I still haven't shaved my legs. I actually went on public transport this morning dressed to go to straight to the gym, which meant two trains and and a tube with my hairy pins on show. I'm struck by the pressure and obligation I feel to minimise offending hairs on my legs, and under my arms (and even my bikini line).
When did it become normal for women to strive for fuzz free figures? When did the first glimmer of summer sun become the onset of depilatory season? (Not to mention bronzing season, and -of course- bikini body diet season).
I can recall when I went with my sister to take a tour of one of the Oxford colleges and I thought the girl who was taking us round was wearing leggings. She wasn't. A mixture of admiration and disgust sat inside me when I realised what I was seeing were her unshaved, unwaxed legs.
I have been thinking about this hair situation for the last week because I've been mulling over what life in shorts will be like in Australia, and because Boots have launched a new hair minimising product called Inhibitif.
I've read the instructions and essentially twice a day you spray your legs with this stuff whilst continuing to shave or wax when necessary. And after a month or two you can reduce your spray sessions to once every other day.
The billboard adverts for Inhibitif that adorn the walls outside Westfield ask the viewer if they are a shave slave.
Offering Inhibitif as an alternative to being a shave slave only makes you a slave to Inhibitif surely?
Who seriously has the time to ensure they reach these insanely high beauty standards set by the media, by society, and by women and men alike? A colleague of mine said he could never date a woman who didn't shave. But why don't women say they would only date a man who shaves? Why is hair the norm for men, and the enemy for women? These are the kinds of things we see as standard, a traditional for men and women. These traditions haven't always been the norm. These are learned behaviours. These are the traditions that we need to be questioning.
Seriously who has the time to spray their legs twice a day? I can just about fit in (and remember) to wash my face. I am learning how to fit in gym sessions and yoga workouts around a 6-day 50-hour working week. I am still yet to build in time for meditation and relaxation. I certainly don't need yet another standard to reach towards that I don't have time for.
In the 10 (optimistic) minutes that it takes to shave, I could learn how to buy my groceries in French. I could read an article on politics. Hell I could even clean the bath and the toilet. Our time is precious, our lives are short, and we should not be wasting them being a slave not to shaving, not to even Inhibitif, but being a slave to unhelpful, sometimes hurtful, and just downright impractical beauty standards.
So despite every fibre of my being screaming at me to shave my fuzzy pins before it's declared a national forest, I'm not going to. Because I want to learn French and read about politics. And my bathroom really needs a clean.
Surely it's all about where your priorities lie? For example, if you want to learn to purchase your groceries in French rather than shave, then that's fine (and admirable) - however it's obvious most girls won't make that choice, but again that's up to them. Men have the similar problems with the media, I've spoken to countless men who WON'T approach a girl because he feels like he's too podgy and doesn't look like the men on magazines, or his hair doesn't look like the people on TV and so on. Yes, I understand it's even more so for women what with shaving and so on, however men also have to consider height and spending hours at the gym if they want to look anything like what an 'ideal man' in society should look like.
ReplyDeleteThis observation may look negative, however it's not - I do agree with 99% of this. Saying that, it's also natural for humans to strive for perfection, men and women alike, so that may help explain why there's this obsession with looking like a media-star. Do you agree?
Put it this way - if you could spend an hour before going out and look like your ideal woman, perfected in every way.. would you do it? If the answer is yes, which is completely natural, then you can understand why women do this, they're effectively trying to perfect themselves - not necessarily for men but for themselves and their confidence when out in society etc. Men do the same but on an admittedly far easier scale: fashions, hair cuts, facial hair, fragrances, how we act and so on (confidence for example) - these are things that men ALSO strive for, it's not strictly a female trait. It depends on how you peceive it, however in many ways this IS a woman's world. Many men do anything and everything for women.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteI agree that the media holds men in a stranglehold too in regards to looks and what standards they should achieve, it isn't as prolific as it is for women but that doesn't make it any less of an issue. We have to tackle it as an issue against both men and women, this undermining of our self-worth because that's what magazines and adverts seek to achieve - you will only value yourself higher, or at all, if you buy into their ideals. And despite buying into them we then can't achieve them anyway and so the dissatisfaction with ourselves continues. We need to break down and dismantle their ideals for both men and women. And we need more men to speak out about it. Call people out when they say something sexist, call them out when they say someone needs to man up or something is too girly. We need to break away from these stereotypes of masculinity and femininity - because they chain us down and promote negativity (especially when you use phrases like "too girly" because it has such negative connotations). We need to work to accept ourselves, and accept others, and yes accept that they might prefer to shave their legs instead of learning French but only if they are doing it because it makes them feel good and not because they are concerned about what other people think. At the same time we must challenge these preconceptions of normality for both genders.