It’s been about a month since I last shaved my legs or under my arms. The old debate about body hair on women seems to revolve around issues of personal freedom and control over one’s own body. While I find those points important--those were the reasons I stopped shaving for several months last year, only to start again in the spring when I became anxious about wearing cute skirts with hairy legs--the issue is much broader for me now. I now see the act of growing out body hair as an important step towards breaking down the gender binary.
When I closely examine my feelings about body hair on women (this includes the hair on our legs and under our arms, but also that on our faces, stomachs, forearms, and lots of other places that many women regularly shave, wax, tweeze, Nair, or get zapped with lasers), I realize that my negative feelings about it arise from the distinctions that are made in our culture between “masculine” and “feminine.” A man with a moderate amount of body hair is considered completely natural and desirable, and it is taken as a sign of toughness, strength and virility. A woman with pretty much any visible body hair is “manly,” “gross,” and “dirty.” It’s true that generally men produce body hair that is thicker and darker than that which women generally grow, but plenty of men produce fine, light-colored hair while on plenty of women it is dark, thick, and long (I am one such woman). It is also true that men are generally taller than women, but are tall women automatically thought of as “gross” or “manly”? Are short men considered more feminine than their taller counterparts? I point out this parallel because I think it brings light to an aspect of the body hair debate that is too often ignored. Where do we get our close association of body hair on women with masculinity, and why is this not the case with height? A key difference as I see it is that corporations make a profit by convincing women that their body hair is gross and that to be hair-free is to be clean, dainty, feminine, and desirable.
We are marketed to constantly from all directions and it takes real conscious effort to question those messages and eventually work to dismantle the associations that have already taken hold in our brains as a result of advertising. Corporations have a financial interest in maintaining the gender binary. My decision to grow my body hair came from a desire for personal freedom, but my increasing comfort and joy in it comes from the knowledge that I am doing my small part to break down the gender binary and the corporate control on my mind. I wouldn’t say that a woman can’t be a “real feminist” if she removes her body hair, but I would be willing to bet that a large number of women who consider themselves to be feminists continue to shave their legs because they are afraid--afraid of what their partners will think, of what people on the street will think, and above all, afraid of losing that feminine sexual power which is unfortunately the only type of power that a lot of women think they have.
Feminism has become so much about personal identity and freedom that many women feel they can invoke “choice” to justify inaction, making statements like “I prefer certain parts of my body to be hairless” (from a recent post on Feministing.com) or “I just really like the way my legs feel when they’re smooth.” I would like to start a dialogue with women who make statements such as these. Is it possible that that preference you feel is due to internalized definitions of women’s beauty, fed to you by the corporate mainstream media? Have you grown your body hair out, at least once, just to see what it looks and feels like? You might be surprised at how much you enjoy it.
It is not my intention to criticize women who choose to remove body hair; I only hope to point out that for most women, it is not a conscious choice. I hope that as feminists we can be honest with ourselves and each other about the extent to which we cave in to societal pressures and the lengths to which we go to resist these pressures and break down the systems (corporate, capitalist, the gender binary) that cause us to feel shitty about the way our bodies naturally look. As for me, I truly prefer NOT to remove hair from my body, so if you see me this spring with hairless legs, it means I yielded to societal pressures. -Adrienne
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
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Another aspect of the whole body hair issue is pubic hair removal. Women who go completely hairless down there seem to negate their adult selves in favor of a pre-pubescent look. This plays into the whole problem of society sexualizing young girls.
I agree that women should not feel the need to shave. I am against putting a blade to your skin, whether its my face or anywhere on my wife's body, it just feels wrong. However, I do not think we can blame the issue on corporate and market driven interests. The issue goes far deeper into our psyche and into human history. In your post you pointed out that in general, men and women are physically different. Most beauty enhancements exaggerate these differences. For example, lipstick enhances fuller lips, high-heels point out smaller feet, make-up covering any weathering, foot binding in ancient china, corsets forcing hourglass figures, farthingales and hoop skirts etc. The same can be said about men trying to enhance their rugged "manliness" with clothes, scruffy beards, scars, weathered skin, etc. Over the years we have been able to put to rest many of these discriminatory practices while shaving is a relatively recent phenomenon. In today's modern society, it is time to learn how to fall in love with people for who they are as a person and not solely on the general characteristics of their sex.
