I Hate My Hairy Legs

I’m trying to detox from the patriarchy, but it’s holding on to me by the ankles — literally

It’s been almost a year since I stopped shaving. Last summer, I started experimenting with letting myself get a little stubbly, particularly under my arms. I actually love underarm hair — men’s, women’s, anyone’s. In general, I find it incredibly sexy.

I remember wearing a tank top in public last July, after not shaving for a week, when my armpit stubble was just starting to get on the long side and I dared to lift my arms up to reach for something on a shelf in the grocery store. I felt audacious. Look at me, people! I haven’t shaved in a week!

I wasn’t as brave about my legs. Two-day stubble was about as far as I could go in public, then out came the razor.

But this has been a personal challenge for me for a long time now — to eschew the beauty standards that have been foisted upon me simply because of my gender — and I’ve been determined to work my way through it. So at the end of last summer, I retired my razor, promising to let myself experience my body the way it was made for the first time since I was 12.

And almost a year later, I’m still struggling.

Let’s get something straight before I dive into my self-doubt: I love my underarm hair. I mean, there are moments when I’m not super thrilled with it — like the way it sometimes sticks out at strange angles — but for the most part, I have a very strong attachment to it.

I find it hard to explain this attachment. Whenever I have let my underarms get a little wild, I’ve always felt like I’ve found a part of my femininity that has been lost to me. It makes me feel soft and tender.

Frankly, it’s the same way I feel about my 70’s bush. I do very little upkeep down there because it feels like a part of myself that is sacred and has been appropriately and reverently shielded by the hair that naturally grows there. The few times I have shaved most of it off made me feel a little bit lost to myself, uncomfortably vulnerable, and far more tame than I want to be.

This is probably super weird to admit, but when I take a bath, I like to run my fingers through this hair. I feel like it’s evidence of my sealskin — my wild selkie soul. It’s part of how I connect with my womanhood.

Strangely, I feel very differently when it comes to my leg hair.

I have never let my leg hair grow out. Ever.

I started shaving my legs at the age of 12, overly eager to leave my childhood behind and become a woman, despite my mother’s pleading for me to put it off for a little longer. But no, I insisted.

I never needed to shave above my knees, though, and to this day, my thighs are naturally smooth, covered with blonde fuzz, and if you don’t mind me saying, they are a joy to touch. (Actually, I don’t care if you mind. I’m gonna say it, anyways.)

What would my calves look like, though, once I stopped shaving? Was it possible the hair there would get a little blonder? Softer?

Well…I got my answers and I wasn’t overly thrilled with them. As it turns out, the hair below my knees grow in patches (I have a few bald spots, which is not at all attractive), is uncomfortably long for my taste, and though it’s only a medium brown in color, it might as well be black against my Scandinavian skin.

I often think of Sasquatch when I look at my legs.

On the plus side, they are incredibly soft. Who knew that after 31 years of having spiky, rough, stubbly legs, they could be this soft? I’m enchanted by that, and now my self-stroking habits go from ankle to hip.

But…I hate the way my legs look. I admit it. I feel ugly. Masculine. Too wild. (Who knew there was such a thing?)

“You need to shave,” my mother said last month, when I wore shorts while visiting her. “The hair is awful. I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make. All this feminist stuff seems like too much to me. I burned my bra in the 60’s. I’m done with all the statements.”

I’m dismayed to say that this is the response I’ve gotten from all my friends and family.

“You don’t have to be hairy to be a feminist. You can groom yourself however you want to. It doesn’t make you a failure to wear lipstick or high heels or to shave your legs,” one friend said.

Another commented, “I don’t know why you feel like you have to go to such extremes or push an agenda. Hairy legs aren’t going to get us equality.”

Truthfully, I’m more upset about these comments than I am about the fact that I hate the way my legs look. No one seems to understand what this is about.

You want to know why I’m doing this? Because I do not want a system outside myself to determine what makes me beautiful and feminine. That’s all.

I have no agenda to push onto other people — feminism is all about giving everyone the choice to do what they want with their bodies and their lives.

I’m also not trying to make a statement. This is very selfishly about me.

I don’t want to look in the mirror and feel like I have to put on makeup to feel beautiful. Or that I have to wear high heels to be sexy. Or that I have to shave my legs to feel feminine.

These are all beauty standards that have been imposed on us. If I choose to express myself in those ways, I want it to be because I chose it — not because the system convinced me to.

My leg hair is simply my attempt to literally detox from the patriarchy.

