Body Hair: Different Battles?

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      Since the rise of social media, unrealistic and inappropriate standards have been pushed onto women, standards that make them more “feminine.” Men all over the internet comment and criticize women’s bodies based on how much hair they have on their bodies, even as they are the ones with more of it. The beauty standard of hairless women has caught the attention of numerous men on the internet, and even outside of it, young women are trapped in it.  

     Lizy Pierson, a senior public health major, explains the stigma of body hair in a Temple News Article in 2019. She decided not to shave her legs for other people’s happiness, despite the fact that she would get negative comments about it from her male peers. Pierson believes that it is due to the razor industry and various media platforms pushing the idea that women are seemingly more beautiful without body hair.

     She states, “It’s the same for any beauty standard. If you see these beautiful women on TV or on billboards and they have this perfect hairless skin, why wouldn’t you want to look like that? But that’s not what women look like.”-Lizy Pierson

     Recently on social media, there have been movements of showing off underarm hair. And while the social movements have the right goal, they do not include marginalized women in them. Both the “hairless” celebrities and the feminists on social media are mostly women with Eurocentric features. Regardless of whether or not they shave their body hair, society will accept them as more beautiful than women of minority groups.  

     Especially women of color are often considered masculine because of their body hair and if they were to remove it, the other “masculine” features they possess would still be taboo. Although there is nothing wrong with being masculine or having masculine features, women of color would still get so much hate for it. Whereas, white women would be more accepted with or without their body hair because they have features that men on the internet would accept.  

     While the body hair movement on social media is certainly the right way to go, we need to understand what groups this movement affects and/or benefits. What is this movement trying to achieve? The normalization of body hair on women who already adhere to Eurocentric beauty standards?