Hair and the Tug (of War)
by Lesh Karan
If your eyebrows meet across your nose,
you’ll never live to wear your wedding clothes.
– a fusty proverb
The week before International Women’s Day, I inadvertently discover Brandy and her visible moustache. Specifically, a poem about the scene in SLC Punk! where Stevo meets visible-moustache Brandy and falls heart-over-head in love. I dig for a youtube clip. And it’s true. Brandy has soft-fuzz on her upper lip like a 15-year-old boy. But it’s not the elephant in the scene – it’s a scene I want to live in.
Because eyebrows-upper-lip-and-chin has been my go-to order off the threading menu for the last 20+ years.
Because I’ve done all sorts of things to my face and body – to be seen but mostly not seen.
Because body-shame is an underswell.
Subconscious: my response – like the act of breathing – to the many big-little moments that shaped me. But I can recollect instances that pulled me under and left a memory-scar of gasping.
Like at age 11 when a male cousin points out in front of others, ‘Ha-ha, you have a mo.’
Like my brother’s face-contorted ‘ewww’ when he sees wisps have escaped my bathers. I’m 13. And there’s an audience. Again. I silent-vow to shave the periphery each time I go swimming. (Also, I start using depilatory cream on my face.)
Like at 26 when I’m shedding clothes in front of my new-hirsute-Italian-boyfriend for the first time. My thighs are pigmented and bumped – filled with pus and coiled stainless-steel-scourer-thick-hairs – from months of epilady-ing (sanding with a dishwashing scourer in the shower each day, attacking scourer-like with scourer, has not worked). The boyfriend doesn’t say – nor does his countenance give away – anything, but when I’m at work the next day, I show my legs to a female colleague. She advises, ‘you need to get that sorted’. So I do. I see a dermatologist for high-grade-acid-peel to treat the pigmentation and laser for the ingrowns. It takes around $2000 and almost a year of burn to look somewhat normal presentable.
I want to know why – just why? – so I google.
Depilation goes as deep as the stone age. It was a survival tactic – still is – against frostbite, lice and enemies (from the hair-grab). The ancient Egyptians (I picture Cleopatra) deemed you uncivilised if you had body hair. The Romans believed your social hierarchy sank with each visible strand (hence Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, milky and smooth-as).
I know my subcontinent Indian ancestors threaded their faces and pumice-stoned their forearms and legs. I dig into the internet for my ancestors’ why. All I find is ‘to remove unwanted hair’ and (ironically) ‘a rite of passage’.
I dig for today’s why. I unearth online beauty magazines cataloguing printed beauty magazines from the early 20th century.
In 1915 Gillette made and marketed the first ever razor for women – the Milady Décolleté Gillette, a name cadenced like a catchy hit song – thanks to the birth of the sleeveless dress.
A snippet from Gillette’s full-page ad claims, ‘The woman of fashion says – The underarm must be smooth as the face.’ Thus begins the brainwashing an advertising campaign that spans decades, and a war that appears to be between razors and depilatory cream, but the real war is the underswell.
It’s the 1945 Neet depilatory cream ad that manhandles my heart. It reads:
Can you bare it?
Fashion has snipped sleeves to the shoulder, deepened the armholes. To wear these charming new sleeves, arm-pits must be smooth as your cheeks, sweet as your breath. NEET Depilatory removes underarm and leg hair, leaves skin satin smooth in a few minutes…Inexpensive!
The ad reminds me of the poem ‘What are little girls made of?’ (Answer: Sugar and spice, and everything nice). Also, I think of mad men exploiting women fashion to keep the women world in the hands of ‘the feminine mystique’ – a phrase coined by feminist writer Betty Friedan, and the title of her seminal book published in 1963.
In my writing workshop someone mentions a Swedish model who gets death threats for posing with hairy legs in an Adidas ad.
When I get home, I google ‘Swedish model hairy legs death threats’ and immediately find the incident. It happened four years ago, but it wasn’t death threats. In her Instagram post Arvida Byström had written:
…Me being such an abled, white, cis body with its only nonconforming feature being a lil leg hair. Literally I’ve been getting rape threats in my DM inbox. I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to not possess all these privileges and try to exist in the world…
Every 4 weeks I get my mo’ threaded as if it’s a breath I must take to face the world – unless life intervenes, like covid or something (where a ghost of a mo grows, and you hide it behind a mask).
F, the beauty therapist, who I’ve seen for the last 4 years, often threads the philtrum – the most eye-watering-part – last. She reminds me to breathe. And in our close proximation, we breathe in each other’s breaths.
