Hickey: No-Shave November not just for men

I haven’t shaved my legs or underarms since the end of October. At three weeks in, I’ve gone… I haven’t shaved my legs or underarms since the end of October. At three weeks in, I’ve gone through the prickly stage and emerged, visibly fuzzy, on the other side.

No-Shave November, the annual Facebook-age tradition in which young people abstain from shaving their beards and other hair, is typically thought to be exclusive to males. Other names for the trend include Manvember and Movember. But the simple no-shaving interpretation is open to co-optation by women — and when several No-Shave November participants complained on the event’s Facebook and Twitter profiles that female body hair is totally gross, some feminists found the idea irresistible.

My friend Robin took the plunge last year, when I was still too reluctant. Though Robin, like me, is a staunch feminist, the aim of her 30-days’ abstinence from the razor wasn’t to reject fascist patriarchal beauty standards but, in her words, “To see if I could do it” — a surprising challenge that, for me, resonated all too well.

Why did American women start shaving in the first place? If you’re a cynic, you would probably guess that it was just a big plot by Gillette to sell more razors — and you’d be right. According to Christine Hope’s 1982 article “Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture” in the Journal of American Culture, the pressure for women to shave under their underarms began with a magazine ad in 1915, around the time when sleeveless dresses became popular for fashionable women. The seminal ad was placed in Harper’s Bazaar and featured a waist-up photograph of a young woman with one arm raised, revealing hairless armpits. The text read, “Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair.” Leg shaving became popular years later as hemlines rose.

But why do we still do it? The typical simplified response is that women shave to look attractive to men — but that might not be the case. Many women, Robin among them, report that when they go without shaving, they only get grief about it from other women. Their boyfriends, husbands and one-night stands, overall, are totally unfazed.

Still, I’m frequently asked whether or not my boyfriend minds.  He doesn’t  my boyfriend is a great big hippie and prefers I not clog landfills with disposable razor waste — but is that really the point? In all the time we’ve been together, no one has ever asked him if I approve of his No-Shave November beard or the goatee he sported when we met. I like the beard just fine, but why am I expected to groom with his interests in mind, and not vice versa?

If my boyfriend has never cared and I don’t own stock in Gillette, why have I shaved since puberty? Until this October, I always insisted that I only did so because I wanted to. Superficially, that was true — aside from my mother, nobody ever told me that I had to shave. And I did — still do — like the look and feel of smooth legs. Yet when I considered going without shaving for more than a week, I was filled with inexplicable anxiety. I wasn’t afraid that people would misjudge my sexual orientation, and I wasn’t really afraid of what people would say — nobody whose opinion I valued really gave a damn what I did with my armpit hair.

No, when I considered not shaving I was frozen with anxiety about all the things that I “couldn’t” do. If I stopped shaving my legs, I couldn’t wear short skirts anymore. I couldn’t wear a party dress with heels. I couldn’t wear shorts to the gym. I heard myself tell people, “My legs are my best feature. I don’t want to ruin them.”

In short, what I found when I peeled back the cheerful “I-shave-for-myself” rhetoric was a paralyzing fear that if I didn’t shave, I would be ugly. It was no more complicated — and, for a feminist who professed to believe that all varieties of natural womanhood were beautiful, no less embarrassing — than that. I believed the leg and underarm hair that I accepted as totally normal and healthy on my boyfriend was unspeakably hideous on me, and that if I dared let it go unchecked, I would lose my tenuous claim on the title of “Reasonably Attractive Woman” and forever appear repulsive to all but the most enlightened.

That was when I decided I had to do it, to prove that I could. If my “choice” to shave was a choice between compliance and gut-gnawing body shame, then it wasn’t much of a choice at all.

Ladies, I’m not saying that you’re deluded or a bad feminist or that you have poor self-esteem if you read this column and keep shaving your legs. Most of my feminist idols shave and don’t think twice about it. All I’m here to tell you is that if you do decide to put the razor down for a while, it won’t make you ugly. People will still like you, and you will still get dates. And if, after taking that plunge, you get a leg modeling gig or want to look a certain way in fishnet tights, I’m here to tell you that you can always go back.

Contact Tracey at tbh15@pitt.edu.