A critical analysis of my personal grooming choices. Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Every time I shave my legs, pluck my eyebrows or ruin yet another white bedsheet with fake tan, I find myself thinking, is this self-care, or is that just a weak excuse for my internalised misogyny?
Maybe this is my “I’m a feminist but…” moment, as Deborah Frances-White would say on her hit podcast, “The Guilty Feminist,” in which she identifies the everyday mistakes we all make as modern-day feminists. Because of course, we all do it; we cannot all be perfect feminists all the time, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. But I believe it is an essential and healthy task to check in with yourself every once in a while; see how you’re doing and check on your razor burn. Because I do all of these things; I shave my whole body every few days, I fake tan all-over once a week, I keep my eyebrows neat, I get my nails done; but who am I really doing it all for? My realistic and honest answer is always, unfortunately, the male gaze.
Firmly established in literature centuries-old, the male gaze essentially identifies the sexualisation and objectification of women for the sake of male pleasure. Now, I firmly identify myself as a feminist, along with the majority of my peers, both male and female. But the concept of the male gaze is an intrinsically sexist ideas and goes against everything that I claim to stand for. As a result, I now find myself in a situation where I must identify my motivations for aesthetic alterations and enhancements.
The conversation of female body hair is one of frequent discussion and debate, and the overriding argument seems to be that the most liberating approach is one of personal choice. If you’d rather never go near a disposable razor, bottle of Veet or wax strips, then by all means, go for it. Equally, if you’d rather be silky smooth all over then that’s okay, so long as you’re doing it for yourself, because you like it. My worry is just that I cannot honestly say that I do partake in these rituals entirely for myself. As a straight woman raised in a patriarchal society, there is an intrinsic part of me which fundamentally desires the attention and validation from men. This is ironic, since I have not once received a compliment from a boy on my eyebrows or the shade of my blush, and in mid-winter, no one’s even going to notice if my legs are shaved or not. However, we perceiver: we shave, we stencil, we trim and dye. All of these grooming habits not only take up hours of my time, but they’re also fucking expensive, a cost which men, in accordance with current male beauty standards, do not have to fork out.
The gender imbalance of the beauty industry aside however, my quest to combat my internalised misogyny continues. Telling myself that my commitment to maintaining these near-impossible beauty regimes comes entirely from a personal choice that I have developed is, fundamentally, a lie. And I think I owe myself a little more honesty.
I first shaved my legs at the age of 12 when I was horrified to discover some rogue dark hair on my calves. So as I sit down to write this increasingly depressing self-reflection, I realise that I have never seen my bare legs, or at least not since I was prepubescent. This not only disgusts me as it calls upon our society’s sexualisation and idealisation of young girls’ bodies, but it also, in my opinion, totally invalidates any claim I have to personal choice.
I tend to prefer going into actual shops when I buy clothes, so that I can try the clothes on and see how they fit my body. I avoid online shopping because, as we all know, they can be so unreliable that I could be anything from a size 8 to an 18… Walking into the dimly lit Zara dressing rooms clutching three pairs of the same trousers in different sizes is exactly how I should be approaching my decisions around personal grooming. I’ve never given myself the chance to ‘shop around.’ And as much as I claim that my legs are quite so smooth because I like it, it’s a bit too much of a coincidence that this just happens to align perfectly with the male-orientated current standard of beauty for women. So, what now? I suppose what I’ve made clear to myself is that, perhaps, I need to explore my options a bit more, try not shaving, or letting my eyebrows grow out, or leave the bottle of St Tropez on the shelf at Boots. Only then, will I feel informed enough to make a decision.
This decision is of course deeply personal. I am not claiming that nobody has the right to shave their legs until they’ve grown their very own winter coat of hair. However, as modern day feminists perhaps we need a bit of a revamp in regards to our grooming choices, or, more importantly, the reasoning behind our so-called ‘personal’ choices.