thereâs this moment of awareness for a girl when she realizes her legs (and/or arms, armpits, upper lipâŚ) are unacceptable.
sheâs just minding her own business, bopping along, when maybe a classmate starts mocking her for having visible body hair. or she goes to a sleepover and someone points out that her legs look different from all the other girlsâ. or she walks in on her mom shaving and asks why, and the answer is âbecause a womanâs body looks nicer this way.â or maybe her mother or sister actually approaches her and says, âlooks like itâs time you learned to shave that jungle.â
the point is, the day before that realization, however it happened, the girl didnât give a shit about her hair. she put on shorts and tank tops without a second thought. she didnât feel unclean. she didnât feel like a monster when she looked in the mirror (at least not because of body hair). her hair didnât stop her from riding a bike or climbing a tree.
only after someone draws her attention to it does she start feeling self-conscious and wanting to remove it. removal, in this culture, is never a choice made free of coercion. itâs never born of a girlâs own naturally occurring desires. the seed of shame was planted in her by someone else (family, friends, bullies, magazines, razor commercials) and chances are that seed will stay with her forever- a sinking realization that her body can be wrong, that she can look ugly or dirty even when clean, that a thing she never even noticed about herself before should be a source of retroactive humiliation.
that feeling is like a scar. every time we look at it, the humiliation and judgment we experienced as kids comes rushing back and the little nasty patriarchal voice in our heads (the same one that says shit like âjesus youâre getting fat,â âugh why did you think you could pull off this outfit,â âgod who would ever want to touch THOSE boobs,â etc) says âugh, looks like itâs time I shaved that jungle.â and itâs just parroting back what weâve already been told.
And we are taught to hate our natural human selves so effectively, that this thinking not only becomes second nature, but we also begin to defend thinking of ourselves this way, because if we didnât self-criticize, self-control, self-hate, how ugly would we become?
