my pubes, feminism, and societal pressures
Image source The Hairiest Feminist on Tumblr.
My body, or is it?
Can we take back ownership of ourselves?
These are the questions I ask myself today as I look in the mirror and take in what I see. I see the naked flesh of a young woman; gentle curves, skin browned by summer sun, perky breasts - pale and sharp. There it is, the vessel I was born with, and the part of me that suffers the most under my own scrutiny, and society’s ridiculous idealisation of ‘beauty’.
I want to talk about pain, regret, and conformity. I always viewed myself as a person who did not fall under the pressures and beauty ideals that are so viciously thrown upon the modern woman. I was strong, a feminist, who believed in her own natural beauty and stood by that. I loved my baggy clothes, rarely brushed my unruly mane, and never wore make up. Hand me a lip liner or box of foundation and you may as well have just passed over a Morse Code dictionary and asked me to use it to translate the Iliad into German. Nevertheless, there was one thing that always disturbed me about my body, and I couldn’t shake it. Although I paraded about the world with hairy armpits proudly, my bikini line and all its dark curly glory was a source of great insecurity. I hated going to the beach, and used to cry about how I couldn’t shave or wax because of the pain of ingrown hairs and skin rashes. My bush was expansive, more forest than simple shrub, and its roots spread out of their ‘rightful place’ and down my thighs. I hated the sight of myself naked. No matter how much my mother told me how beautiful I was, and to love myself for my rich dark beauty, I still couldn’t stand it. From the age of fourteen I decided that when I was old enough, I would sort it out. I would get my bikini line lasered and finally not have to deal with the pain and embarrassment of my animalistic vagina. Finally, I would be like my blond, pale haired friends, who never had to worry. How wrong I was.
When I informed my mother of my plans, she told me not to. She begged, she pleaded, and I ignored her. “I’m only going to do the edges,” I told her. “Just the bits that stick out.” And I believed myself. The first time I went to undergo the painful, repetitive, expensive procedure, I actually stood true to my promise. I only shaved off the parts of my pubes that touched my thighs, leaving the rest free to grow. However, that quickly changed. Living in London with three other women, constantly bombarded by billboards and advertisements, the desperation of sex and power hanging in the air, my security faded even further. I was aware of the women that I lived with and their thin strips of pubic hair, all clean and bare, and saw how confident they were in their sexuality. I took this to mean that I too would be more confident, more powerful, more beautiful, the less hair I had. And so, bit by bit, with the slow subtlety that goes unnoticed, I shaved more and more. In the end there I was, all proud, with a shaped and tailored pubic region; hard lines and cut corners, small, trimmed, perfectly in line with the modern ideals of what makes a woman sexy. How it disgusts me.
One year on and I’ve left London and the bombarding pressures of city life. As time has passed and I’ve settled back into myself, I started to realise my mistake. Looking in the mirror, I see the naked flesh of a young woman; gentle curves, skin browned by summer sun, perky breasts pale and sharp, and the stripped battleground of a pubic region taken to war. The thing I hate most about it isn’t even how it looks. It's pretty, neat, contained.
Like a rose bud. What makes my skin curl is the understanding of what I have done to myself and what that says about my place as a woman in modern society. There it is. The stamp of domestication, urbanisation, sexualisation. Here I am, a young woman, ‘proud of myself’, ‘in touch with my sexuality’, and this is what I had to do to get here. I had to stab myself again and again with high powered lasers, going through session after session of pain, and spending hundreds of hard-earned pounds. I raped my pubes, and in the process, I lost that which I treasured most; the idea that I was a strong and independent woman. I can no longer hide behind my feminist label, or claim to be above modern ideals. There it is, written onto my skin, plain for all to see. I am an insecure little girl who fell down beneath the pressure, and who only now realises how beautiful it is to be natural, to embrace how you were born. Beauty does not come from conformity, it comes from ownership, from your own understanding that you are what you are, and that what you are is perfect.
Now comes the hard part. Now comes the realisation that what’s done is done. I have made an irreversible decision, and I can either cry about it, bend under the weight of my own weakness, or I can work with it. I can harness my embarrassment, my regret, and I can use to as fuel to power my journey towards self-love. Here is my next challenge. Having failed the first, to love myself for how I was born, I must now face the much harder task of loving myself for what I have chosen to be. To see my mistake, and to own it. To use it as an example of how fucked up our world is and how much we need to change. To share my own self horror, to talk to friends, other women, other men, and open up the discussion of what beauty is what it means for ourselves and society.
It all starts with love, love for ourselves, who we are and what we are. Love for others, and even love for the pressures we are under, for only when we truly accept and understand what we are up against, can we learn how to stand against it.