Adrienne, as a reader who is not especially familiar with a number of the feminist arguments you take for granted in your post, I wonder if I could probe a bit.
First, why exactly does a commitment to feminism entail the obligation to "break down the gender binary"? I like and agree with this quotation from an earlier Lady Finger post: "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people." Amen. But that definition does not dispute the fact that women and men are people with substantial and fundamental physiological and psychological differences. Do feminists claim that in order to treat all people with equal measures of freedom and respect we must refrain from acknowledging fundamental differences among them--i.e., that we reject "binaries"?
Second, surely you're right that companies stand to benefit from pushing products that appeal to our traditional notions of how women (and men, for that matter) should look and act. But I think you overstate how much "control" they exert over consumers. A separate insight you make--that women are "afraid of what their partners will think, of what people on the street will think, and above all, afraid of losing that feminine sexual power which is unfortunately the only type of power that a lot of women think they have"--is much more significant, I think. Private enterprise is at the mercy of the consumer, who depends for his or her cues primarily on social standards that come from a variety of places: evolution, a long history of oppression, etc. I say blame history, blame an endless list of individual men and women, blame individuals who buy the crap companies peddle. But go easy on capitalism, because it also produces all the luxuries we enjoy, like blogs and craft beer and used book stores.
All that being said, I want to dispute your claim that the decision to shave one's legs "is not a conscious choice." It is precisely that, though it is undoubtedly influenced by competing considerations, many of them sinister, just like pretty much every other choice we are forced to make in a world where we have to co-exist with billions of other people.
Deer-
First I’d like to thank you for offering your viewpoints and giving me a chance to elaborate on my original post.
Let’s clarify what we mean when we say “gender.” Of course “sex” refers to physical characteristics such as genitalia (i.e. male/female), while “gender” has to do with traits that are considered masculine/feminine by the society in which a person lives.
But the construct of “gender” is even more complicated than that. If we look at a person and try to put them into one of two categories: “man” or “woman,” there are other factors we take into consideration, especially secondary sexual characteristics like breast size and body hair, which and can differ from a person’s genitals in terms of which of the two genders they would designate. There’s also sexual orientation and gender identity. Furthermore, people who identify as “men” or “women” sometimes don’t present themselves that way to society at large, or only present that way under certain conditions. So, someone we would see and assign to the category “woman” could be a biological female who actually identifies as a man, or a person born with ambiguous genitalia, or a biological male who has altered her body so that she presents as a female.
When we think of “men” and “women” we usually think of those people for whom all of these characteristics line up in a neat little package- e.g. a biological female who identifies and presents as a woman, and enjoys feminine pursuits. These people are at either extreme end of the gender spectrum, or web of gender characteristics, however you want to think of it. It would be much more inclusive to use the term “woman” as shorthand for a person who either has female genitalia or identifies as a woman or presents herself as a woman (or any combination of these). While it is sometimes convenient to talk about gender in terms of opposition (either/or) I think it’s more honest and more constructive to talk about gender as a spectrum, recognizing and appreciating its fluidity and complexity.
It may seem that only a few people don’t fit into the two categories available, but when you take into consideration anyone who deviates from the accepted norm in any one of these aspects that relate to gender, you suddenly have a large group of people. If I were to try to organize the people in my life into a chart based on gender it wouldn’t be two columns but rather a network of connections, some sort of huge complicated Venn diagram. And that’s just what I know from talking with them. I bet a lot of people in my life don’t know that I identify as genderless.
