I’ve pretty much always hated and been anxious about my hairy legs (and arms, and face, and tummy, and everything really…) and so I never ever wear skirts or shorts and I hate swimming. This was a big point of contention with my family because they thought I was being antisocial and rejecting them when really I just couldn’t bear to show my body to anyone. I stopped shaving when I broke up with my ex a few months ago, and now my new girlfriend suddenly has given me positive feelings about my hair!! The first time we slept together I hadn’t shaved because I wasn’t expecting it (lol) but I quickly realised that she didn’t mind at all - maybe because her legs were as hairy as mine (she is trans)!! Hopefully I can now say goodbye forever to itchy legs from shaving, spending hours in the shower, cutting my legs, spending money on product, and most importantly the feelings of insecurity… This world needlessly bullies us into feeling bad about what our bodies just naturally do, and it’s high time somebody spoke out against that. So thank you to this blog for making people like me feel a bit better, and hopefully one day body-positive movements more broadly will include us.
Earlier this year, I conducted a 7-month-long self discovery experiment on not shaving. I kept my legs covered most of the time but I really wanted to push myself through the uncomfortable feeling and feel normal in my natural state! I just really wanted to fight the stupid gendered and unnecessary bull that is expected of females. And so I did. I went out multiple times, leg hair on display, and gained confidence each time. I’ve never really made an effort to keep my legs bare but this was the next step up. I am a firm believer in all people being able to make their own decisions on their bodies. Think body hair is gross? Blame society, blame the media, make your own decision. Question the way your mind works, fight what you know. I was made fun of for my body hair from 2nd grade on–2nd grade! My arms were quite hairy so I would wear a sweater every day in the hot classroom until I was questioned by a teacher about it. I started shaving my legs and underarms in 5th grade. I started waxing my eyebrows when I was in 6th or 7th grade. In 8th grade my friends made fun of my belly fuzz so I started shaving that too. Why do so few people see this as an issue? Why should a 7 year old girl have to focus covering up her arms and overheat rather than learn in the classroom? Why does a 12 year old girl have to worry so much about keeping her eyebrow groomed or else somebody will comment on it? It’s disgusting. The only reason I ever removed any hair on my body was either because I WAS made fun of, or I was worried I WOULD be made fun of. Because being hairless is the norm. I always hated shaving and in high school I only did it every once in a while or when I was going to wear shorts. I remember a classmate seeing short hairs poke out of the hole on my jeans and calling it gross. I shrugged it off at that point although it still made me uncomfortable. After high school, I removed hair even less frequently. I shave every once in a while now but that’s the whole point of it. Do whatever the hell you want and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And for those who try to tell you that body hair is unlovable, tell them they can screw off. I’ve had a partner that has loved me in all of my naturalness for the better part of the last decade. Do what you want.
My name is Andrea. I’ve always been very hairy due to my hirsuitism, an effect of my thyroid condition called hashimotos, which makes me grow excessive hair all over my body. I’m latina, so my genes were already predisposed to make me have a lot of thick dark hair on my body, but hirsuitism has amplified that.
Growing up, I was teased for my unibrow, chin hairs, and my moustache in school. Though they weren’t excessively thick, they were noticeable for a girl like me, especially growing up in an especially white community. I started plucking in fifth grade. It was easy enough and I didn’t mind the pain. Anything to keep people from talking.
I don’t remember when I started shaving my legs, but I know it was soon after that, because that same year, I started shaving everywhere. I started developing at a very early age, and as a child, it was impossible to keep up with all of the very adult grooming I felt I had to do just to look acceptable in my own eyes.
Even at that age, you’re exposed to “perfect” bodies so often and almost no real ones, that all you can see when you look in the mirror is all the things that you aren’t. You look at all the reasons the women on TV and in films and on the covers of magazines are beautiful and they become all the reasons you’re not. Despite the fact that they have completely different bodies than you and it takes personal trainers and dieticians and hours of preparation and makeup and grooming and perfectly fitted clothing and photo distortion to make them look like flawless godesses, you somehow think that the ugliness you see in yourself is YOUR shortcoming.
