random thoughts on shaving

[keryx]

[Poll #410124]

I've been thinking about the historical context of shaving in the shower recently. So, when the sleeveless dress (which was synonymous both with women's independence and SEX) came in style in the US in the teens/twenties, armpit shaving took off, right? But leg shaving didn't really hit it big until the fifties, as I understand it - even though hemlines shot up along with the right to vote. I think it had something to do with the beauty pageant and pinup thing. Anyone know what, exactly?

Those of us in the fat and queer movements should be reminded of the history of the beauty myth and its conjunction with feminist advances. Get the right to vote and stop wearing corsets? Sure, but you're also going to get shaving and sexual objectification and makeup. Start working in factories and wearing pants? No problem - also, let's step up that female-body-as-object thing a bit; and don't forget the cult of domesticity!

Shaving, then, is one of many backlashy steps backward. No big shock there.

As for me. I don't shave my armpits, but I shave my legs pretty much every day. I get eczema if I don't (and I would never have gotten it in the first place if I hadn't started shaving my legs, dammit). But for the longest time I thought body hair was just gross (regardless of gender), probably because some other 12 year old told me that ages ago, and I still think that a little bit when summer clothes are out in full force.

Comments

[peregrin8.livejournal.com]

I have a slight OCD kind of reaction to my chin whiskers... I fiddle with them incessantly, so I really need to pluck them just to get myself to stop! Fortunately they don't grow that profusely, but it usually means a lot of tweezing around That Time O' Month.

[cyprinella]

I do that with my leg hair - once it gets long enough, I pet it. But in the winter I keep it short because otherwise it gets really painfully itchy with my dry skin.

Pretty much all of my hair removal has to do with comfort. Underarms itch like mad over a certain length and I've experimented to see if it got long enough if it would stop itching. It didn't. The legs did, but then the dry skin issues.

I odn't like shaving though because it also contributes to dry skin. I pluck. I also have a very high pain tolerance.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. I have the complete opposite thing with underarm hair - my skin itches desperately if I do shave it, but is fine if I don't.

[peregrin8.livejournal.com]

Mine too.

[joelandrewtyson.livejournal.com]

I put "never" cause I shave my face like once every 3-5 months or so.

I put "don't notice it" but I think it's sexy either way actually. I think whatever makes the person feel sexy is what comes off as sexy to me.

[firecat]

I suspect leg shaving to be a Madison Avenue thing since it's less common in Europe.

The only hair I remove is on my chin and that's sort of an OCD thing, as someone else mentioned. It's not because I think there's something wrong with chin hair.

As far as I am concerned, the less hair removal the better - but that's largely because I have a bit of a fetish for body hair. So my preference is more objectifying than feminist. From a feminist point of view, I think that a requirement for women to remove body hair in order to look mainstream enough is wrong, but there's nothing wrong with choosing to remove body hair.

By the way I love the Kinsey-type scale for gender!

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Hello, cute kitty icon! I love. :)

I was thinking Hollywood/pinup more than Madison Ave, but one's really a tool of the other, ain't it?

And you may appreciate this: when I did the gender scale question, I actually spent some time considering where to orient the scale (ie "male" lower vs. "female" lower). It felt as I was doing it that using a numerical scale implicitly judged one position as better/more than another. I think that highlights a problem with the way with think about duality, but it could just be my aversion to "grades".

[firecat]

The kitty icon is a chopstick holder my sweetie gave me, in a nest of a "magic scarf" (you may have seen them for sale various places) that a girlfriend gave me.

Yeah, that makes sense about the gender scale question. On the other hand, right is considered "better" than left (I mean in the language, in terms of "sinister" and so forth, not in politics)... also Kinsey's scale was 0 for heterosexual and 6 for gay.

[snidegrrl.livejournal.com]

I didn't answer "if you averaged out..." because I think at this point I do any one of those things annually. The most recent thing was the eyebrow waxing. I can't remember the last time I shaved my legs. I get embarassed about the pubes when in a bathing suit because mine are encroaching on the legs and I guess since pubes are apparently inseperable from the concept of sex they are more embarassing. The armpits get done when their itchiness and my laziness reach the right windows at the right times, which is really about once a year. It's amazing I even own a razor. Oh, and my research tells me that shaving the pubic area makes oral sex better.

I am one of these radicals that find it hard to believe that the hairless female body can be a personal aesthetic not influenced by social pressures. Like my eybrow thing? TOTALLY A CONSTRUCT. It is not just inherently prettier to have weirdly arching and defined eyebrows, we just think that because it's all we see in the media.

The good story about my ex Chris: At some point he expressed his discomfort with my hairy armpits (in most things he was not into uber-feminine; he hated it when I wore makeup and was unimpressed with dresses.). He said it looked creepy to him. I told him I would gladly shave there if he would do the same, because there is no good reason his own armpit hair shouldn't be just as creepy to me. (You know, other than the fact that we live in a society that arbitrarily says so.) He agreed to do that, because he saw the fairness in my statement. After the first week he told me I never had to shave anything again, he experienced so much discomfort. He wasn't totally unthoughtful!

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Is it that radical to recognize that you can't completely separate personal preference from social conditioning? I mean, people don't live in a vacuum - I just assumed that was widely accepted.

Although, I'm surprised to find that "personal aesthetics" was hands-down the most popular answer looking back at this poll over the past week. Maybe thinking the way you (and I, and many others) do is in fact very radical.

