It must have been as early as the summer after fifth grade that I started shaving my legs. My “hairiness” had become apparent to me, mostly due to the fact that other girls had already started shaving. When comparing my fuzzy legs with their smooth ones, I was very self-conscious and felt that I needed to take action. First I asked my mom if I could shave, and when she said no (because I was too young to start) I took it upon myself to try it out. I took one of her razors and took a long shower, carving my legs the best that I knew how. I had no idea what I was doing and left the shower very badly cut up. My mom knew immediately what I had done, and after that showed me the right way. If I was going to do it, then I better do it right (is what I can imagine she was thinking). I didn’t shave very frequently, just often enough for the blonde hair to grow in a little before I shaved again. During one of these inbetween times, a girl in my sixth grade Spanish class told me that I really needed to shave my legs. I was wearing shorts and felt horrible. I felt like everyone could see my hairy legs and no one would like me (especially boys). As much as I wanted her comment not to affect me, it did. I went home and shaved that very day. My shaving then became more frequent especially since it was spring and my legs would be exposed a lot of the time.

I fell into this cycle of always shaving (in the spring and summer) and I didn’t really question why I did it until much more recently. Bending over and shaving your legs is a huge process (at least for me). It always takes me a long time, my back hurts afterwards, I miss spots, and I often cut this one protruding part of my ankle. Shaving my armpits was not fun either. I often had razor burn which can cause bumps to form and a lot of times stinging. Why was I putting myself through this whole thing? By asking myself this I realized that it was because everyone else did it. Every girl that I knew or saw on TV or in magazines was always perfectly hairless. Doing anything different would subject me to extreme scrutiny at school and at home.

As fashion became more revealing in the 1920s, women were persuaded to shave their armpits. Their underarms had never been exposed before and so no one had ever thought about shaving them. Advertisements popped up everywhere for razors and depilatories. In a relatively short amount of time, shaving was the trendy thing to do, and most women followed. Getting women to remove their leg hair took a little longer to catch on. Drawing attention to the legs was still somewhat taboo when dresses grew longer again in the 30s. By World War II, as the prominence of pin-up girls entered popular culture, so did smooth shaven legs. Women wanted to be beautiful like the models in the magazines. Today shaving isn’t even seen as an option for American women.

Allowing the media to dictate what we think is beautiful is a disturbing fact of life. It can be really difficult to perceive women with body hair as beautiful since so few of us have even seen someone fitting that description. Women didn’t always remove their body hair, and if razor companies hadn’t capitalized on it so long ago, it might not
have become such a huge part of people’s everyday lives. My sister and I decided to stop shaving our armpits over the summer. The rest of my family wasn’t very supportive and were mortified when we decided to dye it in September. It was empowering to take charge of my own body and abstain from shaving. By simply asking ourselves why we shave, we are made to see if we are doing it for the right reasons. Are you doing it because everyone else does?