Why do we think leg hair is ugly? Because we were taught to think so. Companies selling razors in the early 1900s realized they could make a fortune from hitting an untapped market: women.

“The key in making women buy …[razors] was to make shaving a new but unmistakable part of womanhood. Gillette knew that, and so he and his publishers used polarizing words in their ads, drawing a hard line between what it meant to be a man and a woman.

…Companies also picked out language carefully, creating a story where body hair had negative connotations and would dock points from a woman’s scorecard. For example, X Bazin, a shaving powder brand, shared that their product was used by ‘women of refinement’ for generations to remove ‘objectionable’ hair. Gillette labeled body hair ‘an embarrassing personal problem’ and smooth underarms a ‘feature of good dressing and good grooming,’ while another ad claimed you’d be ‘unloved’ and ‘embarrassed’ if you had ‘ugly, noticeable, and unwanted hair.’ If you shaved you were dainty, attractive, and stylish. If you didn’t, you risked being pegged as the opposite.”

This is one of the perversions of capitalism, in my opinion. It deliberately seeks to prey on people by using toxic ideas about sexuality, beauty, and love.

I spent most of my life adhering to grooming habits that I thought would make me attractive to potential lovers. Is that not troubling on a very deep level? Isn’t that worth “making a statement” about?

I feared I would be unlovable if I didn’t at least shave my armpits and legs. I walked away from many sexual encounters because I was ashamed that I loved my pubic hair and didn’t want to wax it — and I knew I would have to explain that to new lovers.

And I want to be clear that this isn’t just a reflection of how I internalized these messages. We have all internalized them. The evidence of that is in the comments made by my female friends and family members who think I should just shave and stop trying to take my feminism “too far.” The evidence of that is in the fact that I have never had a lover who wasn’t displeased with my body hair. The evidence of that is in every critical comment left on social media by people who think female armpit hair is “disgusting,” “unhygienic,” and “not sexy.”

In light of this, it makes perfect sense for me to wrestle with the process of normalizing a woman’s — my own, to be specific — leg hair.

What is it about this that’s so hard? Why do I like my underarm hair, my pubic hair, but not my leg hair?

I think the answer is that it makes me feel masculine.

But why should it? Leg hair is a very common aspect of the human body, thanks to our hormones — most people (with some exceptions) have it. Which means it is neither masculine nor feminine. Or rather, it’s both.

Part of me feels that this is about the perpetuation of a toxic binary system. If you’re a cisgender man, you’re supposed to look, act, and speak in ways that emphasize and center your masculinity. If you’re a cisgender woman, you’re supposed to look, act, and speak in ways that emphasize and center your femininity.

But the truth is, we all have both (and everything in between) within us. It’s unhealthy to hyper-focus on one end of this spectrum or another, no matter our gender identification. This leads to men who don’t feel comfortable in expressing themselves out of fear that they’ll be perceived as weak or insufficient. It leads to women binding and painting themselves out of fear that they’ll be perceived as aggressive or unattractive.

This is not something I want to perpetuate.

I identify as a woman — inwardly, in an almost spiritual way, as a very femme woman. Yet outwardly, I find myself exhibiting more masculine expressions. As much as I love skirts, for instance, I don’t wear them often. I don’t like to wear makeup. I don’t like to spend a lot of time on my appearance. I consider a lot of female grooming rituals to be a total waste of time.

I’m not elegant. I’m not graceful. I’m not even particularly pretty.

I guess this is to say that I’m increasingly aware of the gender spectrum that plays out in my own life, and not at all certain how to go about finding peace in the wholeness of who I am.

I am a woman with juicy, squishy feminine curves who likes wearing pants and flannel shirts. I am a woman who loves big, feminine earrings but who prefers hiking boots to heels. I am a woman who longs to look like a Celtic princess, but who actually looks like a lumberjack.

I love my underarm hair. I love my bush. And I hate my leg hair.

But I’m not going to shave it. Not yet, at least. Because I believe I deserve to unplug from our culture’s expectations of me, as a woman. I deserve to teach myself that I am lovable and sexy no matter how hairy I might be. I deserve to define who I am and how I want to present myself in the world.

And so I will persevere until I can make a decision that feels right to me — a decision that honors me not just as a woman, but as a human being who deserves to be free. That seems like a worthy agenda to me.

Author’s note: This journey of not shaving is solely about me and my feelings about beauty standards and feminism. I genuinely support everyone’s right to groom their bodies in whatever way they choose and this article is not a judgment on that.

© Yael Wolfe 2020

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