The first time I began to notice my hairy legs was when I slept over at my best friend’s house in middle school. She showed me a bag of cheap pink BIC razors that her mom bought her as a birthday present. We were eleven and the excitement on her face about her new treasures was unparalleled. She looked at my legs, gave me a half-smile and asked when I was going to start shaving.

Over the next week, every woman’s legs that I saw were smooth, shiny and practically glistening in the sunlight. Every man’s legs looked like an amplified version of my own hairy ones and I deduced that one of the things that differentiates women from men is shaved legs. In my young eyes, shiny legs made women beautiful, and, of course, I wanted to be beautiful too. This is how it all started.

In her "Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History," Victoria Sherrow points out that as early as 4,000 B.C., women have been using arsenic and quicklime to make their bodies silky smooth. Ancient Egyptians shaved themselves from head to toe to avoid the spread of disease, lice and the plague. Back then, people who didn’t shave were seen as health hazards no matter whether they were men or women. From there, we can trace a long line through history of people rubbing their hair off with coarse stones, tweezing beards, and burning off hair mostly for reasons of practicality.

Fast forward to 2016 and a majority of women in the United States still shave their underarms, arms, legs, tops of toes, and many other body parts, even though the health risks have been largely eradicated.

What was once natural quickly transformed into an object of humiliation for women in America. The fashion industry, media industry and shaving industry began by attacking women’s underarm hair through an onslaught of advertisements meant to enforce this hairless custom.

May 1915, "Harper's Bazaar"

And in 1922 (as seen in the above ad), not shaving became an "embarrassment." This is the culture that I grew up in, and one that I surprisingly never gave much thought to (outside of skipping a shave out of laziness) until Dr. Sandra Posey posed a challenge to my Women’s Folklore class:

Defy the norms of body hair, or if you already defy those norms, then do the reverse and conform.

So, for ten weeks, I decided to put down my razor and flowery foam gel cream and discover what it’s like to grow out my body hair in a society that detests it.

To begin with, I’ve never been the type of person who lets hairy legs stop me from wearing skirts, shorts and dresses, but in a study conducted by Susan Basow and Amie Braman on college students’ perceptions towards women with body hair, it was found that people perceived women with body hair as less sexually and interpersonally attractive, sociable, intelligent, positive and happy, and as stronger, more active and more aggressive than women without body hair (637). These findings illustrate that the absence of body hair on women is sexually desirable in American society, even though “hairlessness is not the natural state of the mature female body and continual effort must be exerted to maintain this culturally approved condition” (642). Although a strong, active and more aggressive woman is not necessarily a bad thing, it tends towards the masculine instead of the feminine. So, having body hair is correlated with being a man, while removing body hair is associated with being a woman.

In Karin Lesnik-Oberstein’s book, "The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair," she states that women with body hair are perceived as “monstrous in being like men, or masculine” (3). Even though I identify as a woman and I grow hair on my body naturally, I felt continual pressure in needing to shave so that I would not be considered less feminine or manly. I wanted to be perceived as attractive, sociable, intelligent, positive and happy, more so than I wanted to be perceived as strong, active and aggressive.

Lesnik-Oberstein argues that “women’s body hair is truly configured as taboo: something not to be seen or mentioned; prohibited and circumscribed by shame, disgust and censure” (2). Women who don’t shave their body hair are seen by many other women, men, the media, and even themselves, as subversive, gross or unhygienic.

Shaving seems to be something that our society doesn’t discuss openly, something that we view as a private, personal matter, but it is a concept that is always hiding out in our peripherals, ready to surface whenever someone counteracts what society deems as the appropriate shaving custom for them. Even Leonardo DiCaprio's mother was criticized openly on various media platforms about her natural underarm hair.

While women and men alike are judged about whether their legs, arms, underarms and other body parts are cleanly shaven, women seem to more often comply with the conditioned shaving rituals, and men are more willing to follow whatever shaving custom appeals to them, and assert their masculinity in other ways. Regardless, if a woman does not want to shave, or if a man does want to shave, it just seems easier to give in to societal pressure and conform to the shaving customs that our culture sees as appropriate, instead of going against the grain of societal norms and subjecting oneself to perceived humiliation and embarrassment. Instead of being seen as humans, we often define people by their biological organs and assign them social customs as a result. Shaving is no exception to this.

Throughout my ten weeks of non-shaving, I didn't see any disgusted looks flashed my way because of my "objectionable" and "embarrassing" body hair. No one seemed to have really noticed, and if they did notice, they certainly didn’t mention it to me. Most people I told were fascinated and curious, wondering what this whole not shaving is thing all about, why I began doing (or not doing) it, and most importantly, just how BAD did my legs itch?

From what I’ve heard, this relatively positive experience is rare. Other women tell horror stories about being grimaced at in public, being called disgusting by strangers, and lovers revoking their declarations of adoration when they see the hair start to grow in. Not shaving during the middle of a Colorado winter—a time in which bare legs, hairy or shaven, are largely forsaken anyways—probably has a lot to do with my lack of public humiliation.

Even so, as someone who isn’t getting regularly mocked or ridiculed for my body hair, I found myself questioning and chastising my choice not to shave. I caught myself tucking my legs away from view when they were vulnerable, wearing long sleeve shirts to cover my underarms, and wearing pants when I longed to wear a skirt. I turned into the woman in advertisement number two who shrinks “from the scrutinizing glance of my friends” and lets her body hair spoil “the freedom which awaits me at the beach” without even knowing that I became her. After my long ten weeks of not shaving, I realized that being afraid of what others are going to think of you is a motivation so strong that many of us change the way we act and who we are in order to fit certain molds that society outlines for us.

Sure, in the grand scheme of things, shaving is a small thing. But the way our society reacts to a person’s choice to shave or not to shave sets a precedent for how we react to other choices or movements that go against our societal norms.

If I decide not to shave my legs and nobody sees this, then I’m not sure that it matters quite as much as if my body hair is brought into the limelight. Shaving should be a non-issue, but in reality, it is something that women are compelled to do, not because they necessarily want to, but because they have likely been taught over and over again that shaving is a way to show off your femininity.

This is not to say that women who shave because they enjoy it are wrong in any way; it’s just that through not shaving, I realized that I have never actively questioned why I have been spending 30 minutes every other day, roughly two hours each week, eight hours each month, 96 hours each year for twenty one years—performing an act without knowing exactly why I was doing it. Shaving or not shaving is something that is rarely discussed in classrooms, feminist theory or elsewhere. Shaving customs are something we simply accept and that which is defined, according to Lesnik-Oberstein, as a “patriarchal taboo,” enforced through the threat of ridicule and trivialisation (how could you devote attention to something so silly?), or of total dismissal (the all-too familiar: ‘you are monstrous, or mad’ for not shaving)” (5).

On the one hand, I want to confront this by continuing to not shave my body hair, but on the other hand, I really like shaving my legs. So which desire wins out in the end—shaving or taking a stand against unfair beauty standards and expectations? Either way, what matters in the end is if I have fully questioned the motivations hidden behind routine actions, behind this patriarchal taboo, and have, in turn, motivated others to question not only their shaving rituals, but other actions they do without even thinking about them. Making conscious choices about which things we would like to subscribe or unsubscribe to allow us to reject being merely products of the culture we live in, so that ultimately, we can be represented as the individuals we are instead of letting ourselves turn into only what society wants us to be. That’s what this whole not shaving thing is all about.