You referred to one definition of feminism, “the radical notion that women are people.” My preferred definition is the one bell hooks offers in Feminism Is for Everybody: “feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexual exploitation, and oppression.” I appreciate that she doesn’t specify who is suffering from sexism nor who is to blame, and that her definition acknowledges that the ultimate purpose of feminism is not just about gaining freedom and respect for those who are biological female, and not about raising women to the same status men enjoy. There are some priorities which I believe most feminists would agree with, namely pay equality, access to the job market and political process, reproductive rights, and ending sexual assault and exploitation. I do believe that we can work right now to make progress toward accomplishing our goals in these areas, but I do not believe that we can fully succeed in ending sexism, sexual exploitation, and oppression until we dismantle the broader systems (capitalist, gender binary) that underlie and perpetuate these problems. This belief makes me more radical than most feminists.
Why should feminists care about the gender binary? Any action that disrupts people’s assumptions about gender and proves their stereotypes wrong contributes to breaking down the gender binary system, thereby making it easier for anyone, regardless of gender, to feel good and free, thereby achieving a goal of feminism.
I would love to tie this into an argument about capitalism and conscious choice but I’ll have to wait for another post.
Deer (& Adrienne),
I so appreciate this conversation about the gender binary. But I want to return to Deer's point of disputing the original "claim that the decision to shave one's legs 'is not a conscious choice.'"
For me, it is. I have experimented with shaving and not, and deliberately choose to. In the same way, many feminists deliberately and consciously choose to wear makeup or revealing clothing. But I think most women and men make cosmetic choices without consciously considering them- for the first few years that I shaved my legs and learned to navigate adult body hair, I was responding to what I had been told to do, and never sat down to consciously think about these actions.
My vision of a feminist world in which many women, and men, choose to shave- if they want to. Their choices would actually be their own, though, rather than a thoughtless response to societal pressures. (Which, to a degree, come from the media and from corporations. But we also make the media and corporations, so they are based on some level on our own ideas.)
I would like to point out the issue of body hair removal for men. Over the last few years, whenever I've had conversations about body hair, it has been pointed out that, yes, it sucks that women have to shave their legs, but a great many men feel they have to remove the hair on their backs and chests. So, goes the conventional wisdom, in a way, things are getting more equal, right? I would argue that the pressure men feel to have hairless torsos is the result of the hair removal industry and the media - exactly the same as it is for women. After seeing countless advertisements with smooth-chested men, many women have been conditioned to find hairy chests or backs unattractive, like gorillas. There is a huge industry based on us hating our bodies, and the executives in charge of new products have figured out a way to make men feel as bad as women for the way their bodies naturally look. This is a backwards definition of gender equality.
Naomi-
Given the fact that young women start to grow pubic hair at approximately the same time that they begin to grow hair under their arms, do you think that a woman who shaves her pubic hair negates her adult self any more than a woman who shaves her armpit hair?
Jessie-
I would agree with you that it's a problem that men are beginning to feel the push to alter their natural bodies, however, as a social issue, I don't think it's comparable to women's body hair removal beyond a critique of corporate interests and the media. Whereas control of women's bodies and minds is essential to the oppression of women and the continuation of a patriarchal society, pushing men to remove their body hair is simply profitable. I would also argue that while this is an issue that is growing in it's severity, I don't agree that "the executives in charge of new products have figured out a way to make men feel as bad as women for the way their bodies naturally look." Most men don't remove their chest and/or back hair whereas most women remove their armpit and leg hair. Girls and women have eating disorders at an extremely disproportionate rate compared to boys and men. I think it's evidence of a patriarchal society that whenever you've had conversations about body hair, "it has been pointed out that, yes, it sucks that women have to shave their legs, but a great many men feel they have to remove the hair on their backs and chests." Control over women's bodies is trivialized and men's issues are brought up as the topic worthy of discussion...
Elisabeth,
That's a really good question. If I lived in a bubble, I would say yes, a woman who shaves her armpits negates her adult self in the same way that a woman who shaves her pubic hair does. But I think that society places a different emphasis on a woman's vagina than on a woman's armpits. The pubic area has been politicized in a way that armpits have not--a hairless vagina is equated with girlhood. A hairless armpit is not.
