she’s just minding her own business, bopping along, when maybe a classmate starts mocking her for having visible body hair. or she goes to a sleepover and someone points out that her legs look different from all the other girls’. or she walks in on her mom shaving and asks why, and the answer is “because a woman’s body looks nicer this way.” or maybe her mother or sister actually approaches her and says, “looks like it’s time you learned to shave that jungle.”

the point is, the day before that realization, however it happened, the girl didn’t give a shit about her hair. she put on shorts and tank tops without a second thought. she didn’t feel unclean. she didn’t feel like a monster when she looked in the mirror (at least not because of body hair). her hair didn’t stop her from riding a bike or climbing a tree.

only after someone draws her attention to it does she start feeling self-conscious and wanting to remove it. removal, in this culture, is never a choice made free of coercion. it’s never born of a girl’s own naturally occurring desires. the seed of shame was planted in her by someone else (family, friends, bullies, magazines, razor commercials) and chances are that seed will stay with her forever- a sinking realization that her body can be wrong, that she can look ugly or dirty even when clean, that a thing she never even noticed about herself before should be a source of retroactive humiliation.

gender