A poet-mentor-friend jogs my memory about Julia Roberts, ‘Remember her hairy armpits?’
‘Yes!’
So I dig.
According to a recent Vogue article, Roberts sent ‘shock waves’ at the Notting Hill premiere in 1999 with thickets of underarm hair in her pink-red sequenced dress.
But shock waves are sporadic and soon peter out to a blip, vanishing into the commercialised ocean, unless we’re digging.
A few weeks later – when I keep digging – I find that Roberts wasn’t trying to make a wave, she just hadn’t calculated her sleeve length. I also find my heart in my stomach.
I try a different tack. I google for cultures that revere body hair on women. I’m expecting to see something about the Sikh tradition of kesh. Instead, I get a smattering of articles along the lines of ‘a new feminist revolution’, celebrities who embrace their underarm hair (not Roberts) and women living in Paris, which mind-ships me to Italy, 1999. I had returned late to my BnB one evening, and turned on the tv to see a woman seductively brushing her silky, long armpit hair. I watched in a trance, then abruptly turned off the tv.
The Europeans, particularly the French, are known for wearing their underarm hair à llanaturelle, as well as ‘dying it pink or something’. This is what a writer girlfriend tells me she said to her 18-year-old when she moaned, ‘Mum, your underarm hair is soooo loooong.’ And that ‘maybe, I’ll do that too.’ To which her daughter replied, ‘Don’t you dare, mum!’ (My friend also told her daughter that she’s been ‘brainwashed by the patriarchy’.)
I had rung this girlfriend because I wanted to ask her about a conversation we had on the beach a few days ago.
‘Remember when we talked about hair the other day?’
‘Yeah, I do.’
‘What was that word you used about weddings?’
‘Performative,’ she said at once. ‘I shave my underarms and wax my legs for weddings as a performative act. Weddings are essentially a performance of gender.’
hair + woman = oh, I love your hair!
= ewwww!!!
= feminist/lesbian/queer
= rape threats
Through a tunnel of hyperlinks, I find someone called Janelle Monáe and her PYNK music video in which she made public her pubic hair as a performance of pussy power.
All I can think of now is what a pretty alliteration public-pubic-pink-performance-pussy-and-power make. And how there is only one letter difference between public and pubic. And how the above paragraph is just a blip.
The opposite of a blip: Sex and the City. Explicitly this:
Samantha, after seeing Miranda’s bikini line: Jesus, honey, wax much…I could be on death row and not have that situation.
Miranda: Well, Samantha, when you’re married, you have a different set of priorities.
Samantha: Oh honey, don’t blame marriage...[points to Charlotte] This one’s married and she’s not growing a national forest…Let me make you a spa appointment. Any thicker, and you won’t be able to find it.
I am with two writer girlfriends at the Sandringham beach. One is 44 the other, 51. It’s a balmy 31 degrees on 1st April. They’ve brought their bathers. I haven’t. They tell me to tuck my dress in my undies, and to come in, mid-thigh.
‘I haven’t shaved my thighs,’ I shout from the shore.
‘So what?’ yells back the 44-year-old, ‘I haven’t either.’
I tell her I have wiry-dark-hair, unlike her blonde-fuzz.
The 51-year-old with ebony-hair-on-olive-skin-heritage pipes in, ‘Oh, I have hair everywhere down there.’
I try not to obvious-look, but she’s sort-of right.
I hitch up my dress, and walk in.
Why do I only feel brave on borrowed power? Have I inadvertently shaved-threaded-lasered mine off?
Sikhs (men and women) believe that cutting or removing their hair (head, facial, body – all of it) severs their power. I don’t know where or when I learned this; maybe it’s something I just absorbed growing up, since the people of Punjab are my cultural cousins.
I google ‘Punjabi women and hair’: Head versus body hair. Femininity versus masculinity. Religion/tradition/keeping-the-oldies-happy-versus-living-in-a-western-society. Versus. It feels like a tug of war. It feels like the underswell.
I snap-shut my laptop-world and go for a walk before it starts to rain.
It’s Boxing Day 2018, and Melbourne has gifted a sunny one. I’m at the Indian Summer Festival, just outside the G. A young Punjabi woman, who’s also a self-professed feminist, is the emcee. She’s standing on an elevated stage, sporting a mini skirt and hairy-as legs. My mother and I are at the front, looking up, so we get a prime-position-view of hair, Miranda style. My mother looks away. But I can’t avert my eyes from the emcee’s power.
A fantasy: I am at the Peninsular Hot Springs, one of my favourite places to ‘relax and rejuvenate.’ I’ve channelled my inner Janelle, an invitation – a bait – for someone to say ewww. As soon as they bite, I pounce with pussy power.