Adrienne,
Thanks for responding. I am sensitive to the fact that many people choose to cultivate identities that depart from the traditional male-female, either-or dichotomy. I wonder, though, whether we would truly be more "honest," as you say, if we all viewed gender along a spectrum.
First off, biologically speaking such a proposition is simply inaccurate. Now I understand and appreciate that all debates do not end at biology, that the new and improved outer layers of our brains have freed us from being slaves to our base instincts and allowed us to move beyond merely carnal imperatives to pursue aims like freedom and justice. If these modern considerations come to invalidate practices that evolution has hard-wired in us, well then I think that each of us is responsible for exerting his or her brain power to stifle those old instincts. To take a simple instance, men should not be permitted to rape women even though their primordial inner-brains may sometimes encourage them to.
So what about the fact that nearly every human being is biologically female or male? Is this another evolutionary relic that deserves to be toppled by our advanced reasoning? I say no. Maybe some day, but not now. One reason is that, despite the growing numbers of humans who depict their own gender along a spectrum, the great majority of them identify strongly as either female or male. And for most of them, their adherence to one or the other gender is a large part of their identities.
Furthermore, dichotomizing gender in this way is not inherently damaging to the modern project of securing equal rights for all. I appreciate the fact that it presents obstacles to the feminist project insofar as it preserves the ground upon which sexism can breed. But in itself, the gender binary is not inherently unequal. I'm fully on board with the feminist aims of "ending sexism, sexual exploitation, and oppression," in the most literal senses of those terms. But to me, working toward those ends does not seem to require opposing the gender binary.
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Sara,
You say that "most women and men make cosmetic choices without consciously considering them." I think that's in an important sense true, so perhaps I was wrong to say in my last comment that the decision to shave one's legs is always a conscious choice. I suppose what I meant to say is that individuals in relatively free societies like ours enjoy the liberty to choose, though they may not take advantage of it, whether or not to shave their body hair.
What concerns me about much of the feminist thought I've come across is that it seems to claim that people--in this country, at least--do not have that freedom, that they are being coerced by sundry sinister forces into shaving.
I fully acknowledge that there are pressures bearing down upon all of us to conform to certain expectations about how we should look and live. But in the United States, at least, the ultimate choice about how we look and live is our own. I applaud the writers on this blog and feminists all over for encouraging people to think hard about the ways they live; that's what a free society is all about. But I think it's misleading to claim that we lack the freedom to make certain choices, when what we really lack is the wisdom, knowledge, encouragement, etc. necessary to make them.
Deer-
I agree that there are some serious problems with what I see as an anti-capitalist blame-game against the media and marketing for "forcing" us to make certain choices. I too err towards anti-corporate and anti-capitalist stances when it comes to talking systemic change, but I also think that we forget that we make the media. It is not some imaginary force--it is in fact people, many of whom may have their own radical opinions. And we also should credit The Media (mainstream or not, it is still all a part of the same cultural mass of ideas and expression) with publishing the ideas of thinkers that have promoted radical thought. All this just to say that I believe it's all much more complex than The Media demanding that women shave our legs and that men pluck their unibrows, since marketers are responding to what we tell them we are willing to buy--indeed, an exercise of our free choice.
As a nice companion to this discussion, I recommend the recent posts/comment discussions relating to gender nonconformity taking place on Feministing.com:
“H&M: Tomboy Chic”: http://www.feministing.com/archives/014132.html
“Things Change”: http://www.feministing.com/archives/014093.html
Deer-
If you’re going to use the old biology argument, then I wonder if you could tell me where exactly in the human body does gender lie? For most people various physiological traits (genitalia, chromosomes, hormone levels) coincide in such a way that we can rightfully assign them to either the “male” or “female” category in terms of reproductive capacity. This is sex, not gender.
