The Casualties of Women's War on Body Hair
Hair removal, at its core, is a form of gendered social control.
I’m sure there was a time when I was not hairy, but I can’t remember it. I have an early memory from middle school where a doctor examined my sideburns, which stretched almost down to my jawline, and suggested some pills to slow the growth. She told me they were for people with a lot of facial hair, like me. I recall inspecting the black hairs on my legs with serious fascination; my mother would use sticky sugar to rip them out from their stubborn roots. “Beauty requires strength,” she would say, deploying an Arabic take on the more common proverb: Beauty is pain.
The regular removal of body
