Learning to Be Ugly (or My Hairy Journey)

As many of you know, I'm a bit of a rabid feminist. Or I'm getting there, at least. Maybe, if I keep working hard, some time soon the Feminazi council will promote me to "rabid." Fingers crossed. In any event, I wanted to put pen to paper (so to speak) about my personal experience with what is undeniably a feminist issue: body hair. If you have no interest in reading about my big ol' bush, I'd stop here. Because seriously, this is going to be 90% about my bush. Go ahead. There's the door.

Oh. You're still here? Great. Let's begin. I have entitled this post "Learning to Be Ugly" because that's quite honestly what it feels like. I'm sure my thinking that way is part of the problem, but I'm not trying to be a perfect paragon of feminist ideals, here. I'm just trying to tell you about this journey I'm on- my hairy journey. That's also a good title. I'm going to go back and include it as a parenthetical. There. That's even better. So, here it really goes:

Recently, I've stopped shaving on the reg. This hasn't been some huge life-changing revelation for me, but rather a series of small ones. I understand that this is neither revolutionary, nor particularly brave. But I also understand, or at least I'm starting to, what a source of shame my body hair has been for me. 

As most of you could guess if you know me, I developed body hair quite early on. It's sort of a package deal. Buy two boobs, get hairy pits free. Being only about ten, I was not allowed to shave. Like most girls, I was told by my mother that it would grow back thicker and denser if I took a razor to it. But I was insistent. I needed to do something about that disgusting hair sprouting up where it shouldn't. The other fifth grade girls didn't seem to have this problem and I had to take care of it before they noticed. I was already self-conscious enough in gym class. My mother decided we would use Nair. That way, we wouldn't have the aforementioned "thicker and denser" problem- which, in case you didn't know, is not an actual thing. It reeked. I had to run interference with the cat so that he wouldn't rub up against me while I watched Sabrina the Teenage Witch with a thick layer of Nair on my spindly pubescent legs. You know something's off when you are literally rubbing poison into your skin. Not an auspicious beginning for my relationship to my body hair.

I spent the next few years developing my grooming habits until they were second nature. By the time some girls were just picking up their first razor, I'd already learned how to minimize razor burn and how long I could "get away" without shaving before it was noticeable. Despite the early onset, my hair was relatively thin and only in the "normal" places women were "expected" to have to maintain. As such, I grew into a teen thinking relatively little of my body hair besides the places I actively groomed. I plucked the hairs in between my eyebrows to make sure there were two of them. I really only had to shave the front of my shins to keep my legs smooth. I took care of where my thighs meet up with the rest of my body- the bit that might show if anyone saw me in my underwear in the locker room. That's about it. Nothing extraordinarily hairy about my hairiness. Just the base-level shame that all women are supposed to bear.

So, by the time I was nearing the end of junior high, I was pretty comfortable with my routine. That is, until a girlfriend insisted on giving me an eyebrow makeover. I needed a different shape. Had I not seen this issue of CosmoGirl? They needed to be thinner, sharper, more rounded. They looked sloppy. Didn't I know that just plucking the middle wasn't enough? How stupid of me for thinking they looked pretty good just as they were. Maybe that's the next instance of greater shame creeping in.

Or, maybe it was when I entered into my first real (and abusive) relationship. When we started our awkward, teenage fumblings, he told me I needed to take care of my hair "down there." I told him that I didn't want to, because in health class I learned that it was there to keep my vagina clean. He said I didn't need to shave it ALL off. I just needed to trim it down. Keep it neat. He didn't like it. Guys didn't like it. Didn't I know that? So, assuming that all men would find my natural hair disgusting and in order to be worthy of the love I craved, I spent the next ten years dealing with the intense itch and discomfort as every week my pubic hair grew back in again. Poor old Megan Finnegan (begin again). I continued to remove more and more until all that was left was a thin strip down the middle, surrounded by ingrown hairs and razor burn.

That's really where this mini-revelation started. As I grew older, settling into a long-term, supportive partnership, I stopped thinking the discomfort was worth the "results." Sex and the City would have me believe that this means I've "let myself go" or that this would be justification for "my man" to stray. But, there are many things I have learned since being loved unconditionally. The main thing is that unconditional love is unconditional. Even if you're disgusting and covered in hair. Letting go of the thought that I needed to be perfect (see: hairless like a dolphin) to be loved, opened me up to being able to accept many things about myself that previously caused me shame. Like body hair or love handles or swampy pits.

Now, please believe me when I say that I'm not ramping up to espousing the virtues of rocking the hairy pit, although, I do think you should try it just to see. See if what happened to me can happen to you. After giving myself permission to not shave for a while, even though I don't see this a permanent part of my life, I learned something really valuable. That there's really not that much difference between a shaved and an unshaved leg. What I used to think was something that made me disgusting and unnattractive and sloppy, really doesn't look all that different from that perfect, hairless ideal I've been chasing for sixteen years. It's just not that big of a deal.

Plus, I like my bush. It's soft.