truth

With the first stroke of the razor, I regretted it, but I had to keep going. It was the first time that I had shaved my legs in months and I was starting to wish that I had just left them alone. Clumps of blonde hair came off with every stroke of the razor and I felt like I was maiming myself. My leg hair had become a part of me and now I was slowly removing it, stroke by stroke. When I was done, I had the profound feeling that I had made a stupid decision. My legs were extremely smooth, but it did not seem natural. First I felt like a child, but afterwards I decided the feeling was more extraterrestrial than childlike. I can’t believe I used to do this a few times a week, I thought to myself. Indeed this is a question I have wondered about for a while now: Why do so many women do this to themselves?

I first became aware of the practice of leg shaving when I was in sixth grade. All of a sudden everybody was doing it and if you weren’t you were nobody. So, of course, I needed a razor and some shaving cream to make myself cool. Unfortunately for me, my godmother with whom I was living at the time had different plans for my leg hair. She told me that I was too young to start shaving my legs and that I would only regret it later, because my hair was so fine and light and it would only grow back darker. These words only made me roll my eyes. Why would I regret it? To me it seemed like a lifelong commitment that everyone made. Well, that all women made anyway. It was just the normal thing to do.

I decided that I needed to shave my legs, and never mind that the hair on them was barely visible. When I was on vacation with a friend I tried it for the first time. She had a junky, little disposable razor that she let me borrow. Of course I didn’t know what I was doing and I sliced into my leg pretty badly. I still have the scar, a little healed gash that the razor bumped over during every subsequent shave, to remind me of the first.

I didn’t stop there, though. I had to keep doing it. I bought a razor at my dad’s house without my godmother knowing and proceeded to use it whenever I visited my dad. I wasn’t very good at it and I would cut myself often, but I had to keep shaving my legs. Eventually my godmother caved in and I began to shave my legs all the time. I loved the smooth, silky soft feeling of my shaved legs and didn’t mind the fact that they were often spotted with cuts.

I bought a better razor, improved my shaving technique and continued to remove the little bits of blonde hair that kept poking through my skin. As I matured, I saw the strangeness in this unnatural practice and I thought about quitting, but it was hard. Every time I would stop shaving, my legs would get all itchy and prickly and, after a week, I would invariably start again. I convinced myself that I really liked the smoothness of my shaved legs and that that was why I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t that I couldn’t, it was just that I didn’t want to stop, I told myself. Finally I decided I needed to stop to see if I really would rather keep shaving. Once my legs got past the itchy stage, I realized that my leg hair was very nice. It became silky and soft. When I walked down the street in shorts or a skirt, the wind riffled through the hair on my legs producing a nice sensation. I never had to worry about shaving, but my legs were always soft and nice. They were never prickly or itchy because of my gross leg stubble. And that was when I became hooked on the natural state of my legs.

That I say I was hooked on it may seem strange, but in our society it is considered strange for a woman’s legs to be in their natural state. In truth, when I became hooked on the natural state of my legs it was more comparable to becoming hooked on breathing oxygen or having a nose, but that is not the generally held belief. This is because women are expected to shave their legs. Period. That’s just how it is. Sure you can choose not to shave your legs, but then you must also risk social ridicule. The hair on my legs is barely visible, but I often wonder when I’m wearing a skirt if people on the bus notice it and what they are thinking about it. Women’s leg hair is always a question. Even if a woman chooses not to shave her legs, she is faced with a whole new set of choices such whether to cover the hairy legs. Men are not expected to shave their legs, but they are also expected not to wear revealing clothing, especially clothing which shows much of their legs. Even if women were to scale one superficial barrier, they would simply run into it again in another form: People in the United States find body hair unsightly and gross and it is to be hidden or removed. As hip women’s clothes get smaller and smaller, more and more body hair has to go. As adults, there are really some places where body hair should remain intact, but even those places are not sacred in the practice of body hair removal, which can become an obsession.

The answer to this question boils down to, but is not limited to: women should be hairless and show it off, men should be hairy and hide their hairiness. The real question here is: why? No, more importantly, why can’t we change this? Both women and men should be able to choose whatever they want to do and this includes body hair preferences and clothing choices. Women should not be ridiculed for having hairy legs, but men should not be ridiculed for shaving their legs either. So, next time a man makes an unsavory comment about your hairy legs tell him that you fully support his right to shave his legs and that maybe he should try it sometime.