Flipping Beauty the Bird
In the latter half of December 2021, I put down the razor for the final time. I stepped out of the shower, dried myself off. The sensation of my hairless legs felt strange against the pants I wore to bed that night.
The hair grew back. It always did. That just meant you had to get rid of it again the next time you took a shower. This was only a fact of life as a post-pubertal girl or a grown woman.
But when that next time came, I decided not to pick the razor up. It was exactly for that reason. Well, it’s just going to grow back anyway. What’s the point?
It took years for me to reach that conclusion. I’d been taught since the fifth grade that shaving away all of your body hair, save for your eyebrows and scalp, was just hygienic. As a kid starting to go through puberty, of course I was much more conscious of my hygiene, so I went along with it.
Going along with it soon turned into it becoming part of my routine. It became something as mundane as using shampoo and conditioner. I’d start with armpit hair, then leg hair, though I’d sometimes leave my legs untouched in the winter. It would just be covered by pants anyway. I thought the happy trail on my stomach was weird, so that had to go as well.
Nobody ever explicitly told me that I had to shave my forearm hair, so I usually didn’t. I tried shaving my pubic hair several times, but it was too dense and coarse, and much of it was too hard to reach. I gave up on that after a while - it wasn’t like anyone was ever going to see it, at least not for a very long time. I figured I’d just get a wax before that happened.
Injuries were occasional. I nicked myself a couple of times, and I recall getting “fish gills” on my thumb after accidentally running my finger the wrong way when clearing hair from the blade.
By late 2021, I was a 16 year old, and things were changing fast in my life. During this time was my introduction to radical feminism, via an Instagram meme account and a Reddit discussion board. I had not yet reached the “peak trans” stage of my exposure to feminism, but I’d found that particular Reddit board in December 2021 and learned about beauty culture from it.
It helped dispel what I had been taught about shaving, and beauty as a whole. Ridding myself of body hair every few days was such an ingrained ritual that I didn’t think about it all that much, but posts on that board opened my mind to a new line of thinking.
Well, if it’s unhygienic for a woman to have body hair, why isn’t it unhygienic for a man to have it? There’s not that much of a difference, is there?
Men do shave, yes - mostly their beards and mustaches. But are they, by and large, taught that it’s unhygienic to have facial hair? Do they go out of their way to shave the hair under their arms, on their legs, around their groins? In fact, many religions, such as Sikhism, even decree that men must grow out their hair, including their beards.
So, the next time I went to shower after reading through that board, I refused to pick up the razor. A couple of weeks later, I was sitting in a hot tub in Hawaii on New Years Eve, nervous about the armpit hair that had grown back and would be visible had it not been nighttime.
I didn’t give in to the pressure from my mom once she realized that I hadn’t shaved in a while. In fact, learning about the feminist criticism of beauty culture had also turned me off from makeup, though I was not an avid user of it anyway.
In regards to makeup, the most I’d ever used on a day-to-day basis was a bit of concealer in a bid to cover up acne, and only while I was in middle school. Of course, more would be applied on a special occasion, a bit of blush and mascara for family photos, or my eighth grade promotion.
Fun fact: at the time of my eighth grade promotion, I’d recently gotten new glasses, but didn’t wear them because I didn’t want to mess up the makeup that had been applied.
The death knell for makeup came in August 2022, when I had my high school senior portraits taken. I was under the impression that it would just be a matter of concealer, a bit of mascara, and not much else, so I went along with it as not to make a fuss.
Instead, my mom enlisted the help of a family friend to do my makeup and hair, and she went all out. I didn’t even recognize myself by the time she was done, and later that night, I cried as I tried to scrub it all off in the shower.
I still feel sad when I look at that portrait in the yearbook. She isn’t me. She bears some resemblance to me, but she just isn’t.
My mom tried to broach the topic of makeup again in November 2022, when we did family photos with my visiting grandmother. This time, I was firm in my refusal of it, no matter how much of a fuss she made. Guess what? The photos turned out fine. Any stray acne can be brushed away in two seconds with Photoshop, it turns out.
Maybe she learned something from that, because she didn’t push the issue on me for my high school graduation six months later. I attended both the ceremony and the party with my relatives with my true face, having not even used hair products either.
It took some time for me to become comfortable with wearing shorts in public, and that came in summer 2023. At that point, I hadn’t shaved in a year and a half. Nobody noticed, or cared enough to say anything if they did.
And, after a while, I realized that I should also reject beauty culture on the basis of being a role model not just for girls, but also for other women.
Beauty culture pushes women and girls to shave their body hair and wear makeup, but it is also an ever-changing set of standards designed to keep us on our toes. In the 2000s, skinny was the thing. Women and girls were starving themselves to obtain skinny bodies, and plucking their eyebrows to make them thinner.
Then the 2010s rolled around, and curvy, hourglass figures were in. Women who were not well-endowed in curvature went to get BBLs and breast implants. Thick brows and full lips were trendy at this time.
When COVID-19 kept everyone home, many women put the makeup away, since they weren’t going out nearly as often. Some who believed that they were “doing it for themselves” felt the pressure lift, and realized that they never actually did it for their own good. Of course, this meant that beauty corporations weren’t turning nearly as much of a profit, and in their panicked attempts to regain their customer base, they turned to “‘no makeup’ makeup”.
This trend attempts to replicate the look of a bare face - or at least, a face barren of inconvenient pores and scars. At that point, why not just go around without any makeup at all? (But then how would the poor CEOs afford their third yacht?)
This constant change of beauty standards is patriarchy and capitalism smashed together. Again, it is designed to keep women on their toes. Suddenly, times change, and the skinny girl is no longer in fashion. She must spend her money to switch to the newest trend.
Those beauty corporations will also sell you the solution to problems that they create. Makeup clogs pores, leading to acne. It’s no coincidence that, for example, Estée Lauder is the parent company that owns Mac (and other makeup brands), as well as the skincare brand Clinique.
It’s not just that. Makeup has also been found to contain asbestos, as well as microplastics.
In an attempt to feel as though they have control, many women will insist that going along with these beauty standards is just their own choice. This has coincided with the rise of liberal feminism, an ineffective form of feminism which seeks to work within current patriarchal structures rather than reshape them.
However, radical feminists acknowledge that many women’s choices are made in the context of the patriarchal society we live in. After all, how much of a choice do you really have if you may not be hired for not wearing makeup? How much of a choice do you have if people look at you with disgust because you forgot to shave? It is a hungry person’s choice to shoplift food, yes, but that ignores the fact that she is hungry to begin with.
You do not need to run from your body because society does not like it. It is not a thing that needs to be tweaked to make yourself more desirable, or to make men take you seriously in the workplace.
Instead, be the change you wish to see. Teach the girls that they don’t need to rid themselves of their body hair, or spend their mornings applying makeup, to be pretty. Be a role model for them, and your fellow women, to teach them that there is nothing wrong with existing as you are.