cimorene

The summary of this entry in image form is:

^*

More specifically, I am reflecting over my personal history of struggles to get rid of body hair in spite of its extraordinary difficulty, vs the particular fascist beauty standards that have to do with body hair.

This was prompted specifically by having to at least temporarily give up on doing anything to my eyebrows except trimming, because the skin around them has become irritated by a number of recent ingrown hairs.

I've never been really keen on removing the hair from everywhere US culture tells me I should (legs and bikini line, any hint of color on the upper lip, and 'grooming' of the eyebrows), partly for feminist reasons and partly because it is difficult and painful for me to do.

One of my vividest memories, and near the top of the Grooming Socialization and Lesbians tags in my memory files, was a time when I was perhaps 10-12 years old and we took a close friend of mine along with us to visit the Community Supported Agriculture farm (an exciting treat because of the fresh berries, tomatoes, and flowers). The CSA was owned by a lesbian couple - the only lesbian couple I knew personally from my childhood who were together when I met them and still are, incidentally; there weren't tons of lesbians in Alabama in the 90s. As we followed one of our hosts up the driveway to the house where the flower garden was, my friend leaned over and whispered to me how gross it was that her legs weren't shaved. It wasn't something I'd ever even noticed about her, or any other woman at that age. I'm pretty sure my mom didn't shave her legs all the time, but it had never occurred to me to care. I was stricken by this message: she was finding fault with an adult person whom I had considered to be flawlessly cool; and she was giving me a standard to live up to in the future if I didn't want to be "gross" to people like her. This made me a little angry too, and I did defend Carol to her on the grounds that she certainly didn't need to dress herself up especially to work outside on her own farm in the summertime. But I always hear that judging voice from someone whose opinion I cared about when I'm trying to convince myself it's okay to go out without shaving my legs.

Aside from the fact that I cut myself frequently when I try to shave, that is the best (and most problem-free) way to do my legs. I am Jewish - specifically, 3/8 Polish and Russian Ashkenazi Jewish, but I'm very well acquainted with the type of body hair everyone on my not-Jewish side has, and it's very different - which is probably where my thick, coarse, dark hair comes from (though the missing 8th that's neither Jewish nor maternal-side was my Welsh great-grandmother, who died at 99 with a head full of wiry black hairs, so that's also a possibility). Home wax kits don't work on my legs: they leave about half the hair behind, enough so that I have to actually shave the remnants. Home hair-dissolving stuff doesn't work on my legs either, even if I leave it on twice as long as it says on the package. It doesn't burn my skin, either. (My skin and my hair are both really badass, apparently, which is kind of ironic considering what a weakling I am.)

When I was a teenager I hated swimming, because I could literally never find a swimsuit that would cover all the dark hair at my bikini line, but any attempt to remove that hair resulted in excruciatingly painful and itchy torture when it grew back in - red irritated ingrown bumps every time. (Red welts from ingrown hairs is also what happens when waxed or dissolved hairs grow back in on my legs, for extra fun times.) The extra-long and curly hairs, nowadays, continue sporadically halfway down my thighs, and every last one of them produces pain and suffering when it grows back if it's even shaved. And of course there's also the fact that the removal of pubic hair from women, specifically, seems weirdly fetishy and infantilizing. The attempts to make adult women like little girls and little girls like adult women in Western culture are disturbing enough without that. (Even if that isn't the origin of the practice.)

I was also horribly conscious back then of the faint shadow of colored hairs on my upper lip. There were a few years where I tried to bleach them, in fact, because shaving them didn't work (the shadow was still visible that way - I think from the root of the hair showing through the skin). Sometime in my early 20s I had a nervous breakdown and stopped caring about that, fortunately.

But the one hair-removal thing I've had all along and never given up, and even had a relatively problem-free relationship with, was tweezing my eyebrows. I don't say I've always done a great job, because I had a couple of periods of over-tweezing and then there was that early period when I was briefly tweezing from the outside before someone's borrowed copy of Seventeen or whatever set me straight on the ground rules of eyebrow grooming, but mostly I have been tweezing steadily, on my own, since I was 14 or so. Eyebrow tweezing is easy to get into because you can figure out how to do it on your own, and it's only a tiny bit painful to me, so it was easy to start small and then take away more and more until sanity returned. Just this week, though, those ingrown hairs caused me to look at myself in the mirror and say "OW" and also "How can I prevent this from happening?" and also "Why was I even doing this in the first place, anyway?" Like seriously, what is this bizarre conceit that a line of hair growing exactly along the browbone in a line with clearly-delineated edges is inherently superior to a thicker line of hair growing along the browbone with some individual hairs visible at the edges, producing a slightly softer line? I have looked at people's faces plenty of times, observed eyebrows that did not have a clearly-delineated edge to them, and not reacted with revulsion or whatever.

Also, can I just say for the record that more than once, during my upbringing in Alabama, I was with groups of girls when more than one of the girls present expressed revulsion at:

the idea that anyone might not shave their legs and armpits even if it was winter and they would be covered by clothes

the idea that anyone might ever shower less often than once per day

Then again, I can also pull memories of a sizeable minority of the girls in question expressing clueless privileged opinions about race and class, or unkindly mocking this one girl who got bullied a lot for her social cluelessness and for having a scar on her scalp (it's always been understandable, if reprehensible, that they talked shit about her lack of social skills, because she unintentionally made a lot of people uncomfortable, including me a time or two - although that doesn't mean they got off my mental list of Okay This Person Is Kind of a Dick - but I've never been able to fathom mocking her for this scar, which was the result of surgery so it's not like she could have conceivably done anything about it and it wasn't even disfiguring or unsightly...), so I should probably stop being so disturbed by the spectre of their idiotic and definitely wrong opinions hypothetically being echoed by complete strangers who might happen to see me on the street or at the pool.

I can't deny that it is a bit disturbing, though. I've never managed to give up shaving yet, despite struggling with myself every single summer. And when I give in and go for the razor, I'm always hearing those voices - girls who were my friends talking about how 'gross' they thought hair was. But maybe this will be the year when I tell the imaginary voices to shut up...

* icon I made like 10 years ago using the webstore images of a t-shirt I used to see all the time. (It might have been from Northern Sun, which is a US lefty political shirt/bumper sticker type store, or from the National Organization for Women.)