I shaved a lot growing up and through highschool. It took me hours to do every single time. I would always get ingrown hairs, rashes, razor bumps, pimples and whatever other terrible thing a razor can give you. If I hadn’t shaved, I would hide my legs in pants. It never looked my legs were really shave as fresh thick prickles of new hair would poke through my skin the second a chill in the room gave me goosebumps, even if it was while I was cleaning up from shaving.
I hated shaving, but I hated being hairy more. Hairy legs meant no shorts in the summer. A hairy tummy meant no crop tops or bikinis. I went to theme park that also had a water park, with my best friend when I was thirteen, and she pointed at a beautiful girl in a bikini and said “that girl would be really pretty if she didn’t have hair on her stomach.” I looked down to see some barely there blonde fuzz on her belly. I was as covered as a person could be that day in the summer, without getting heat stroke. I knew I wanted nothing less than for someone to see me.
My hiding and self loathing grew throughout highschool, dying down in college as I started to become exhausted with the amount of time I had to dedicate to shaving without any sort of tangible payoff. I was growing more and more into a feminist but still had some setbacks, as the biggest part of my journey was finally having the strength to walk away from religion. Once I had, I was free to start openly engaging in the body positive movement.
And I think that’s where I met my biggest disappointment of all. I would look through post after post, article after article of these proud “body positive”, “inclusive” feminists and with each one, grew more and more in my shame. “Fat girls are beautiful” would be followed by perfectly curvy “plus size” models in flawless makeup, with no pot bellies, no sagging or droopy rolls of skin, and most consistently, not a single speck of body hair to be found.
I grew more and more certain that my body was ugly until one day I finally snapped. I stopped shaving and I stopped hiding it. I was uncomfortable and nervous for a while, but I did it anyway. I had made a decision. If nobody is going to call hairy girls beautiful, then I will. If nobody is going to share…
I finally got the chance to submit my legs to this awesome blog! I’ll tell a little about my life with shaving/having hairy legs.
So I’ve always hated shaving. I find it so pointless. I do like the feeling of shaved legs but it’s totally not worth it. I have pcos which is polycystic ovarian syndrome. This syndrome causes cysts on the ovaries as well as weight gain, excessive body hair, and other symptoms. I’ve always had a hairy body but when I was diagnosed with this, I noticed even more body hair. I get hair on my feet, stomach, face, chest, and pretty much everywhere and there’s a lot of it.
I honestly don’t care anymore about shaving. Part of the reason is because of my depression and it being really hard to do anything at all. I now have decided to not care about shaving anymore. I have a tattoo on my leg and I know now that it is not going to look worse because of hair. Men naturally have leg hair too and they wouldn’t be told to shave because it makes their tattoos look bad. I’m at peace with my body hair now and hope that others can learn that it’s okay to not shave.
Anyways I wrote a lot but I hope it helps add to the blog!
41 days of not shaving anymore. I haven’t even seen let alone legitimately met another girl who is doing this in person yet. And the reactions from my best friend and my brother (people I’m closest to and thought I would get a more vivacious response from) have been lackluster at best… found this blog and just made a tumblr literally so I could follow it, cause I could really use some genuine enthusiasm and support right now . I was shaving every day from 10 years old until a little over a month ago (I’m 22 now) and I have never ever felt comfortable unshaved for even more than several hours when my legs would start to feel prickly again and catch on the material of my pants and stuff. I would feel so physically uncomfortable sometimes it would make me cry but shaving too often would too because I have super duper sensitive skin… perhaps that’s why the feeling of them being prickly has always seemed to bother me so much more than any other females I’ve ever met. The longest I had ever gone without shaving before this was 5 days when I was 14 in eighth grade and it was only because I was in bed with Swine Flu (lol). So I decided to stop doing this to try to see if I can get to a state where my legs are comfortable all the time (which is impossible when I’m shaving them because of how intensely them being prickly bothers me and how they become prickly within four hours of shaving so there’s barely anytime to even enjoy the soft feeling) and because I highly resent the fact that I am stuck now in a state of physical discomfort that is very hard for me to resolve for myself all because I was made to start changing how I am naturally or “normally” when I was a fricken little girl BECAUSE I was a