Gender, as opposed to sex, is a social construct. Human societies decide collectively what mannerisms, roles, behaviors, forms of dress, emotional states, and so forth will be considered “masculine” or “feminine,” i.e. which will correspond to the male sex and which to the female (for the sake of this argument I’ll entertain binary language). Your post implies that gender roles are one of the practices that “evolution has hard-wired in us,” so I’d like to know exactly which masculine and feminine traits you see as being hard-wired in males and females.
Much feminist effort has been directed at disputing those gender stereotypes that are seen as negative, such as “femininity” being equated with being weak, silly, passive, etc, but I would go so far as to dispute those traits that are considered positive, such as being nurturing, patient, and kind, because the nature of the binary implies that if women have these qualities then men do not. By encouraging gender fluidity I do not just mean that women should be free to grow their leg hair out, but that people of all genders should be free from the associations and responsibilities that are expected of them based solely on their perceived gender.
This brings us to the topic of freedom and conscious choice. Since when have feminists been content with being “relatively free,” as you describe our society? Though people in the United States who do not conform to gender norms may have more freedom than those in some other societies, we are still much more likely to experience verbal harassment, physical attacks, depression and suicidal thoughts, parental rejection and homelessness, and substance abuse compared with those who do conform. Indeed we also have less legal freedom because our government forces us to officially identify as either “male” or “female” and this designation determines who we can or cannot marry. Isn’t there enough pressure to conform that we can reasonably assume that many people are conforming, consciously or not, against their “true self,” that is, the self they would be happiest presenting to the world?
You close your post with the statement, “I think it's misleading to claim that we lack the freedom to make certain choices, when what we really lack is the wisdom, knowledge, encouragement, etc. necessary to make them.” What is freedom without knowledge and encouragement? I think good evidence in favor of the gender spectrum model as opposed to the binary is that in parts of our society where people have the knowledge, encouragement, and therefore freedom to make their own decisions regarding gender identity and presentation, they tend to represent a much wider interpretation of “masculine” and “feminine” (think progressive college campuses and urban centers). Moving from rural, conservative Virginia to Denver was a huge step for me in terms of feeling comfortable enough to express myself outside of the gender binary.
Adrienne,
First, let me apologize for taking too little care to distinguish between sex and gender. I understand that we use the term gender to indicate a social convention and not biological fact. But part of your response confused me. You say feminism disputes the stereotypes, negative and positive, widely associated with gender. Ideally, a biological female with harry legs would elicit the same reaction as a hirsute biological male--i.e., none. And numberless other human characteristics observed in both biological males and females would be equally unremarkable.
If I've portrayed your beliefs correctly (and maybe I haven't; please correct me if I'm wrong), then it seems to me there is no gender spectrum, in fact no gender at all. You would like to see is a society where the concept of gender has no currency whatsoever. Is that right?
On another note, I was mistaken if I implied that gender is hard-wired in us. What I meant to get across in my comment about hard-wiring is something like this: a complex network of biological impulses is kind of the default you, and your highly-developed brain, the product of eons of incredible progress, makes a gazillion alterations to the default way you operate. Gender is one of the alterations. It tweaks, tempers, and in some cases completely transforms, the crude sexual facts that our bodies present us. Gender is not the hard-wiring; it's the hot-wiring.
Again, I'd argue that the instructions for that hot-wiring come from evolved social customs, many of them the legacy of bigots and tyrants. And yes, many vile customs still survive. Some of them thrive. Yet I don't see how the custom of dividing most people along male-female lines is inherently immoral, disrespectful, oppressive, or otherwise objectionable. Most people's gender still aligns with their physiological sex, and therefore gender as a binary is still very useful to much of contemporary society.
I find men's razor commercials pretty stupid, and not just because they always seem to take place in some futuristic space ship. I find most beer commercials stupid, too. But it's not because they reinforce the practice of distinguishing humans as men or women. It's because they glorify distasteful traits in both. Have you seen the latest Coors ad, where a woman comes home to a man watching TV and says she's had a bad day at work and needs to vent, and he's ecstatic because he thinks she's talking about Coors's new groundbreaking venting technology, which allows you to pour beer down your gullet more quickly? You can subscribe to the concept of the gender binary without sympathizing with that guy.
