Not By The Hair On My Chinny Chin Chin

My 4 year-old daughter recently asked me if women have beards. I knew she was looking for a generalized answer – men have facial hair, women don’t – but instead I gave her the more politically correct and accurate response that most women do not have beards, however all of our bodies are different and that that some women do indeed have them.

Her curiosity satisfied, the discussion was quickly dropped and forgotten – by her at least. For me, hair – particularly the dreaded and villainous female body hair – has been at the forefront of my notice since that innocent question broke the floodgates of my lucid observation.

I think back once to when I tried on an engagement ring (long before I was ever even close to getting married) at a jewelry store while my sister had her own wedding ring cleaned by a perky saleswoman with bright white teeth and even brighter red lipstick. The ring was beautiful – elaborately vintage-esque with an ornate silver band – and I took a picture of it on my hand for any inspiration my future husband may require if or when the time ever came (note, the time has since come but we haven’t been able to afford/haven’t prioritized affording a wedding ring in the three years since our very quick and practical civil ceremony- someday maybe).

Later that day, upon revisiting that image on my phone, my eyes were drawn immediately not to the glimmering piece of earth that adorned my finger, but rather to the tuft of light brown hair that poked out from underneath it.

Disgusting.

Women are not supposed to have hair on their knuckles.

Women are not supposed to have hair anywhere, actually, except on their heads (bonus points if it’s coiffed to perfection with the aid of heating tools and multiple styling products).

Yet here was a picture that was supposed to indicate the epitome of female success (in the most outdated yet still true-even-though-we-won’t-admit-it way) ruined – in my own opinion – by the straying whisps of unwanted hair reaching their little tentacle-like tendrils out from beneath the brilliant glisten of jewels.

Thinking back to this image now doesn’t fill me with quite the same disgust it once did. Or rather, not disgust at the fact there was hair on my fingers that shouldn’t have been there.

The disgust I feel now is that of having to care. Of living in a world where women – mammals – are expected to be hairless creatures. Where it’s a requirement of a male-dominated society to have to make such an effort to fight our biology for the sake of beauty and femininity. Where my daughters have to ask which female body hairs are allowed and which are taboo.

I have hair in my butt crack. Yeah, I said it. There’s no poetically subtle way to describe that. Or how to describe how I stand in the shower, legs spread, reaching in all kinds of unimaginable contortions trying to remove said hair from said butt crack without also taking a chunk of the skin from the inside of that butt crack with it. (I’ll regret publishing this later, but hey, sometimes the truth needs to come out in all of its embarrassing glory).

There are errant dark hairs on the soft pink skin around my nipples that I occasionally pluck out with a tweezer when there’s no risk of an interrogating child or grimacing husband interrupting this ritual.

Thick prickly pieces sticking out from all directions on my big toes that I shave during the summer should anyone notice past my Birkenstock tan lines.

Hairs growing prominently between my eyebrows. Around my belly button. From the caverns of my nostrils and above my lip.

The bane of my existence – the persistent little bastards that sprout back again and again from under my chin.

Masses of it covering my arms – a constant reminder of the evolutionary kinship we still share with the ape.

But unlike our monkey cousins, we seem to have forgotten that we, too, are animal. That we are a part of the natural world where things never look perfect and growth is unruly and wild.

I calculated that over the past 20 years of my post-pubescent life, I’ve probably spent 50 days of my life on hair removal – an average of 10 minutes every day for two decades. Fifty days (almost two months) of this relatively short lifetime spent fighting the natural form of my body – and losing every single time. Fifty days I could have spent doing literally anything else that brings joy, comfort, fun, love – instead lost forever in the futile pursuit of being less a human being. Of being less a part of a natural world.

I wish I was brave enough to lounge in the sand of a populated beach, not giving a single fuck about the stares or sniggers of onlookers as my untrimmed bikini line lie exposed to the sun and surf. I wish I could wear a skirt and unabashedly flaunt unshaven legs, feeling as confident and feminine as if they were plucked soft and smooth. I wish I could Frida Kahlo my way through face-to-face interactions without the slightest concern for others’ opinions about my semi-attached eyebrows highlighting my expressions as we spoke.

But alas, I am a conditioned.

The rules of society and idea of beauty and feminine form so engrained deep in the core of my soul that they may be eternally stuck there, weighing, as they do, on the conscience every time I look in the mirror, right before reaching for a tweezer or razor blade.

I choose, rather begrudgingly, to continue the silly and vapid removal of my body hair, partaking, albeit unwillingly, in the acceptable behavior of womankind. But trust that the heft of that decision weighs far more on my body and soul than the hair itself ever did,

-Bailee