English Version | To shave or not to shave?

I shave, you don't shave, she shaves. What about us? It's none of our business. Or is it that, in practice, the motto "my body my rules" is still just a huge buzzword that everyone repeats but few respect? So, we tried to understand with those who have taken the infamous waxing out of their routine the advantages as well as the disadvantages behind this decision.

Laura Andrade was 19 years old when she realized she hadn't shaved for about a year. She was pleasantly surprised. Before that, she recalls a trip to the beach with a boy she liked. She was about 17 or 18 years old when she suddenly noticed "a few hairs on her legs" that immediately transported her to that common place of shame, trying to hide them at all costs. Although she had "deliberately and consciously let them grow", she was worried about what the other girls in the group might think - even more than the judgment that might come from her crush. To date, Laura had always shaved her hairs. Her first time came, as it does for most girls-quasi-women, aged 12-13: the arrival of the fateful day when, "too hairy", she asks her mother to go for a wax. "As soon as we started [waxing] I realized that it was much harder than I thought. The pain was very strong. I could only handle one leg, the other had to be waxed with depilatory cream. For a few years I always shaved my legs, armpits, and groin, always at home. I liked the feeling of smoothness and of course I couldn't think of keeping my hair as an option. I had never seen a woman with hair in public. Everything I saw and heard taught me that it had to be that way," she recalls. To have or not to have hair has been a big question, when, given the circumstances of a supposed evolution as human beings and/or society, it should be just a non-question. At a time when we talk about freedom left and right to be whoever you want - even whatever you want - why is the debate about mere body hair still a topic?

Today, the world is divided between women who want to inject Botox and hyaluronic acid into their faces to slow down their aging and those who don't, those who love makeup and those who hate it, the "green juice" fans and those who live on McDonald's. And it's all good. Personally, I wax. I'm vain, I love the feeling of smooth, hairless skin, and I don't mind undergoing those minutes of excruciating pain that waxing can be. I don't feel any less of an advocate for women's rights because of it, and I definitely don't do it to please any man - the ritual happens whether I'm in a relationship or not. I do it because I want. Just like Laura doesn't because she doesn’t want. But also a bit out of laziness, she confesses: "Although I liked that moment with myself and the feeling of the skin [that comes from not having them], repeating it constantly and stressing when I saw the little hairs appearing again, forever? No way. I'm very lazy and there started to be this conflict between what I should do and what I wanted to do. So, it started as a claim for the right to be lazy." But it became much more than that: "They're asking me [to do] things that they don't ask my male best friend to do. If the demand on me is higher, am I lazy for not wanting to fulfill it? He can't even be lazy because he's not being asked to do any of these things. And so, a discovery started to unravel, and it hasn't stopped yet." She explains that once you start to put the situation into context, you quickly realize that this issue of hair removal is not just an individual preference: "I thought about the problem of the elevator: in order to go out on the street, women have to go up a few floors until they are equipped to face the day, and that involves a lot of things, such as shaving, putting on makeup, dyeing grey hair, paying attention to whether or not they have their period - and taking the necessary precautions in that regard - dressing appropriately. It seemed to me, as it still does today, very unfair for us not to wake up at the first floor, which is what happens to men, and just walk out the door." The gesture of not shaving became a statement for Laura, who even liked to be provocative: "It was a brutal empowerment. I felt in control of my body, not submitting to the rules society had created for me," she says.

Indeed, this rebellion in favor of hair - or against its removal - goes back a few decades. When, in 1972, Harriet Lyons and Rebecca Rosenblatt published the manifesto Body Hair: The Last Frontier in the inaugural issue of Ms. - an US liberal feminist magazine co-founded by Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes -, they introduced an anti-hair removal stance that did not tolerate concessions: you were a fierce feminist or a pawn of the patriarchy. According to Rebecca Herzig, Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies and author of Plucked: A History of Hair Removal (2015), intentional hair removal only became a standard of beauty after World War II, when American society found it useful to reenforce gender distinction as soldiers returned home to start families and take up the jobs that women had previously held.

"In 1964," she writes in the aforementioned book, "surveys indicated that 98 percent of all American women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four routinely shaved their legs." Since then, little has changed. A 2016 study published in JAMA Dermatology with more than 3,300 American women found that 84% of respondents shaved their legs, compared with a scant 16% who said they never did. "The goal of the study was not to judge what people do," said study author Tami Rowen, a gynecologist and obstetrician in San Francisco, "but to explore the reasons behind that choice,” she told Self Magazine. Although partner preference plays a role in the decision, most women (59%) trim or remove pubic hair because they consider it "cleaner." Rowen continued: "It's a misconception that pubic hair is unhygienic. I'm a gynecologist and obstetrician and many of my patients talk about their hair as if it's a cleanliness issue, and it's not. Having pubic hair is not unhygienic". Luís Uva, Clinical Director of Personal Derma - Clínica Dermatológica & Estética, in Lisbon, doesn't refute this idea, but he does shed light on some of the advantages of having pubic hair removed: "When you have [laser] hair removal, you are much less likely to get folliculitis in areas like the thighs or groin. The same is true for those who suffer from acne inversa: hair removal reduces the infection problems caused by hair in those areas." The dermatologist also points to the comfort factor of not having hair for those who, for example, play a lot of sport. There are also disadvantages: in the case of permanent hair removal, it can cause some temporary irritation due to the laser or pulsed light: "When [the laser] is not done by qualified personnel, it can even create some hyperpigmentation spots - brown spots - especially in darker skins", the doctor points out. It should be noted that opting for razors or even some types of wax can also lead to infections since the act of shaving the hair can cause it to grow inwards creating problems in the skin: "It is also for this purpose that the laser appears, not only as a method of permanent hair removal, but also as a way to avoid this type of skin infections."

When I ask Laura about what someone who "doesn't care about their hair at all" feels, she hastens to correct me: "I care about my hair very much. Over the years, I've been doing the exercise of looking at them neutrally, without judgment, and then lovingly, like I look at my eyes, my hair, or my legs. They are an important part of my body because I had to fight to keep and appreciate them. They are also a great source of my self-esteem and the way I conceive myself as a lesbian woman, a human being, a mammal. They are very cute and also serve as a calming mechanism when I am worried, anxious or overthinking: I like to touch them and feel their soft texture." She adds that what is strange, strange, is to recognize her today without hair, but that she still removes them from time to time and that is fine. The director of Pelo Sim Pelo Não, a documentary that portrays female experience based on the conversations of a group of friends who do not shave, is still waiting for the day when, in fact, no one cares about hair. We're not there yet: "The stereotype is that if you don't shave you're a lesbian, you're ugly, dirty, masculine, a man-hating feminist.... For me, as a lesbian woman who likes to express herself in a feminine way, it was also one of the difficulties in this process. Breaking the deep-rooted thinking that my hairy legs are 'men's legs', that you are necessarily masculine if you don't shave, and learning to see my hair as feminine." The dictionary defines the term "hair" as the "filiform extension that grows on the skin of animals and on some parts of the human body", a description that could not sound more uninteresting. The discourse of today's hair removal product brands themselves couldn't be more inclusive. After all, it's just hair. So, what's all the fuss about?

Translated from the original on The [Un]Popular Issue, published July 2023.Full stories and credits on the print issue.