I haven’t shaved my armpits for 50 YEARS!
Her mother was appalled, but as rising numbers of young women take the same stance, JENNI MURRAY dares to admit...
MY FIRST step towards total defiance of one of my mother’s absolute requirements when it came to personal grooming came at the age of 21. I was standing in the shower and I had the Lady Shave (pink, of course) in one hand, the shaving cream, borrowed from my dad, in the other and the words of one Germaine Greer, author of the newly published The Female Eunuch, in my head.
‘Women suppress hairiness just as they suppress all the aspects of their vigour and libido,’ she’d said. ‘In extreme cases women shave or pluck their pubic hair so as to seem even more sexless and infantile.’
How right she was, for here I was, one morning in 1971, razor in hand, about to literally scrape away the evidence of my female maturity and sexuality like it was something to be ashamed of.
I had, I must make clear, never attacked the pubic area, but the armpits and legs had been almost a daily bind ever since Mum had presented me with my first razor as soon as the first few hairs materialised when I was a teenager. To her, soft, smooth, hairless skin was a vital part of basic cleanliness and femininity.
To me it was nothing but a hassle that often gave me an ugly, red-raw rash which stung like mad when I applied deodorant. And, even before Greer had voiced it in her book, I had often wondered why hair was considered attractive and acceptable in a man, but a woman was supposed to retain the bald appearance of a baby or a little girl.
SO I MADE a radical decision and threw the razor in the bin. A few days later — enough time for a healthy little thatch to be forming under my arms — I put on a short-sleeved dress and prepared to face the onslaught from my mother.
‘Good grief, Jen, surely you’re not going out looking like that.
‘If you haven’t time to shave, at least put on a cardigan and DON’T TAKE IT OFF!’
I did my best to explain the sexual politics of what felt like a proud and bold strike for feminism.
My mother was having none of it. She told me I looked ‘common, cheap and shabby’. I weathered her fury, ignored her advice and created yet another subject ‘on which we would never agree!’. And so it remained. For the rest of my mother’s natural life, and indeed for the next 47 years, my armpits have remained as nature intended.
I remain proudly and defiantly hirsute, as the words of Germaine Greer still ring in my head: ‘It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along.’
And yet it still astonishes me that a woman showing off her hairy armpits creates controversy after all these years, but apparently it does.
Look at Madonna’s daughter, Lourdes. Not so little now, at the age of 21, but there she was this week, cuddling up to her mother, with one arm thrown above her head, showing off a bit of underarm fluff.
Comparisons were immediately made to her mother, who’s also been a proud champion of the anti-razor movement over the years (in 2014, she posted a picture on Instagram with the caption ‘Long hair, don’t care!’).
Julia Roberts did it too, at the 1999 premiere of Notting Hill, when she raised one arm to wave to the crowd and sent the assembled paparazzi into a frenzy.
Hairy armpits as a propaganda tool is not just a Western phenomenon. In 2015 the Chinese women’s rights activist Xiao Meili used a popular blogging site to hold an armpit hair competition. She was protesting against the social pressure on women to shave under their arms. There were more than 1.7million hits.
Now Madonna’s daughter has taken up the mantle.
This is Lourdes’ second ‘outing’: in April she was ‘caught’ on a beach in Miami, with a ‘shockingly’ stubbly armpit, prompting all sorts of debate, with commentators arguing whether it was a feminist backlash against the image-obsessed industry which had propelled her mother to fame, or just a way to get attention.
Did no one consider that she might just be a dark-haired, Latino girl, long past puberty, who was on holiday and simply couldn’t be bothered?
EVERYONE seems to have an opinion when they see a hairy armpit. Mine didn’t go unnoticed when I went out over the years.
I was often asked how I’d found the courage to do it, but nobody voiced any horror (apart, of course, from my mother who never really got over my refusal to shave).
None of my friends seemed to find it surprising and a number of them followed suit. I guess we’d all been reading the same book.
Boyfriends seemed to find it rather engaging. I like to think they’d all seen the famous photos of a hirsute Sophia Loren taken in the mid-1950s and were making favourable comparisons.
As for the hygiene side of things, I continued to wash and apply deodorant just as I always did, and no one ever took me aside for a ‘quiet word’.
Now we hairy ladies, I am delighted to report, are no longer unusual. I’ve been talking to the mothers of teenage girls who are as pleased as I am that their daughters are rebelling against the expectation that they will
follow that airbrushed, hairless, image of a woman made popular by pornography.
It seems girls and young women have learned for themselves that a boy’s assumption that they’ll resemble (and behave like) a shorn porn star is an insult to their basic humanity.
They may also have picked up some hints from mothers who fell for that barbaric fashion fad for the Brazilian wax and saw them limping home shrieking and shaking with the agony of it.
They’re far too switched on and sensible to believe that old ‘no pain, no gain’ lie when it comes to personal grooming.
There are so many advantages to being hirsute as nature intended. No more bits of toilet paper stuck on the legs to stem the bleeding when the razor slipped. No painful boils under the arm as a result of an infected hair root (my mother had one and I’m ashamed to say I was not particularly sympathetic).
No itching, no shrieking after applying deodorant and no stubble, which I’ve always considered so much more unattractive than the clean, fresh down of natural growth.
Germaine Greer was right when she said it gets easier to design your own image as you get older, rather than obey the rules demanded by society.
Maturity and wisdom seem to underline the right to make your own choices.
It no longer takes courage to say ‘stuff it! I’ll please myself and I don’t care what anybody thinks.’
And as for my legs, I deeply regret following the fashion of my youth.
When I started to shave there was nothing there but barely visible fluff.
Shaving made the hairs darker and coarser, but I gave it up years ago. Another case of ‘can’t be bothered’! Nowadays, however, my armpit hair is rarely seen.
Nobody notices anything unusual about a woman in her late 60s going out only in a dress or top with long sleeves in the height of summer.
Women my age tend to cover their upper arms for reasons other than bodily hair.
I think they’re known as Bingo Wings, and, sorry Germaine, I’m not ready to be out and proud with them just yet!