Bitter Bitch

Hello :) I just have a quick question, well idk if it'll be a quick answer. But I was just wondering what made you want to not shave? And did you feel awkward at first or were you comfortable with your decision?

Thank you so much for asking me this in such a polite manner. The reason why this is so long is due to that I often don’t have the time to fully explain to someone why I made this decision and this way I have the ability to entirely explain why I don’t shave. I don’t shave because I don’t want to. And this really is my primary reason, I just can’t be bothered. And fundamentally, I think that when it comes to beauty rituals like this, we have to realize that not wanting to is a perfectly valid reason not to do something. I would rather not waste valuable water with shaving my legs and pits when there are people without clean water to drink. Also, there is something very releasing and refreshing in realizing that you are not required to shave your legs to be a ‘real woman’ or an ‘attractive women’.

Of course, I do have reasons going beyond my perfectly valid laziness, though that is the primary reason. I started shaving my legs when I was 13, around the time that a boy in my class saw the hair on my legs and told me that it was disgusting, and if I’m going to show my legs, I really should make sure to shave them. He wasn’t deliberately being nasty, but the newly teenage me was totally horrified. I couldn’t bear the fact that something about the way I looked disgusted people (and more particularly, disgusted men), so I started shaving. And this is important to remember, I, like most of us, only started shaving in order to make the way I looked more acceptable to those around me. Shaving has no benefit to me, it doesn’t make me happy, I don’t enjoy it, it was just to make me normal. And now I’m making the adult, educated choice, not to be normal. Its over-rated.

We cannot live our lives just assuming that we do things because everyone else does, and we are required to, we need to start analyzing them. Why is it that women shave legs/pits and men don’t have to (some do, but its not a requirement to be attractive). “The Beauty Myth” talks about how ideas of female beauty are used to control women, and limit them, and I think that has some bearing here. Other people have brought up how the desire for hairless women, makes us look pre-pubescent, child-like. Why would I want to stop being a woman and become a girl again?

So, I guess I don’t care how much of a social stereotype I am (queer, hairy feminist), I am embracing my right to look exactly how I choose to, and not to be limited by constraining ideas of what society says is attractive.

Concerning if it was awkward at first, a bit. It takes a while for your best friend’s stares to not hurt your feelings and it takes a while for you to muster up the courage and explain why you are wearing a skirt, when you’re legs are unshaven to a peer in government.

I hope I’ve helped !