Bitch Doctrine by Laurie Penny

Author:Laurie Penny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

IT’S THE LITTLE THINGS

It’s always the little things. In the midst of a welter of unutterably depressing news about welfare and political turmoil, the great controversy is, yet again, the stunning fact that women are human beings with bodies that grow hair, eat, sweat and shit.

First, a spectacularly misogynist and homophobic (and now withdrawn) advert from Veet, manufacturers of hair-removing goo, claimed that failing to remove your leg-hair with the help of Veet products will turn you into an actual bloke. Then there was the equally repugnant site set up to shame ‘Women Eating on the Tube’, featuring non-consensual pictures of women doing just that, because there’s nothing worse a female person could possibly do than demonstrate in public that she has a body that gets hungry.

Now, in eight years of feminist blogging I have avoided weighing in on the body hair debate for two reasons, the first of which is political. I’ve always been faintly distrustful of the school of feminism that advocates a return to ‘natural’ womanhood as a political statement, because as far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing. There is something a tiny bit reactionary about the plea for nature as opposed to liberated modernity; it runs uncomfortably close to the rhetoric of those social conservatives who would prefer women to be ‘natural’ when it comes to being submissive to a male provider and hogtied by their own reproductive capacities, but to continue the decidedly unnatural practices of bleaching, waxing and taking a bath more than once a year. The problem arises when any behaviour, however private and personal, is socially enforced. The problem arises when, according to the language of Veet, you have to go through the expensive and time-consuming rigmarole of shaving to prove that you are a proper, well-behaved woman and therefore worthy of the kisses of easily shocked men with boring haircuts. And the problem arises when this sort of pop controversy is used as a decoy, distracting us from structural arguments about class, power and privilege. Body hair, in particular, has become an obstructive stereotype when it comes to feminist history – sexist commenters speak of ‘hairy-legged feminists’ when what they really mean to say is that women who do not conform, women who refuse to perform the rituals of good feminine behaviour, are a deeply fearful prospect.

The second reason is a bit more personal. According to the accepted way this sort of article is supposed to go, now is when I’m supposed to tell you exactly what I do with my own body hair and why and how it’s always been a problem.

Unfortunately, I am personally exempt from this particular dilemma by virtue of being a human axolotl who doesn’t grow much hair anywhere. I am literally unable to be the furry-legged, forest-crotched feminist hellwraith I often find myself accused of being. This makes shaving a largely academic issue, and puts me in precisely no position to judge any woman for her intimate topiary decisions, and I wish my friends would stop asking me to validate theirs.

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