Hairy Shame

Hair. Leg hair. Sophomore Laura Passarelli smiles as she rubs her fingers lightly over her shin. “It’s fuzzy,” she says, “but it feels natural.”

Laura’s hair, which has grown four months without blade, wax, or cream applied to it, is hardly noticeable. As she sits on a couch in the Dorsey living room, she is completely comfortable with her legs, which look natural. Her demeanor is easygoing, her body language ca­sual. Instead of staring at her legs, you focus on her face and the way she casually wraps her hands and wrists around her legs, neither displaying nor hiding them, but, rather, letting them be a natural extension of herself. After all, her legs are a part of who she is.

Laura’s decision to let her leg hair grow developed from her final project in Core II: Femi­nist Theory of Body, Yoga, and Dance, which exam­ined how American society views bodies, how they move, and what messages about the body are projected by the media. Her project, in conjunction with Hailey Hartford (’12) and Jesse Klekamp (’12), consisted of dissecting television advertisements for shaving products for women and men and analyzing the messages they project.

While one men’s Gillette ad insists that their razor is “the best a man can get,” implying that the man chooses the razor, a Venus ad tells women that they can “release the goddess within” only by relying upon their razor. Laura felt that the Gillette Fusion razor was complimentary to men’s pre-established confidence in a society that favors the white male, adding to their natural masculin­ity, while the Venus razor emphasized that women had the potential to become feminine, even god­desses, but could not reach that point without the razor. She says, eyes flashing and hands out for em­phasis, “It felt as if these ads were saying that I was not okay the way I was already.”

Laura believes that individuals must de­cide why they shave, and that it should be an au­tonomous decision and not because of social con­straints. She understands that some women like the feel of shaved legs or dislike body hair, amongst a multitude of other reasons, but she feels that a woman should shave for herself, not to please her partner or conform to societal expectations.

Laura looks down at her legs. “I’d shave and then touch them, and it wouldn’t feel like me I was touching,” she says. In her last relationship,

she always made sure she shaved her legs before seeing her boyfriend. “If I didn’t,” she adds, “I would feel self-conscious and ashamed.”

“Shame is something you’re not respon­sible for, because it’s when other people tell you that you’re not right the way you are. I didn’t want to be ashamed anymore because I hadn’t shaved.” Before she stopped shaving her legs, Laura won­dered where it would be acceptable to have leg hair. In a more lasting and involved relationship, such as one with a spouse, she wonders what ar­eas of her body she would leave unshaved. “I don’t want there to be any part of my body that I can’t accept.”

The notion of shaving is so gendered, and Laura says that all she could think about while shav­ing was how everyone was go­ing to look at her legs and how hot they would be. At the end of her Core II course, she de­cided to stop allowing herself to feel ashamed, and along with that, she stopped shaving. She decided not to shave again until she got over the shame, and then, if she wanted to start again, she felt it would be her decision completely.

In her estimation, unshaved legs are no embarrassment, and she is now less critical of her body in general. “My legs are fuzzy and nice. I like the way they look – my legs are Laura-legs!”

“The beginning was difficult,” Laura remi­nisces. After a few weeks of letting her hair grow, Laura was at work at a children’s educational camp when a five-year-old student wanted to draw on her with face paint. The counselors had already let the students draw on them, and Laura’s face and arms were covered. However, she still had space on her legs. “I hesitated for a moment, still feel­ing a bit of shame and wondering if the student would notice my hair.” Nevertheless, Laura stuck her leg out so that the student could scribble on it. “She didn’t notice. At five years old, the children in our society have not yet been primed to respond to hair or hairlessness; to them, hair is completely natural, so why shouldn’t it be so for me, too?”

Now, as Laura continues not to shave her legs, she no longer feels ashamed about her hairy legs. She accepts them as natural and feels that her legs are hers completely. “They’re not on dis­play for anyone.”