Hair’s a thought - keep it
Removing body hair is boring - but do women have a choice, asks
Michelle Duff.
Tis the season to spend a small fortune getting your body hair tweezed, waxed, lasered, threadedot or trimmed to within an inch of its life.
That’s right, ladies, it’s Christmas depilatory time!
There is nothing worse than seeing pubic hair hanging out of someone’s bikini. Oh wait! Yes there is. There is spending literally thousands of dollars over the course of a lifetime for the pleasure of someone tipping hot wax on your nether regions and then ripping it off, while you writhe in pain. Yep, that’s definitely worse.
There is nothing worse than having visible leg hair, unless you consider how boring and repetitive shaving your legs is (that’s 15 minutes you’ll never get back, not to mention the five minutes spent pressing a piece of toilet paper to your kneecap to staunch the bleeding).
Just for kicks, I thought I’d roughly add it up. Let’s say I maintained a hair removal routine of an extended bikini line wax every six weeks ($45, one hour including travel and waiting time) a brow shape every four weeks ($28, one hour) and shaved my own legs and underarms every second day (20 minutes).
Let’s assume I started doing this age 17, and stopped at age 70 – remembering this is completely hypothetical, as women certainly start removing hair younger than this and may well continue into old age.
A year of bikini and eyebrow waxes will cost me $770, and 22 hours of my time. I will spend 60 hours shaving a year, which adds up to just over two working weeks worth of hair being ripped from my pores.
If you consider that in terms of lost earnings - using the median hourly earnings for women in New Zealand – which is $23.02 an hour – then I am losing $1887 every year. If you add on my waxing spend, that’s a total of $2657.
Based on these conservative calculations, over the course of a lifetime, I will spend 108 working weeks – that’s two full years of my life – removing hair from my body.
It will cost me around $141,000. Why do we do this again? We could choose not to, right? Actually, not so much. A new joint study by the University of Auckland and the Auckland University of Technology, published in the journal Feminism and Psychology, found the pressure for women to remove their hair is so strong it’s almost invisible – and the ‘‘choice’’ is not really a choice at all.
Researchers spoke to 299 women aged 18-35 about their thoughts on hair removal. They found while the participants said women should do what they want with their body hair, in reality it was very difficult not to conform to a ‘‘hairless ideal.’’
But some wished this was not the case. ‘‘Sometimes I wonder what a day in the life of a hairy woman is like … not to feel selfconscious about stubble, ingrowns, not to spend moments and dollars in the pursuit of a smooth body,’’ one woman said. And: ‘‘I feel quite envious when I see ‘hairy women’ with armpit hair and unshaved legs – I wish all women could feel as uninhibited and let natural run riot,’’ another wrote.
Dr Gareth Terry, who led the study alongside Professor Virginia Braun, said the ‘‘persistent and pervasive’’ pressure to remove hair was not experienced by men. ‘‘While men
It's kind of a nice, isn't it, to think that every day you don't shave is another small act of rebellion.
are also removing hair now, they have far more flexibility in comparison to women.’’
Women in previous studies who did not remove hair reported negative sentiments, including anger, disgust, and homophobia, from friends, partners and people in the street. ‘‘It’s very hard to say it’s a ‘choice’ when you are receiving negative comments about your body and what you’re doing with it.’’
Because it went against what was considered ‘‘normal’’ for women - which, in fact, was not their natural state, Terry said.
‘‘I think for women to display body hair seems to be transgressing those binary ideas of male and female, and there are problems with that for a lot of people. In New Zealand we are quite invested in that notion, and in genders being quite distinct from one another.’’
So, there you have it. It’s kind of a nice, isn’t it, to think that every day you don’t shave is another small act of rebellion.
❚ Michelle Duff is a journalist and weekly columnist for Stuff.