Look, an armpit selfie!
This is a typical look for me. I rarely shave it all off or let it all grow out. Just a nice trim—the armpit hair equivalent of a Caesar cut.
Women’s armpit hair seems be a fashion question lately.
If keeping your armpits immaculately hairless helps you feel confident and beautiful, then go for it. But I have reasons why I don’t:
How it feels. Newly-shaved skin feels itchy and prickly to me. (Maybe I’ve just been doing it wrong all these years?) I’m choosy about clothing and fabrics, too, preferring loose fits and natural fibers. I suppose it’s a sensory issue.
Time. There are so many things I would rather do than shave. Like, read and write. Or spend time with my kids. Does this mean I’m lazy? Well, I work pretty hard in other areas of my life, so I don’t feel any shame.
Resources. Letting water run down the drain while shaving seems wasteful. I’ve thought about waxing or lasers, but so far I would rather keep that money in the rainy-day fund.
Integrity. I am reluctant to make any permanent changes to my body. (Likewise, I have no tattoos.) Fashions change: just look at the whisper-thin eyebrows of golden-age movie stars Clara Bow or Joan Crawford. I would not want to have permanently narrow eyebrows like that.
The current fascination with armpit hair, however, seems like a blip compared to the longstanding war against body hair. Just check out these scary recipes for Renaissance-era depilatory creams. Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man, suggested sexual selection as the reason for less body hair:
I am inclined to believe, as we shall see under sexual selection, that man, or rather primarily woman, became divested of hair for ornamental purposes….
Human evolution seems to be an ongoing process of keeping more and more childlike characteristics, such as hairlessness, into adulthood. In the short run, though, it’s not so much a matter of evolution—changes to human genetics—as a matter of the extended phenotype: what we do to our bodies and how we choose to adorn them.
Wholeness. My body hair reminds me that, as a woman, I am a complete person. I have both feminine and masculine characteristics. All human beings are a mix of feminine and masculine, and each of us finds our own place along the continuum in terms of our grooming and dress, identity, and sexuality.
As my kids grow up, I will remind them that they have control over their bodies. I hope they will never allow an intimate partner to dictate, Christian Grey-style, how they wear their body hair. It makes sense to have a conversation with your partner about what he or she finds attractive, but that’s just a starting point.
So, I don’t want to take the time to shave regularly, and I don’t like the itchy feeling. Many people think women’s armpit hair is gross, so I usually keep mine covered up, and I’m writing this post anonymously. I’m not planning to dye or decorate my armpit hair.
You are welcome to shave or wax anything you want—even get a full Brazilian—but meanwhile, I will be quietly enjoying my armpit hair.
