No Razor, No Problem: A Manifesto for Not Shaving

Confession: I haven’t shaved for years. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has seen me in a sleeveless top, yet, I still feel a pang of anxiety typing these words. The thing is, even though it’s been almost 20 years since Julia Roberts proudly flashed her armpit hair on the red carpet, the social pressure for women to be more Photoshop perfect has only grown ever since. Just Friday, The Guardian reported that Swedish model Arvida Byström received rape threats after she appeared in the Adidas Originals campaign with unshaved legs, even though her blonde hair and petite frame otherwise match most existing beauty norms. Byström is also an artist known for challenging preestablished perceptions of femininity, often posting photos of herself with body hair or cellulite. “Me being such an abled, white, cis body with its only nonconforming feature being a lil leg hair,” she wrote on her Instagram. “I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to not possess all these privileges and try to exist in the world.”

Another confession: I haven’t always been as comfortable with body hair as I am now. I started shaving around 13, when, dressing up with a friend for a party, she suddenly shrieked: “Ew, what is that?” Before I had the chance to think that she was referring to my late-naughties crop top, she already started pulling on the delicate crooks of hair that were sticking out from under my armpits. “This is an emergency,” she declared, and pulled me into the bathroom, where she tore off the wrapper on a brand-new Venus Gillette, held my arms up, and bit by bit, shaved off any of my own early ideas of what a woman should look like.

After a quick round of consultation with female friends, it seemed that peer pressure was a prevalent reason for girls to start shaving. One friend told me about the time girls at summer camp pressured her into it, while another spoke about how she was teased into shaving at around the same age as me. “They were all doing it and sharing tips,” she said. “They wore Band-Aids on their mistakes as a cool way to let everyone know they were shaving.” For others, the drive to shave came from ideas of femininity they had acquired on their own. “I loved everything about the rituals I connected with being a woman,” another friend said. “Like perfume, jewelry, lipstick, and shaving.”

Of course, the underlying connection between shaving and femininity is bound to the idea that a clean-shaven woman is most attractive to the opposite sex. A few friends have told me that, even though they don’t regularly shave, they will get the razor out for a date. One of them put it this way: “I started and continue for men. It’s not great.” Of course, certain LGBTQ cultures have their own social codes on body hair too. “Being a lesbian then, it was like I had to prove it. I was coming out to people and they were all surprised because I had only dated men before,” a friend told me. “Then I lifted up my arms and was like. . . Now I’m a lesbian!”

In the last few years, however, there’s been a growing backlash against female shaving. The Telegraph, for example, reported that almost a quarter of millennial women have stopped shaving their underarms, while the number of those who shave their legs have decreased as well. This comes amidst a growing pushback against established societal norms of femininity, while many in the study also cited a concern about the chemicals and irritability that many commercial products bring. Paris Jackson, Jemima Kirke, and Bella Thorne have been among the most visible advocates for putting down the razor. Thorne even fought back against social media criticism calling her to shave her legs, writing: “NEVER.”

My own empirical evidence would support this fact, as many of my female friends have trashed their razor in the past few years—and not only because they have found steady relationships or have stopped dating. “I stopped because I felt trapped by the responsibility to shave my entire body,” the “Band-Aid” friend told me. “It’s so time-consuming to do this every two weeks.” The friend who told me she started shaving for men also told me that she stopped shaving when she “started thinking about feminism critically in college” (she now only shaves when she’s going on a date with sex in mind). Another told me, “I love women who don’t shave. It gives me a sense of solidarity.”

I shaved religiously for almost 10 years for all the reasons mentioned above. Even though my then-idol Britney Spears appeared on the red carpet with an unshaved armpit in the same year that I started, I still came of age during a time when naked photos of women showed them naked everywhere, when pink-colored razor blades were marketed to girls as a cute accessory (even if they were no different than men’s razors except in color), and when I stocked my first bathroom outside my parents’ house with shaving products as a sign of maturity and independence (never mind that I didn’t know how to wash a pan). I would like to say that I stopped shaving once I had read enough feminist literature, and that might be partially true, but the more direct answer is that I stopped shaving because the concerns in my life grew much bigger than body hair.

It might be more feminist to stop shaving—though I can imagine other, more pressing battles we can pick against the patriarchy—but what it comes down to is that most reasons that drive women to shave are not at all practical, but social and imagined. And if someone would research how many years of their life women spend removing hair, I’m sure that we’d realize that we’d be better off spending that time on getting another degree instead. In times like these, spending our time, energy, and money on hair removal might simply not be a priority anymore.