“You don’t shave your legs? EWWWWWW.”
The first time I heard an iteration of the above grossed-out exclamation was when I was in the seventh grade, and shortly thereafter became known amongst my classmates as the freak who didn’t shave. Most of the other young ladies had started shaving well before then, and while the time for me to “start” removing my leg hair was long past, I just…didn’t want to. To be honest, I thought it was silly to spend all of this time removing leg hair when the actual hair itself wasn’t an impediment to much of anything, nor dangerous. It’s not like bugs or small animals were going to get caught in my leg hair and then die, after all. So I didn’t shave it.
I still don’t.
We’ve all heard about the supposed downsides of leg hair: it’s unsanitary, it’s “gross” on women (even though it’s okay on men), not shaving means you don’t care about yourself or how you look. It’s interesting to me that body hair is such a gendered issue, and removal of it is also kind of a new thing, history-wise. Social mores have a lot to do with who removes their leg hair and who doesn’t; we don’t make choices in a vacuum, after all. My choice to leave my leg hair on my legs has absolutely been influenced by social mores; I’ve decided to not shave them, in part, because I don’t think leg hair on folks of any gender is a huge deal that is worthy of pointed stares, ostracism, or any weirdness on the part of people who’ve made a different choice or who have the ideal of perfect hairless ladies’ legs firmly cemented in their minds.
So do I eschew shaving my legs because I’m a scary fu-fu-fu-FEMINIST? Yes, but that’s only part of the story. (For the record, I fully believe that you can shave your legs and still be a feminist. I KNOW, what a strange and competing set of ideas!) You see, I have a chronic pain syndrome called fibromyalgia, the main symptoms of which are (obviously) pain and fatigue, although the levels of both vary from person to person. One of its weirder symptoms is something known as allodynia, where things that do not usually provoke pain in people without fibromyalgia do exactly that to people who have fibromyalgia or another chronic pain condition. This adds yet another complication to the whole leg-shaving equation: I have tried to remove hair from other parts of my body before, and since I seem to be particularly sensitive to ingrown hairs (yay!), such experiments have proven to be the exact opposite of pretty. The itchiness and discomfort that has resulted in the past from my attempts at body hair removal has thrown the allodynia into such overdrive that it’s really put me off trying to remove my leg hair.
And since I want to avoid subjecting myself to a ton of discomfort — or pain — in pursuit of a beauty ideal that I think is unrealistic, I will gladly keep my legs unshaven, even if the mere presence of that hair makes other people uncomfortable. If some folks are uncomfortable or weirded out by just seeing my leg hair, it’s not on me to shave it off if doing so is going to cause me more physical discomfort than I need. After all, they have the option to change their attitude, or at least try to go beyond the knee-jerk “ewwwww” reaction.
For more on the politics of leg shaving, be sure to read Jenna’s recent piece Becoming A Lady: Shaving My Legs After 11 Years.
[Photo source: N. Stanbridge (cc)]
