Recently I have been looking like a King Kong tribute act — I am hairy, very hairy — as part of a journey to learn to love my body hair.
I’ve been growing everything for a comedy documentary about hairy women. My friends don’t understand why I am doing it. I told them it’s for the money but really it is for the challenge — because I didn’t think I could do it. I have been a serial hair remover — waxing, shaving and plucking — since I was 14, when I should have been learning about the speed of molecular activity in an equilibrium reaction. Instead, I was bleaching my moustache. To me, being hair-free is feminine, beautiful and sexy. Could ditching the razor, tweezers and wax help me change my mind about body hair being unattractive?
My journey begins in Hove, on the south coast of England. I dress up as a gorilla and roam the streets, asking people what they think of hairy women and what parts of the body women most remove hair from.
Most men say they think facial and body hair on a woman is disgusting: ”I wouldn’t go out with a woman who was hairy, that’s just lazy”, ”It’s disgusting”, ”It’s unattractive”.
And the women? Most say they remove almost all body hair — arms, legs, underarms, Brazilian, upper lip, chin, eyebrows. I meet one woman who had her pubic hair waxed in the shape of a heart, then dyed red with diamante stones on it as a Valentine’s Day gesture. I wonder if her boyfriend did the same in return. And what next? A python? An elephant? What happened to being natural?
I had assumed that a lot of women were doing this for men and because of men — but it appears women can be just as ruthless towards other women. Every morning I go swimming, and in three months of hair growing, while men have rarely batted an eyelid at the bush hanging out of my leopard-print swimming costume, women certainly have. I walked into the sauna the other day and the two women in there did a double take and walked straight out with their backs against the walls. I didn’t mind — I had the sauna all to myself.
But I was not so confident when I visited Loaded magazine. When I walked into the office with six weeks’ worth of body hair, a young, confident writer came over: ”Hi, come through to my casting couch.” Apparently, this is where girls are auditioned. The office was plastered with pictures of glamour models with extraordinary sized breasts and not a hair in sight.
The air smelled of pure testosterone. I sat like a 15-year-old boy, mouth wide open, very confused. Could I be in Loaded? They looked at my face: ”Yeah you’re all right”. Then they look at my legs: ”No way! Why have you got hairy legs?” Then I show them my underarms: ”That’s disgusting! I can’t believe you left the house like that. Our readers don’t want to look at something like that!”
I can’t believe the prejudice and stigma attached to hairy women — it makes me want to grow my body hair even more, and wear sexy, revealing clothing. There is something both worrying and obscene about society’s requirement for adult women to remove the body hair that proclaims them sexually mature adults, and turn themselves into facsimiles of pre-pubertal girls.
To me body hair is no longer a big deal. It is only hair, after all. — Â