Thirteen years after Brazilian gets another meaning added to the dictionary, Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw inadvertently gets one by a stern-looking Eastern European beauty therapist. She winges to her besties, ‘I got mugged! She took everything I’ve got…I’m so aware of down there now. I feel like I’m nothing but walking sex.’
I try to mind-eye ‘walking sex’, but I can’t. It’s not a concrete image, but still manages to feel painful.
But do men really want ‘eleven-year-old-vaginas on eighteen-year-old-bodies’, as an article in Ask Me About My Uterus claims?
A few days after reading the article, I’m having lunch with my girlfriend J at a café.
‘I don’t believe in the Brazilian because it infantilises women,’ she says. ‘Why do men expect us to have no hair? Young men who watch porn and read Playboy don’t realise women have pubic hair.’
I mention the article to her after she says ‘infantilises’. And we have a conversation with our hands waving about.
Another strong, independent girlfriend tells me I look like Frida Kahlo. My brain immediately sees Kahlo’s signature look – facets she fortified in her many self-portraits. (My brain is also split-second-fast to compare and report back that I’m a fraud, like the Kahlo barbie doll.)
Kahlo says she painted her self-portraits because, ‘I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.’
How much power does it take to be – know – who you are? To fight off misplaced power? Even then, can you really win? Perhaps you’ll find the answer in this question: Does hair stop you from walking in?
Lesh Karan was born in Fiji, has Indian genes and lives in Melbourne. She is a former pharmacist who writes. Read her in Australian Multilingual Writing Project, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Rabbit and Not Very Quiet, amongst others. Lesh is currently undertaking a Master of Creative Writing, Editing and Publishing at the University of Melbourne. leshkaran.com
References (in order of first reference/citation)
[English proverb] Edwards, L. Friday essay: shaved, shaped and slit – eyebrows through the ages. The Conversation. 15 November 2019. Accessed online: https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-shaved-shaped-and-slit-eyebrows-through-the-ages-123872
Brehas, I. ‘Brandy’. Voiceworks, No. 116, Spring 2019: 93-94 https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/informit.670978999824368
SLC Punk! Movie. 1998.
Savini, L. ‘A Retrospective Look at Women's Body Hair in Pop Culture’. Allure. 23 April 2018. Accessed online: https://www.allure.com/gallery/history-of-womens-body-hair-removal
Shrivastava, J. ‘A History Of Body Hair Removal And Distorted Body Image’. Feminism India. 16 May 2018. Accessed online: https://feminisminindia.com/2018/05/16/history-body-hair-removal/
Edwards, P. ‘How the beauty industry convinced women to shave their legs’. Vox. 22 May 2015. Accessed online: https://www.vox.com/2015/5/22/8640457/leg-shaving-history
[Neet ad.] Gallery of Graphic Design (catalogue). Accessed online: http://gogd.tjs-labs.com/show-picture.php?xd=1244574704
BBC News. ‘Model Arvida Byström gets rape threats after an advert featured her hairy legs’. 6 October 2017. Accessed online: https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-41522160
Arvida Byström. Instagram. 25 September 2017. Accessed online: https://www.instagram.com/p/BZd1cbNggu7/
Valenti, L. ‘20 Women Who Prove That Underarm Hair Is the Ultimate Show of Confidence’. Vogue. 7 June 2021. Accessed online: https://www.vogue.com/article/celebrities-who-dont-shave-underarm-hair-julia-roberts-madonna-sophia-loren-lola-kirke
Freeman, H. ‘Our fashion choices always reveal something about us – even Julia Roberts’s armpit hair’. The Guardian.7 November 2018. Accessed online: https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2018/nov/07/ask-hadley-julia-roberts-underarm-hair-fashion-choices
Webster, ES. ‘Janelle Monáe Shows Off Pubic Hair in New "PYNK" Music Video’. 11 April 2018. Accessed online: https://www.allure.com/story/janelle-monae-pubic-hair-pynk-music-video
Sex and the City. Movie. 2008.
Sex and the City. Season 3. Episode 14. 2000.
Furey, M. ‘Gray Expectations’. Ask Me About My Uterus (publication on Medium.com). 2 June 2016. Accessed online: https://medium.com/ask-me-about-my-uterus/gray-expectations-3e4eac96eb9b
[Kahlo quote] Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). ‘Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair 1940’. Accessed online: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78333
BBC News. ‘Frida Kahlo Barbie doll banned from shop shelves in Mexico’. 20 April 2018. Accessed online: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-43845069