Desexualizing Legs and Growing Up
I kept my legs closely shaved to mimic some level of aesthetic beauty and acceptance that I then found in smooth, hairless skin.
Getting rid of body hair is like getting used to make-up. You start off thinking you’re not going to do it again for a while. But then it grows back too soon, just like the urge to dab some lipstick to avoid having to look at the real shade of your lips. Before you know it, you’re accustomed to it.
However, somewhere in the back of your mind you still believe you can go back to your natural make-up, bare look, except one day you try and find it physically painful. You like your face better when there’s make-up on and for some inexplicable reason, you feel insecure showing your bare face to people. Just like you’re now afraid to show hair on your legs and arms after hiding it for so long.
My friend, whom I’d like to call Pimi for this story, is unique. Both of us went to the same school for three years and we never fit in with the popular clique. Our school dictated a knee-length pinafore dress for a uniform and that meant putting our calves on display for 7 hours a day.
I was insecure about my calves. They seemed too fat in proportion to my ankles, so I couldn’t bear to make it look any more “uglier” than I believed it was. So when I started wearing the pinafore, I kept my legs closely shaved to mimic some level of aesthetic beauty and acceptance that I then found in smooth, hairless skin.
Almost all the girls in my class shaved or waxed their legs. Some even got their arms done every two weeks or so. But Pimi didn’t care.
Hair isn’t ugly. It is natural.
Pimi was so iconic that she kept the hair on her legs and arms in all its natural glory. And this was a huge thing — we’re talking of peer pressure and the struggle for acceptance among fifteen-year old girls in a private school. Once she told me that she’d never gotten rid of the hair on her limbs.
I was always in awe at her courage and zero-fucks-given attitude regarding the situation of light brown curls on her legs when almost every girl we knew was sporting smooth, glossy legs in their pinafores. But I never got to do it myself at school.
I hated the prickly feeling on my legs three days after a shave. I hated the cuts I occasionally made when I shaved in a hurry and I hated spending every month on shaving foam, razors and all that moisturizer because I’d get rashes after every shave. I also hated how my school dictated a pinafore dress when we were fifteen and had to take the public bus to school frequently. It was all horrible but I couldn’t change anything and I wasn’t brave enough to desexualize my legs.
I wasn’t brave enough to desexualize my legs.
I’d shave one day and hope to grow it out the next time but shave again because my thick body hair became something I badly wanted to hide. I was stuck in the leg hair cycle of wanting to grow it out but giving in to internal stigma.
Seven years later mid-pandemic, I sit in my pajamas with my legs in all its hairy glory. I love how they don’t impersonate a porcupine anymore and I simply do no miss the rashes and itchiness that followed a waxing or shave. Once in three months or so, I give it a shave just because I feel like it. Not because it is expected of me.
And when I watch it grow back and its ends turn blunt and soft, I’m reminded of Pimi, who did this long back in the face of peer pressure at the cost of falling at the bottom of high school hierarchy.
But hey, it’s okay if you’re fifteen year old me still trying to break out of the leg hair cycle. It’s also okay if you’re never burdened by the chore of keeping your body hairless.
22-year old me knows that there is a certain liberation in not presenting your legs for someone else’s pleasure or satisfaction. That I can do it if I’m comfortable with it and that someone’s judgement about it is simply a reflection of their bias —the bias that it’s okay for certain members of the society to flaunt body hair while it is scandalous for others.
