They are everywhere: ads showing women shaving already perfectly hairless legs, articles criticizing celebrities’ unshaven armpits, and comments declaring hairy women to be angry, lesbian feminists who “can’t get a man”. Women’s body hair is demonized in the media as advertisements declare that body hair is “unwomanly” and that a woman who embraces her body hair is “risking dudeness”. Women’s body hair is deemed unsightly, unfeminine, unsexy and a direct affront to the patriarchal, heteronormative, and cisnormative standards of society. Thus, women are expected to devote their time to preening and grooming themselves into the perfect, smooth, pre-pubescent body which functions to stand in the way of their social progress. While the practice and expectation of female hair removal may seem trivial, it is precisely this seeming triviality that makes such expectations such a potent method of socially controlling women, continuing their oppression, and taking advantage of them for the sake of managing our discomfort regarding the “creaturely” female body.
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