honest to god question why the fuck is Wonder Woman totally free of body hair?? no woman raised on an island without men is gonna shave her damn pits what the hell
I thought you did those things for yourself, not for the approval of men?
half the population of adults does not up an decide to spend hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours of time at risk of bleeding, scabbing, scarring and infection “just because,” “for yourself.”
women shave their legs and under the arms because of patriarchy and capitalism, which makes it a direct result of gendered socialization. body hair on women is perceived as unclean, barbaric, or disgusting as a direct result of gendered socialization. socialization is not an accident, it’s not coincidence. the hair grows on our bodies the SAME as it does on men, it has the same biological function as it does for men.
a quick google search will tell you that women didn’t start shaving under their arms in the modern western world until about World War I, when changes in fashion led to exposed underarms and razor manufacturers took that opportunity to double their profits by suggesting that cleanly shaven armpits were fashionable and high class. the trend trickled down from there, and a similar process repeated about 40 years later with leg shaving, which was adopted by pinup models, sexualizing the practice in addition to the coding of class status.
I used to claim that I shaved “for myself,” using the fact that I BEGGED my mother to let me start shaving at age 11 as evidence of my “choice.” all that that proves is that I was socialized to be repulsed by female body hair before I even had my own. I had never known an older woman who didn’t shave, I had never seen a woman who didn’t shave on TV or in movies, and the only unshaven women I heard about were the butts of jokes, “bad” women who were very, very explicitly expressed as women not to respect or model myself after.
claiming that you “freely choose” to conform to the only model for being a human woman that you have been presented with from birth is not a true choice.