see how it genuinely feels and trust yourself to be able to distinguish between "doing something because you want to" and "doing something because you're suffused with body disgust". If you feel that, actually, your hairy armpits and legs are beautiful because humans are meant to have hair and that's the way it is, then that's just grand and, frankly, lucky you. Think of the time and money and pain you'll save.
It is likely that some may question your choice, and you may question others, but the world would be a much better place if we could all learn to stop being so Judgey McJudge of one another. Different things work for different people: this is a universal truth, but it is also a top secret and if it ever got out, it would spell the end of all women's magazines, and we can't possibly have that, can we? In your particular case, Amina, it sounds as if your sister is taking out her anxieties about her own body on you, because you're her sister and therefore she sees more of herself in you than she does in other people. Don't sweat it. This is what being a sister is all about (well, that and complaining to one another about how crazy your parents are). Simply smile sweetly at her next time she does it and tell her that you appreciate her input, but what works for her might not work for you and she can now shut the hell up and make you a cup of tea. That, too, is what being a sister is all about. And then smile calmly at her back as she switches on the kettle and enjoy the gentle sensation of a breeze wafting through your plush and generous under-arm hair.
Post your questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Email ask.hadley@theguardian.com.
