TakingITGlobal - Panorama - The Battle of...

Published on: Oct 27, 2006

Topic:

Type: Opinions

https://www.tigweb.org/express/panorama/article.html?ContentID=8697

The battle of body hair, perhaps does not quite share the historical significance of say, the Battle of Britain, but for your average Western female it is a more immediate and pressing concern. Every day in bathrooms across the land woman critically survey the status of their body hair and regulate the appropriate areas. Eyebrows, legs, underarms, keep up our attempts to remain sleekly hair free and, in society's eyes, of suitably feminine appearance. It is such a continuous and tedious process - plucking, shaving, waxing, bleaching, epilating, dissolving, trimming - a battle of attrition that can never be won. But with what are we really fighting? Are we simply fighting follicles or are we wielding our gold tipped tweezers for another, deeper, reason?

Let's get vaguely academic here for a minute. And yes, I am going to use the p-word (patriarchy) at some point in this piece so anyone who associates its use with my being a raging 'feminazi' better click over to someone else's article. Now, a little revision of some simplified feminist theory. In Modernist Western society femininity and masculinity are constructed through the use of binary opposites. Masculinity is constructed as human/godly, rational, reasonable, active, etc. and femininity is painted in opposition to this as animalistic, irrational, emotional, passive etc. Therefore in a patriarchal society men rule over women as a matter of their natural superiority. Women are wild, hysterical, unruly and must be governed.

What in the name of Veet does this mumbo-jumbo have to do with shaving my underarms, I hear you ask? Think of it like this, because (according to Modernism) men are naturally more human and women more animal, women must be controlled in all aspects including the physical and therefore each time we reach into our hair removal armoury and get to work on ourselves we are in essence acting out one of the central tenets of patriarchy through self alteration; we are taming our wild, hysterical and unruly selves, trying to make ourselves more civilised and controlled. Have we internalised the masculine fear of the female as 'nature' and become the instruments of our own suppression? Are we now as afraid of ourselves as men are of us? And so what if we have/are?

(The above are rhetorical questions incidentally and if you are hoping for this article to end up as a tight argument with a satisfying resolution, abandon that hope now).

What am I on about then? Am I advocating for the return of the hairy female? No. Even if the female removal of body hair symbolises male domination, leaving it to grow rampant really isn't gonna assist the liberation of women in any actual sense. So, what am I advocating? Just that we question the routine and mundane. In doing so we might find that even the simplest and previously most unconsidered of social practices give cause for the raising of our perfectly plucked brows.

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by Pleso
Published on: Oct 27, 2006
Topic:
Type: Opinions
https://www.tigweb.org/express/panorama/article.html?ContentID=8697


The battle of body hair, perhaps does not quite share the historical significance of say, the Battle of Britain, but for your average Western female it is a more immediate and pressing concern. Every day in bathrooms across the land woman critically survey the status of their body hair and regulate the appropriate areas. Eyebrows, legs, underarms, keep up our attempts to remain sleekly hair free and, in society's eyes, of suitably feminine appearance. It is such a continuous and tedious process - plucking, shaving, waxing, bleaching, epilating, dissolving, trimming - a battle of attrition that can never be won. But with what are we really fighting? Are we simply fighting follicles or are we wielding our gold tipped tweezers for another, deeper, reason? Let's get vaguely academic here for a minute. And yes, I am going to use the p-word (patriarchy) at some point in this piece so anyone who associates its use with my being a raging 'feminazi' better click over to someone else's article. Now, a little revision of some simplified feminist theory. In Modernist Western society femininity and masculinity are constructed through the use of binary opposites. Masculinity is constructed as human/godly, rational, reasonable, active, etc. and femininity is painted in opposition to this as animalistic, irrational, emotional, passive etc. Therefore in a patriarchal society men rule over women as a matter of their natural superiority. Women are wild, hysterical, unruly and must be governed. What in the name of Veet does this mumbo-jumbo have to do with shaving my underarms, I hear you ask? Think of it like this, because (according to Modernism) men are naturally more human and women more animal, women must be controlled in all aspects including the physical and therefore each time we reach into our hair removal armoury and get to work on ourselves we are in essence acting out one of the central tenets of patriarchy through self alteration; we are taming our wild, hysterical and unruly selves, trying to make ourselves more civilised and controlled. Have we internalised the masculine fear of the female as 'nature' and become the instruments of our own suppression? Are we now as afraid of ourselves as men are of us? And so what if we have/are? (The above are rhetorical questions incidentally and if you are hoping for this article to end up as a tight argument with a satisfying resolution, abandon that hope now). What am I on about then? Am I advocating for the return of the hairy female? No. Even if the female removal of body hair symbolises male domination, leaving it to grow rampant really isn't gonna assist the liberation of women in any actual sense. So, what am I advocating? Just that we question the routine and mundane. In doing so we might find that even the simplest and previously most unconsidered of social practices give cause for the raising of our perfectly plucked brows. « return.