Earlier this year, actor Channing Tatum shared that after years of intense grooming while filming the Magic Mike franchise, he would no longer be waxing himself clean before showing up on set. “I think we’re going to change with the times,” he told Ellen DeGeneres. “You don’t need to look like a Chinese Crested hairless cat to look sexy anymore.”
Emma Corrin on the August, 2022 cover of Vogue.Supplied
Luckily for Tatum, he’s a man and can choose to opt out of looking like a Chinese Crested hairless cat without facing any real consequences. As a culture, we’ve become accustomed to seeing men posed shirtless on magazine covers, underarms exposed in all their bushy glory.
Women, on the other hand, have no such luck. From ad campaigns reminding them of how much more beautiful they’ll look and feel after a fresh shave, to the misogynistic abuse regularly hurled at women who dare to have hair anywhere other than on their heads, there is no shortage of societal messaging telling women that having body hair is bad.
Recently, though, actor Emma Corrin, who starred as Princess Diana in The Crown on Netflix, was featured on the cover of Vogue with their underarm hair showing. It’s left to be seen how social media will react to the photos, but the generally positive responses that the cover has received so far could be a sign that the cultural conversation around body hair is moving in a positive direction.
When Montreal-based Esther Calixte-Bea was growing up, there were no role models like Corrin to make her feel comfortable with her body hair. She was only 11 when she first noticed the way other people reacted to seeing it. “I’m a very hairy person,” she laughs. “So when I was growing body hair, I don’t think I ever really thought anything of it until I saw my friends’ reactions, and they were so shocked. That’s when I knew that something was wrong, and I shouldn’t have hair.”
She still carries painful memories of seeing other girls be teased for their visible body hair.
“This girl had really hairy arms, so she was called Chewbacca,” she says. “This [other] girl … her boyfriend said he doesn’t like her with a moustache, so she removed it just for him. And I just remember all these moments that scared me and I didn’t want to be made fun of so I made sure to always hide it.”
Fine for men, but not for women?
According to Breanne Fahs, a professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, the current cultural disdain for female body hair can be traced back to the early days of fashion photography, which featured aggressive campaigns such as the ones by the Gillette razor company starting in about the early 1920s.
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“The ads from that period are wild. They show a woman opening shutters to her house, and then having armpit hair and people beneath her screaming and running away,” says Fahs, whose new book Unshaved: Resistance and Revolution in Women’s Body Hair Politics looks at how body hair fits in to the broader cultural landscape of women’s reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, neoliberal intrusions into beauty regimens and even women’s place in society.
As Fahs explains, the debate about female body hair today fits into a much larger pattern of controlling women’s bodies, and telling women that their natural state is inadequate or somehow objectionable. “I think it’s more about patriarchal control than anything else,” she says.
That control is maintained by the perpetuation of certain myths surrounding body hair. And when it comes to myths, Fahs has heard them all. “Some people don’t know that women’s hair will stop growing. It’s like they think it will just keep growing, [which is] very weird to me because of course, they know that that’s not true for men.”
She’s also heard that hair makes you smell and sweat more, and even that bugs will grow in it. “And of course, we know quite the opposite is true,” she says. “Hair is not the opposite of hygienic.” In fact, body hair such as pubic hair can help prevent the transmission of microorganisms, and maintain an optimal temperature for our genitalia.
More than just beauty
But this isn’t just about beauty norms. Fahs explains there are real material consequences for women who choose to skirt this gendered convention, including jobs where the grooming of body hair is written into the dress code. “Women who work as restaurant servers will have a boss that calls [body hair] a violation of the dress code, even though of course, there wouldn’t be any,” she says.
Esther Calixte-Bea on the January, 2021 cover of Glamour.Supplied
And when it comes to queer women, she’s heard anecdotes from people who feared that showing their body hair may further out them or somehow signal their queerness, which puts them at greater risk for hate crimes.
“[There’s also] a lot of really strong reactions within heterosexual relationships about women growing out their hair,” she says. “Some of the men have compared body hair to the juice at the bottom of a garbage can or have threatened not to [perform oral sex] on them until they shave.”
The kind of social, romantic and professional isolation that often follows a woman’s decision to grow out her body hair can have deeply damaging effects on the women who are victimized by it.
Pushing back, speaking out
Calixte-Bea still remembers the years when she hated her appearance so much that she would cry whenever she saw her own reflection. “I didn’t like to see myself naked in the mirror and see all the hair that I had,” she says. “I would be like, ‘God, why would you make me like this? I have a sister and I’m the only one who’s that hairy.’”
So, in university, Calixte-Bea finally decided to do something about it. “I had a moment when I was in college where I really felt this powerful urge to paint an artwork based on my personal struggles,” she remembers.
That idea turned into a “self-photography self-liberating” 2019 project called the Lavender Project, which Calixte-Bea hoped would start new conversations about femininity and female body hair and why it’s so taboo.
The project was a huge success, and helped give voice to many other young women who were navigating the same issues she was. And, speaking up about her experience helped connect Calixte-Bea with a massive online ecosystem of like minded female-identified people who are at the forefront of a grassroots movement to demystify body hair and change the gender-based narratives that surround it.
For her part, Fahs says she’s always encouraging people to consider growing their body hair and see what happens.
“This is one of those great moments where you can learn a lot of things about yourself and your immediate social world and the power of social norms,” she says. “I’m hoping that [people] will feel encouraged to try it as an act of bravery or political resistance, or maybe we can even use it as a form of solidarity around abortion. Certainly, there’s gonna be plenty of anger to go around.”
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