Quote:
Originally Posted by boo boo
I think you just like the idea of being as natural as possible and that's fine but don't give so much flack to people who'd rather not feel like cavemen.
So why is it so hard to accept that yes some women like to feel better about themselves in the same way men do?
You're trying to guilt trip women into making a personal choice which you feel leads to persecution as in you're encouraging them to be persecuted, if I didn't know any better I'd say you just don't want to be alone. But that's a price that comes with doing something different, deal with it.
If I recall correctly, some women here clearly say that they feel it's their choice and they like doing it and you're telling them that they're enslaving themselves and I find that insulting and I'm sure they do too.
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Boo boo, I do not oppose people changing their bodies as they wish. What I oppose is a culture that teaches women (and men) to:
(1) feel disgusted by women's body hair, and
(2) cave into such a culture rather than oppose a pervasive and
extremely strong social norm that women's bodies are not acceptable as they are naturally.
There is an important distinction between a woman choosing to shave off her body hair and a woman choosing a get a new hair-do or a tattoo. All these actions are "unnatural." However, in the case of body shaving,
her body hair is seen as disgusting and unattractive, thanks to a huge advertising campaign started in the U.S. around 1915 (and later spread to Europe and Australia), and so she shaves her legs and arms, caving into or not questioning the pressure.
In the second case, her regular head hair and her skin are seen as perfectly fine and acceptable, but she decides to do something for positive reasons to accentuate her beauty, she feels.
I want all people, both girls and boys/men and women, to feel good about their natural bodies, such that their choices they make are based on their own opinions, not due to a culture that tells them their body hair is horrid. I oppose, rather than side with, the bullies and advertising companies that tell women they aren't okay as they are. I also oppose the people who ridicule girls and women who don't shave, or the employers who FIRE women because they have their body hair (and this has happened, showing how non-trivial the body hair issue is). Telling people to change their bodies or accept such bullying, as you do, is something I will
never do.
Studies have shown that when girls start shaving (typically at age 14 - 16, when they become sexually mature and develop more body hair), they often do this because they feel "my hair is ugly," and "it is the thing women need to do," and because of pressure by family members.
When women reach college-age, their reasons they give for their shaving tend to shift to a feeling that it is feminine and sexually attractive...but when asked why *other* women shave, they say it is mostly due to social pressure. So, researchers have concluded that women often fail to see or acknowledge the pressure that started and maintains their own personal shaving.
The women who have written in this thread that they shave because they like the feeling of being silky, attractive, etc., are responding exactly like the women in the studies. They may genuinely feel these positive feelings about shaving now, but we don't know if that was why they STARTED shaving. I feel the best test of their deepest reasons for shaving would be for them to assess how they react to *not* shaving.
One researcher writes:
Quote:
Tiggemann and Lewis (2004) "Attitudes Toward Women's Body Hair: Relationship with Disgust Sensitivity," Psychology of Women's Quarterly, 28, 381-387.
Based on the present set of results, we would contend that although women say they shave their legs and underarms for femininity/attractiveness reasons, the very universality of this behavior belies this.
If women were able to give more explicit recognition to the normative pressures they are subject to, the problem of unwanted hair could be located more squarely at the societal level, rather than as a problem with the individual woman's body.
Researchers have pointed out that linking shaving to feeling feminine and attractive is the major sales pitch of advertising, and women appear to have internatized this message. This is an entirely culturally constructed connection, because biologically body hair is a signal of women's sexual maturity.
It is sad that a woman's attitude toward her own body should be linked to feelings of disgust.
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I feel it is an appalling and extremely degrading thing for people/culture to tell girls and women that their body hair is ugly and they need to look sexy, so they should shave it off. I'll answer some of your other questions/comments (such as about shaving heads
) in a later post!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Urban Hatemonger
I've seen plenty of women say that men with hairy backs are 'disgusting'
So it works both ways.
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This is true and sad, Urban, that men sometimes also get targeted due to their body hair. However, the majority of men's body hair is viewed as fine or even desirable, while almost *all* women are viewed as disgusting when they don't shave.
Rather than saying, "Both women and men can be seen as disgusting due to their body hair, so they should just shave or deal with people's nastiness," I prefer to stand up to the people who are being cruel. For example, if you send a child to school and schoolmates bully him, do you tell your child to change so the bullying stops, or do you work to stop the culture of bullying?