Well, it has been over a decade and I have finished considering WHY I had a problem with female body hair. This is going to be a long one, but I hope that you still care enough to read:
Growing up as a Nigerian girl, even in gradeschool in America, I had teachers (in class and in front of my peers) comment on how hairy my arms were. That was so jarring to me because I hadn't even noticed the hair there before, but after a substitute teacher (a Nigerian woman, ironically enough) LITERALLY pointed them out and everybody laughed, it haunted me. I wore long sleeves and jackets to avoid the "hairy Nigerian girl" stereotype that that grown woman lobbed at me in a room full of my non-African peers. It was so.....unassuming how traumatizing this event would prove in my future.
After coming home and finally freeing myself from the heat of my self-inflicted cloth cocoon, I'd deal with the comments from my family. My older, abusive brother always crossing boundaries to demean me for my leg, arm, and pit hair—even when the door was supposed to be closed. Our mother would ignore and excuse it, then have me pluck her chin hairs and exclaim in Igbo (our tribal language) how grotesque she found it all. I internalized so much of that that I needed to get it off of me and FAST. I needed to purge the feeling.
At the time of the substitute teacher incident, I was thirteen. At the time of the initial antifeminist post, I was fifteen. As I type now, I am twenty-seven. My abusive brother has died and I have read enough feminist literature and critique to understand that much of my issues with "feminism" were either misapplied criticism of white feminism (when valid) or incomplete assessments of experiences to which I was far too young to understand the full dynamics (when invalid). Even being the direct victim of my own rhetoric, I persisted in my projection. That was wrong, and frankly stupid!
I give myself a lot of grace as it pertains to my ignorance and strange, personal belligerence towards feminism as a blanket concept for one reason and one reason only: I was an early teenager. By about seventeen, I'd gotten it out of MY system, but.....into whose? Had I perpetuated this cycle of self-hatred and harsh projectile purging unto other girls just as traumatized as myself? Imagining my own younger sister, I lament and detest myself for the damage such an angry, sad post like this could have done to such an impressionable and equally tortured mind. My mentality here is all the more jarring considering I'd say all that shit on here, then turn around and teach my sister to be an intersectional feminist, considering our position in the racial and sexual matrix of society.
This is not even getting into the legal aspect of it all, which getting a formal legal education greatly helped in demystifying for me!
This is all to say that those in the reblogs and notes rightfully (and gently) correcting me were heavensent. It feels strange and special to know that my nonsense was handled with such mercy. For once, I felt like I was handled with care. That was new to me. It feels freeing to know that I was seen and heard, but not left to run amok. Thank y'all for combatting my ignorance and trauma with level-headed pushback and I deeply apologize for any and all harm my teenage self has caused! ❤️🩹
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