[snidegrrl.livejournal.com]

See, I'm one of those people the person on your new post is comlpaining about. The rude one who's like, you can't separate your personal aethetics from social influences! I don't care if your skin feels softer when it's shaved! It probably would feel fine if you'd never shaved in the first place!

Yup, me, obnoxious.

On the other hand, lately I've been feeling less apologetic than usual about stuff I think. The more appropriate reaction is probably "you're both right" like that other person said.

[catchstars.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of ambivalent to my body hair. If don't feel like shaving, and I'm going to be in a place where body hair is socially inappropriate (like work), I'm not going to wear a skirt, I'll just cover my legs with pants. The main reason why I shave/wax/pluck, is because I'm a stickler for symmetry. I keep the natural shape of my eyebrows, but I pluck in between to get rid of stray hairs that throw off the symmetry. I shave my legs if I want to wear a skirt, or a swimsuit. It's not so much the hair that bugs me as much as the fact that one leg is hairier than the other. I shave my pubes because the hair is coarse and straight instead of curly, and sometimes they stand up and poke through the weave of cotton underwear.

My boyfriend and I have a "shave, or don't" policy. He's a very hairy man, and with the advent of metrosexuals, has become extremely self conscious of his chest hair. Shaving has it's own problems, because there's the scratchy stubbly in-between stage. So, for comfort, we've decided that if we're going to shave, keep the part shaved, if not, don't shave it and then decide to let it grow back! (I'm going unshaved for the winter).

As for the metrosexuals, I think that with this heavy emphasis on grooming, men may soon feel the same societal obligations that women do to keep hairless.

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

My husband keeps musing about removing his chest hair, and I finally came out and told him that I find men without chest hair less appealing sexually. They just look unfinished to me. I think he was a little relieved.

hairs

[bizarrojack.livejournal.com]

Somewhere between "body hair is ugly" and "i dont even cut my hair, ever" there's something inoffensive that demands a little bit of trimming. I have been toying with the idea of not shaving any part of my face all winter, and it just looks uneven and scruffy. I may take care of my cheeks on my face this weekend. Also I am due for a haircut. I look like a lazy lazy person; I'm not expecting to meet any new people that I need to impress this week, but I feel I'm just not putting my best foot forward, leastways, not right now, because I don't have any call to.

I'm not sure I'd mind looking lazy if I wasn't actually lazy. But then again, if I wasn't actually lazy, maybe I also wouldn't have thought twice about shaving this patchy growth area, and it would already be done. I'm telling myself that it helps me retain heat during the winter.

[originalenid.livejournal.com]

i do it 'cause i'm self conscious about my very dark hair, and i want to appear very feminine (in my own twisted, kistch way) because i'm a femme/drag queen. but i don't do it regularly. i often don't care enough to shave my legs more than once every few months. same with eyebrows. though when the eyebrow hair is abundant i feel... well... naked almost. like, unrefined. like the real me isn't showing through. i love my eyebrow shape when they're plucked, and i'm very attached to it.
but i'm proud to say that i'm often too busy to really care very much about body hair untill it's reached an unbearable level. and with my leg hair, i really don't care unless i feel like i'm gonna score (i hate how rough my legs feel with the long and very thick hair), or i want to wear a skirt/dress and the hair shows through the tights/is uncomfortable to wear with tights/i'm out of clean tights.
with my arpits, it's about B.O. mainly. my armpit hair is pretty fine, but i've found that when i have long armpit hair they retain a lot of bad smells, so that every time i lift my arm i notice it. so i try to keep them shaved, or at least short, but that often doesn't happen as much as i'd like, so i just use extra deoderant. :P

[deadpoet83.livejournal.com]

I'm not big on deoderants/antipersperants, I don't wear one in my day to day life. I shower daily, as a general rule, but I find that shaving my underarms from time to time helps keep me smelling a bit more pleasant.

Oh and you can add one to specific demands from employer, partner, etc., because now that I think about it I have been in shows where I was asked to shave or pluck.

[lil-ms-drama.livejournal.com]

You also didn't mention waxing or bleaching. I'm very self-conscious of a mustache I have (I am Italian and Polish) so I bleach it every other week.

No one ever said a thing to me about it. I just noticed it one day and realized shaving, depilitorying or waxing it wouldn't do - I was hoping that by now all the bleaching would have made the hair fall out on it's own but it hasn't.

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Well, waxing is a form of hair removal. So while I was thinking about shaving, I intended the survey to include it. But yeah, I didn't think about bleaching - and it really has the same purpose - it's to make the hair light enough to be invisible, not changing it's color just for fun or anything.

[skelkins.livejournal.com]

What a great discussion!

The only thing I shave is my armpits, and then only in the summer when the weather gets hot. I do it because I've found that when I'm sweating a lot, it's a lot easier to keep myself from getting stinky if there isn't hair there. I'm not sure whether to classify that as "personal aesthetics" or "social constraints," though: odor strikes me as one of those tricky areas where the two considerations tend to overlap.

I also have that OCD-ish habit of tweezing my chin hairs right out of my skin with my fingernails while I'm doing other things, like reading or web-surfing. I wasn't sure whether to count that or not: I do end up removing the hairs, but it's not exactly a conscious effort. In the end, I decided that it probably counts, which makes me--alas!--a daily plucker.

Oh, I feel so...so conventional now!

[keryx.livejournal.com]

Oh, I feel so...so conventional now!

Ha! I feel your pain - that's what I think whenever the topic of shaving comes up. I'm almost ashamed to admit to leg-shaving as often as I do.