Hair Autonomy

I’ve been on somewhat of a hair journey recently.

About a year ago, I decided I would grow out my armpit hair. It was something I contemplated/dabbled in for a while but would always shave off if I was going on a date or wearing something sleeveless. At the end of last summer, I made a pact with myself that I would grow it out and try to push away my concerns over the male gaze and what I saw as my desirability. And, I kept with it!

For a while, I sported my long (sometimes pink) armpit hair with a head of hair that was longer, straighter, and blonder. With this look, I began to think about my sense of self and the comfort I felt in having a head of hair that was deemed not just acceptable but desirable. I began to think about the numerous ways society and culture were at work in influencing how I decided to present myself specifically as it related to my hair. I found myself relying on conventional notions of attractiveness when thinking about what I liked about myself if someone asked. Spoiler alert: I would always say my hair.

With this realization, I wanted to push myself. In an attempt to break away from these patterns, I did the big chop! The big chop was great, and I loved my short hair. However, going through all this change made me reflect on why I make the decisions I make and what are the forces that keep me from expressing myself in the ways I want to. It’s no surprise this thought process lead me to thinking about beauty standards.

Tangent: The original post incorporated a lot on professionalism (in addition to beauty standards) and how they influenced the ways I presented myself. It quickly became too long of a post, so I might bring that up on a later date!

When I decided to grow out my armpit hair, I was worried about other people finding it gross or ugly. Repeatedly, I heard people saying that women having armpit hair was unhygienic or nasty in a way that it’s not for men. I also heard that it wasn’t visually appealing for women to have armpit hair. These ideas certainly held me back for a while, but as I thought more about it, the double standard became clear.

Humor me for a sec. Could you image there being a movement (lead by mostly women) that considered men having armpit hair as gross, ugly, disgusting, etc. So much so, that it made these women incredibly angry and they pledged to not date any men who did not shave their armpits (and everything else for that matter). They would go as far to say that if men didn’t shave their armpit hair, they would be stripped of their masculinity and manhood.

Clearly, that situation sounds absurd. However, it seems to me that this is the issue that women are dealing with when it comes to grooming themselves in a way that’s out of the norm. What if we moved this to a slightly different context? I felt similar pressure when I was thinking about cutting my hair. It was almost like having my long hair gave me comfort in my appearance, almost as if I was overly reliant on it to feel beautiful. When I realized that, I knew I needed to cut my hair just to prove to myself I could do it.

It seems like with both of these examples, I was working off a framework that told me that women looked a certain way and groomed themselves in a certain way. Which created that pressure/anxiety I felt when I was doing something considered abnormal. I guess that’s why I originally wanted to write this post. I’ve always been anti-patriarchy or whatever, but sometimes it can be hard to see how these types of things manifest in what feels like your individual preferences. My point is, maybe we aren’t as unbiased as we think we are.

Reality Check

As I was writing this, I felt like the whole post needed a BIG asterisk. Part of me agrees with and supports everything I’ve written on this, but another part of me isn’t sure if I’m the right person to be making this argument.

To start, I see myself as being in a very privileged position to be writing this post. In a bodily sense, I have white skin, am largely femme presenting, and have naturally thin and light hair. My point is, me deciding to grow out my armpit hair or have a bisexual bob is something that is probably more palatable to people because of the other identities I have or how I present myself in other ways. For example, when I grow my leg hair out, you literally can’t see it unless you’re standing less than 3 feet away from me. You likely can’t say the same about someone with darker hair.

In a less zoomed in example, we can think about white womanhood at large. White womanhood has looong been the standard for beauty. Tressie Cottom (2019) writes:

"…There was something powerful about blondness, thinness, flatness, and gaps between thighs…That was beauty. And while few young women in high school could say they felt like they lived up to beauty, only the non-white girls could never be beautiful. That is because beauty isn’t actually what you look like; beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order” (Cottom 44).

Cottom sees the toxicity of beauty but it’s not simply a gender issue. Race places a very key role in defining what is beautiful. Not only am I a white woman, but I am a white woman who currently is exists in a liberal academic field in Southern California who also has liberal friends. Anyways…my point is, I find myself in a position where it is easier to have this conversation without vast social, emotional, or economic repercussions.

Another critique of this conversation can be that it doesn’t matter. It’s giving, she’s complaining about armpit hair when other people have actual problems. And, to be honest, that sounds like a good point. If we want to center this conversation around (1) things that harm women, (2) white-centric discourses, (3) bodily manifestations of social structures, etc. I think there are other conversations that might take the cake in terms of urgency. However, this topic is a part of all of these themes even if it is a small part, so I’m not sure if I’m ready to move on.

One of the things I’ve learned in graduate school is just how much nuance every topic has. A lot of times its difficult to land on a “good” course of action or way of thinking, because things are just so complex. I guess with this conversation, all I can hope is that people try to identify the pressures that make us feel like we have to present ourselves in a particular way and how those pressures might manifest differently for different people even if we are “just talking about hair.”

That’s all for now! I’ll be back soon with things to say :)

References

Cottom, Tressie McMillan. 2019. Thick: And Other Essays. The New Press.