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Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA
No, it isn't a conspiracy, but I also don't like how shaving was pressed on women to a large extent by "the environment."
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What you have to accept though is that it has
become a part of the environment.
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Shaving large areas of women's bodies became common in the West in the 1900s due to companies wanting to sell their shaving products and using advertising to get women to think they should buy them. Though not conspiracy, it was marketing that exploited women's insecurities at a time when women NEEDED men for financial security and survival (in the early 1900s). If women were told they needed to do XY&Z to be attractive, they probably would, and companies knew this.
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Actually I'm pretty sure that this is only true for the popularity of pit shaving and explains why it's not as common in Europe but legshaving is popular all around the world, including Europe, and I'm pretty damn sure women were doing it before the 1900s, I doubt hairy legs on women were ever fashionable.
You'll be hard pressed to find me a painting from the Renaissance onwards of a female nude with hairy legs. Smooth legs has been part of the ideal of female beauty for a VERY VERY long time.
Leg hair removal goes WAY back, it was very popular custom in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and Middle Eastern countries for women to do this, and often it was done by singing or plucking, far more painful methods than what's used today.
It's true that this was more common and accessible for women of higher class and it became less common in the middle ages. And the razor industry did make shaving more popular by making it accessible to lower class women in the United States.
But men prefereing hairless legs is not a new invention at all and the reason it's more popular now is because women now have the technology to do it in in a more accessible way and it's no longer something exclusive to the upper class, not to mention how much more time consuming and painful the older methods were. It's not because just a few guys decided that hairy legs weren't hot and somehow turned it into popular consensus, we probably always felt that way, it's just that the economic boom made beauty products more accessible to the not so privilaged.
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Back in the early 1900s, when women responded to advertisements that told them their hair was superfluous and unattractive, women's job opportunities and legal rights were not good in the Western world. If women didn't marry, they often faced a pretty bleak future. Shaving companies preyed on women's fears of economic insecurity. In fact, they advertised shaving for women by telling women that it would bring them economic security. So, this is how shaving became a norm. I feel that is sad.
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You act like the US is the only place where women shave their legs. If this was just an American invention why do we not see hairy legged foreign chicks
all the time?
Like I said women used to not remove leg hair because of how difficult it was but it was never an aesthetic preference because what did women do before legshaving? They didn't bare their legs
at all, that's what. The roaring 1920s gave rise to short skirts and that's the REAL reason legshaving became more popular.
It's
because of legshaving that women could show their legs without embarrassment, which I find more liberating than it is enslaving.