On the topic of "relative freedom": I don't mean to imply I'm content with it. I only include the word "relatively" as a semantic qualification since a fully free society is plainly an aspiration and not an achievable reality. Because I think you're absolutely right: people who fall outside of not just gender's mainstream but all kinds of other mainstreams still are persecuted, and that should infuriate us.
As for wisdom, knowledge, and encouragement in progressive college campuses and urban centers: I'm a product of both, and I think both are double-edged swords. They're rich in resources but increasingly poor in intellectual diversity. They foster group-think as much as they do wisdom. They are (again, relatively, since there's always room for improvement) tolerant, though, which is absolutely something to celebrate. I'm glad to know you've found acceptance in Denver.
While I would not go so far as to say that dividing people into two groups is inherently oppressive, it is inherently limiting. We’ve established in this discussion that our society’s concepts of “woman” and “man” are so constricted as to be harmful to many people. Deer also admitted that the binary “preserves the ground upon which sexism can breed.” I don’t believe that the spectrum model is completely accurate, but when discussing gender with people who have only ever thought of it as either/or, the spectrum is a useful way to illustrate the range of possibilities. Once people are open to the idea that there are more than two natural, harmless ways to experience gender, they’re less likely to treat others negatively solely on the basis of their perceived gender.
All binaries are limiting: good/evil, black/white, conservative/liberal, virgin/whore. These dichotomies don’t allow for enough range of motion. The nature of binaries sets people in opposition against one another: us vs. them. In terms of gender we see phrases like “battle of the sexes” and “the opposite sex.”
One major criticism of feminist movement is that people assume it is anti-men. Including discourse about the gender binary and attempts to dismantle it is the most effective way to make the movement more inclusive of people of all genders. It’s a way to remind ourselves that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are a product of socialization (of course with some degree of that biological hard-wiring). We can do a lot of good by convincing individual people to change their oppressive behaviors, but if we don’t address the socializing forces that encourage/coerce people to act that way in the first place then we won’t get very far. One could try to address these forces within the binary model but I don’t see how it would be effective. It just comes down to how radical one is comfortable being as a feminist. I understand why most feminists are only comfortable with attempting to reform the system as it stands, but the movement also needs people like me who will always try to push it farther.
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I agree that “forcing” doesn’t accurately describe the way that corporations and the mainstream media interact with consumers; “coercing” is a better term. In my experience, people from privileged backgrounds are less likely to accept the existence of this coercion, perhaps because their privilege allows them to believe that they are in complete control of every decision they make. Members of oppressed groups (women included) are more vulnerable to this coercion because, as Elisabeth explained in an earlier comment, “control of women’s bodies and minds is essential to the oppression of women and the continuation of a patriarchal society.” Most consumers are not aware of the effect that deceptive marketing tactics have on their decision-making. It might sound as if I have little faith in the critical thinking skills of the average consumer but we need to take into account that purchasing decisions are increasingly impulsive, leaving the consumer even more vulnerable to nefarious tactics. Resources on this topic include Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity by Anne Elizabeth Moore, and the Killing Us Softly film series by Jean Kilbourne (http://www.jeankilbourne.com/video.html).
Just as I said in my first post that I don’t mean to criticize individual women who shave their legs, I wouldn’t claim that any individual’s choices are the necessarily the result of coercion by the corporate patriarchal mainstream media. I can however say that I have felt it acutely in my own life and have seen the positive effects of distancing myself from marketing as much as possible in an urban setting. Reading fashion magazines and watching mainstream television and movies negatively affected how I viewed myself and others. Just because another person hasn’t had this experience, or hasn’t been aware of it, does not mean that it isn’t happening to the vast majority of people (especially those in oppressed groups) who do take in those stimuli.
I don't think that women should be pressured to shave if they don't want to, but I refuse to sleep with women who don't shave. Call me shallow, call me a pawn of the patriarchy, but that is MY prerogative.
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