Hairy pits never made her feel any warmer.
As she stood under the shower she wondered for the 100th time if she should just give up and shave her armpits. A couple of months earlier, as she shivered and grumbled under a blanket, hat and scarf she thought why the hell should women have to shave, wax, pluck n pick away what mother nature had given them to protect and keep them warm. Why just because of what men envisioned was the ultimate sign of femininity did it mean women had to freeze, while they hunkered down under a warm blanket of head to toe hairy warmth? Enraged (and cold) she decided there and then to take a stand, to say no to the white mans patriarchy and their archaic ideas of beauty. She was going to grow her armpit hair! In truth this gesture, while heart felt, would probably not break down any doors. Born as fair as they come she had never had to shave her legs or control the “unfeminine” down on her upper lip, any hair simply faded out of sight into blonde like “godliness.” This would therefore be her private F-U to the Man, her own war against ones of society’s ideals of a woman’s self worth.
During both her pregnancies her armpit hair had stopped growing altogether which left her wondering if she would even be able to stand on this picket line. Days turned to weeks and the hair eventually came, a weird auburn sort of color. She would lift up her arms, push them backwards and forwards to see how the hair looked and moved in the mirror. Whenever her husband or kids came into the room though she would hurriedly bring her arms down or put a t-shirt on afraid they would see it.
As the weeks wore on her discomfort never eased, on the contrary she became so sensitive to the words hair and armpit she changed how she worded this protest. No longer was she growing her armpit hair, as a big middle finger to the patriarchy, rather she had simply “stopped shaving” to show those men she didn’t need their male gaze acceptance.
In the end though it was basketball that finally got her. Joining the local women’s basketball team meant she was going to have to wear sleeveless jerseys, she was going to have to raise her arms high in the air and that was too much. She wasn’t strong enough to let the world see she had armpit hair or handle what they thought of it. Her warrior thoughts and actions, she realized, were grounded in theory only. Having grown up being bombarded with images of beautiful hair free women jumping out at her from magazines and tv screens, of being surrounded by the talks of do you Nar, shave, wax or pluck, she was not able to shake the deep seated thoughts and beliefs that seeing hair on a woman’s body was unattractive, something to be got rid of. She remembered the time, a couple of years ago, when she went and picked something up from a store and glimpsed behind the desk that the girl serving her had leg hair as thick as her husbands. She blushed, as embarrassed to have seen it as if she had walked in on her having sex. For the rest of the time she was there she tried to look every where but “there” only to find her eyes sliding down to see those car crash legs again. Speaking to some of her friends about her attempt to stop shaving, they too were like, “oh no that is gross the patriarchy can totally keep this one! Besides they said they liked no hair and it was their choice to get rid of it.” Much the same way women who wax their vaginas say they do it because THEY themselves much prefer it, leveraging the idea they had total agency over this without contemplating that the roots of a bare vagina come from porn.
She thought she would feel crap about shaving but instead she felt relief. Her armpits were once again one less thing to think about. We all have our own missions and this one wasn’t hers. Some women are meant to fly airplanes, others captain submarines and she was ok with that. Besides the hairy pits never made her feel warmer any way.