On Womanhood and Hair

“on womanhood and hair”

Second grade at the salad bar. I stare down a boy I have never met and he stares down at my arms. “I don’t like you,” he says, “because you’re hairy.”

Third grade. I fold the ends of my pigtails up to my ears and blur my vision. I imagine what I would look like without this weight on my shoulders.

The same year I donate eight inches of hair to a wig company. Everyone is proud. I wish it was shorter.

In fourth grade, I lock myself in the bathroom and press duct tape to my upper lip.

Fifth grade I type ‘short haircuts for girls’ into the Google search bar. It becomes a semiannual tradition.

In the locker room in sixth grade, I am asked why I don’t shave my legs. I prefer it this way, I explain. Soon I am asked again, this time by the little girl I babysit. “You look like a monster,” she laughs.

Is hair on my stomach normal? Search.

The first time I shave my legs I feel exposed, like I’ve done something wrong. I cover them with my backpack when I sit down at school.

I cut my hair and it’s the antithesis of stylish but somehow I feel better about myself than I have in years. Two years later I decide to grow it out. “See,” people say, “Everyone eventually regrets short hair.”

How to get rid of razor bumps. Search.

In the yearbook room, a classmate finds my picture from freshman year. “I’m glad you grew it out,” he says. What does he expect me to say? “Thanks”?

I mention, in passing, to a friend that I have not shaved in a while. “If I did that, I’d have so much hair in like two days,” she says. This is something I hear frequently. “Oh, I can’t do that, my hair grows too fast.” “I know it’s hot, but I haven’t shaved.” “I really need to shave, it’s been so long.”

Need to shave. Said in the way one might say that they need to brush their teeth before bed, or that they need to finish a paper for school. I do not know a single woman who enjoys the act of shaving. Yet, every woman I know shaves most of her body regularly. Yet, the word at the forefront of every conversation on the topic is “choice.” 

Most women I know will tell me they choose to shave because they like the feeling. They like feeling clean, feeling beautiful, feeling confident. These are also the reasons that I have for shaving. But I would be lying if I said that this choice is freely made.

I may be privileged enough to pass as white, but I am half Middle Eastern. When people criticize my hair, they don’t know that this is why it is dark, thick, and so quick-growing. Besides skin color, hair is one of the most important physical features our brains consider when attempting to categorize someone within a particular race. It’s also one of the quickest ways we make assumptions about someone’s gender. 

The intersection of womanhood and race is heavily policed, and those who patrol it carry scissors. The result is white women can ‘get away with’ not shaving for much longer than women of color. How many more beach days do these women politely turn down? How many more scrapes do we resign ourselves to? How many hours eaten up by anxiety about what strangers, employers, our partners, will think of the state of our body at any given moment?

The idea that shaving is a choice, or that any personal choice is inherently empowering, is an overgeneralization at best, and dangerous propaganda at its worst. Women are not born with an innate desire to remove their body hair. The association of hairlessness with femininity does not have natural origins. Women who don’t shave do not look less feminine - they look like adult women. 

Natural is a charged term. The hatred women face as a result of natural hair, a bare face, the shape of our bodies comes from the fact that femininity is a performance in a way that masculinity never will be. When we are natural, we are warned to touch up and get back on stage. Yet, at the same time, our performance of femininity is used as an excuse to treat us as inferiors. We hear, “I’d take her swimming on the first date,” “You’ll never get hired if you post stuff like that,” “Go to the office, cover up,” “Well, what were you wearing?” “Women are so shallow.” As long as womanhood is inferior, no woman can win. Even when we feel personally empowered by our “choice” to participate in femininity, we are granted no true power except that over women who don’t perform as well.

When you’re expected to be on stage all the time, relaxing backstage feels like the action. If I choose to not shave, it doesn’t matter what my reasons are; people will always assume I am making a political statement. As if simply not feeling up to the task is at all comparable to marching in a protest or placing a black band on my arm. Maybe I like how it looks. Maybe I like how it feels. Maybe I just don’t like the action of shaving. But my deliberate inaction will always be interpreted as aggression.

Likewise, when I cut my hair short, the same outside parties questioned my true intentions. I must have been coming out. I must have been crazy. I must be a feminist. Either I was unaware that I was displeasing the men who would see me, or I was intentionally affronting them. The truth: I was tired of dealing with it. I was tired of its tangles, the hours it took to dry, the weight of it on my shoulders, and the heat it trapped against my neck. Like Brittany in 2007, I was tired of people telling me what to do. And everyone thought I was going crazy.

For this reason and many others, asking ourselves to reconsider our relationship with our hair is unpopular. We’ve been taught that taking off our costume is a bigger decision to make than putting it on. Like most women, I can’t help but prefer feeling smooth or enjoying the compliments as I grow my hair out. But it’s time we start taking baby steps toward true liberation.

We might one day  live in a world in which saying “Shaving is a choice” isn’t accompanied by an asterisk. The way we get there is by making small choices. We’ve been taught there’s a dichotomy between people who shave and people who choose not to. In reality we make decisions about our hair every day, not just while we stare at our razors, contemplating whether or not to throw them out for good.

Do what you can to take back your choice today. I have a rule with myself that I don’t shave unless I can genuinely say I want to. That moment of introspection is enough to ensure that I’m not weighing myself down with the burden of a chore I don’t actually have to do. I’ve learned that while I am uncomfortable with my legs being unshaved for too long, I don’t really care about my underarms. We can all make similar choices that push our comfort level just enough to create meaningful change inside our own minds. 

Let’s detach hair removal from our idea of “self-care” and learn to feel beautiful and clean when we take care of our bodies, hairy or not. Let’s divorce the standard of long, color-maintained, professionally cut hair from our ideas about beauty (and throw our need for male validation out with it). Let’s start saying “yes” to beach days and stop saying “sorry” to our partners when we don’t have time to “prepare.” Let’s stop treating the idea of natural hair as a joke, or a mean trick to play on society. Let’s make the choice that will truly make us happiest, and let’s make it without shame. 

In the end, we need to look at the small sacrifices we make every day and ask, “Is it worth it?” “Who am I letting down if I refuse?”

When we are insecure, the beauty industry wins. Patriarchy wins. Racism and heteronormativity win. We lose. Loving ourselves unapologetically is how we start the revolution.