girl. There is nothing that isn’t fucked up about that to me, to feel now like I had not been given the choice of growing up with leg hair and then as an adult deciding to shave it if I wanted to. I definitely do not feel like most of us or at least a lot more of us would choose to shave as adults if we were allowed to without judgment grow as children and teenagers without needing to modify our appearances because of our gender, because perhaps we would feel no need to, perhaps it would feel so comfortable and normal and attractive and feminine at our basal states to have the body hair we literally all have that no one or fewer people would want to… In my experience regarding shaving as a little girl I was totally being made to feel like it was a behavior that girls HAVE to learn how to do, a behavior as essentially feminine as learning how to put a tampon in. My mother was completely shaming of women who don’t shave one thing or another or even who haven’t shaved in a few days or a week, and she still is. And I’m honestly terrified for her to see me now that I stopped. And I’m still waiting for the time when it feels completely comfortable because I still have like really short prickly hairs all over in addition to the really furry parts now lol. But I guess ultimately I’m posting here because even if this was easy or silly for some people to start and stop doing whenever they felt like it (I envy you so much that’s so awesome) this is really really really hard for me. I feel like this is what a therapist would tell me to do to try to begin resolving my intrapersonal troubles that I trace back to both my relationship with my mother, and my probable obsessive compulsive amplification of my chronic pain and chronic physical discomfort. LOL so basically my point is that this feels really intense to me and it’s also very important to me. But friends and family wise I kind of feel alone in it… so I guess I’m saying all this cause I could really use some likeminded acquaintances right now. Thank you for reading.
I debated for a long time on whether I should make this post or not, but because of all the encouraging responses from my earlier post I made about shaving and not shaving and whatnot, I’ve decided to go for it. There are people out there who might need to hear this and get some comfort from it, so I’ll do it.
I’m afab and I identify myself affectionately as a Girl-Thing for the most part. I’ve struggled with my body image for all of my life, with my weight, my body hair, and my gender expression. It has taken me years to get comfortable with who I am and I’m still battling to love myself and the body I’m in. As you can see from my ponytail, I have very long hair–a meter long when straightened. It’s thick and naturally curly, but the weight of it pulls most of the curl out into waves. The hair on my head is sacred to me. It’s a very spiritual thing and a core part of my identity. But for most of my life past puberty, I was shamed for the hair on the rest of my body. I was made fun of early on for the hair on my legs and underarms, and so I started shaving the year I hit puberty. I was 10. I hated it then. I still hate it now. It’s always been something I resented, because as a child I couldn’t understand why half the population could have hair on their legs and the other half seemingly couldn’t. Now that I’m older and more educated on the many ways gender can be expressed and body autonomy, I know that shaving is a social thing. And it’s your choice whether you shave or not. That goes for any part of your body, from your head to your toes. I am not an unclean person, just because I don’t shave the majority of the time. I have a genetic predisposition for thick, dark body hair. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve injured myself over the years trying to remove it. Once when I was 16 I suffered a severe burn on my face from a wax treatment trying to remove hair from my neck, chin and lip. I had horrible scabbing over a large portion of my chin and neck for nearly 3 weeks, and had I not taken as good a care of my skin, I could have scarred. It happened another time a few years after that. And a final time that made me swear off getting waxes. All that pain for fear of the opinions of others–strangers who I don’t even know. Who will never know me. That’s crazy.
Now that I’m an adult, I’ve taken control of my identity and expressions and my body. This body is mine. Your body is yours. No one has a right to police our bodies. No one has a right to say how they should look or feel. I am a big, hairy girl. And I’m beautiful because I say I am. You all are beautiful too. No matter what your gender expression is or isn’t. No matter what ethnicity you are. No matter how old you are or where you come from. You are beautiful. There is nothing wrong with shaving. There is nothing wrong with not shaving. It’s your choice to make. Please don’t let anyone tell you what to do with it. And don’t let the lies and hate of others change how you see yourself.
I hope this helps anyone who feels uncomfortable with their body and hair.
