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Category: Beauty

Hair Part III: Head

I have a love/hate relationship with the hair on my head. I hated it for most of my childhood and adolescence. I was super envious of the curls that many of the other girls in my Jewish school had. My hair was thin and mousy brown. Mousy. I remember seeing that word in the book “Jennifer Murdley’s Toad,” an awesome piece of young adult fiction. The main character, Jennifer Murdley, was chubby and had mousy brown hair, just like me. Of course, the girl on the cover was thin and blonde. I loved the book anyways.

The summer after I graduated high school, I dyed my hair bright red. I had intended on highlights, and got the cap method instead of foils because of price. My hair was thin enough that is pretty much just looked solid red. Bright red. The color of a good, ripe tomato. My hair stayed red throughout most of college. When I got lazy, it grew back out to brown. But I always loved it red. With bright red hair (as well as the blue, green, purple, and orange that followed), I could be noticed. With mousy brown hair, I was plain and shy, the fat girl who hid in the corner. But I couldn’t hide when my hair made me stand out.

***

Around age 21, I started thinking about covering my head full time. Traditionally, in Judaism, men cover their heads. Those are the little caps that people associate with Jewish events. Many religiously observant men wear them everywhere. Some also wear hats or other head coverings, depending on the sect. I’ve heard a number of explanations for this practice: it’s a reminder that there’s something higher than you; it’s a public statement of Jewishness; it’s a safeguard against vanity. As an egalitarian Jew, one who believes that requirements should not generally differ between men and women, I felt conflicted. My beliefs said that I should cover my head. It seemed incredibly simple. But I didn’t want to wear a kippah. I didn’t have the energy to challenge gender norms in that way.

Non-Jews, if they’ve seen people wearing kippot, have usually only seen them on men and tend to ask lots of questions. Many people, especially non-egalitarian Jews, assume that women who take on historically male rituals and garments are simply doing it for attention or to make a statement. I wanted neither, but covering my head seemed like an important affirmation of my Judaism and my egalitarianism. I thought about wearing hats or scarves or bandanas, but there was another problem: historically, the only women who covered their heads were ones who were married. I was looking to date, and didn’t want to have people interpret my action that way. I also didn’t want people to think that I believed that women had to have their hair covered, and I very much differentiate between head covering and hair covering.

And, though I hated to admit it, part of it was vanity. I loved my brightly-colored hair and didn’t want to cover it up. So I didn’t.

But when Mr. Ruggedly-Handsome and I were a couple months away from getting married, I revisited the issue (Mr. R-H has been asked not to be referred to as Mr. Shoshie because he thinks that Shoshie is a weird alias– no accounting for taste). I wouldn’t have to worry anymore about signaling that I was single because, well, I wouldn’t be, and hadn’t been for quite a while. I knew I wasn’t going to cover my hair, for the aforementioned reasons. And, after having a long conversation with a friend who had recently started covering her head, I realized that vanity wasn’t a good enough reason for me, anymore.

When I mentioned my decision to Mr. R-H, he asked me why. And I told him that, in all other ways, we were observant Jews. But not in this one, and I thought it was important. He decided to start wearing a kippah full time. We’d both start after wedding. I bought a bunch of thick headbands, headscarves, fascinators, and awesome hats. I looked up ways to tie up the headscarves, and brainstormed haircuts that would allow me to show off my brightly colored hair while still covering my head sufficiently (traditionally, a covering as least the size of your fist). These days, I feel weird if I don’t have my head covered, at least if I’m not at the gym or hanging out around the house. It’s become a part of my daily uniform.

***
These days, I have another reason for favoring my head coverings: my already-fine hair has become even thinner. It’s possible that it’s been due to stress or my recent ill health, but female pattern baldness runs in my family, so it’s definitely possible that my hair will continue to thin until I barely have enough to cover my head. I’ve thought a lot about how I’m going to respond when/if this happens. Will I wear a wig? Will I shave my head? Will I just wear lots of hats and scarves? Should I continue dying my hair? It may make my hair fall out faster, but it brings me a lot of happiness in the meantime.

I’ve probably cried more over this hair issue than any of the others that I’ve brought up.

Mr. R-H tries to cheer me up by saying that we’ll lose our hair together, but it’s not the same. He can lose his hair and still feel like a man. How can I lose my hair and still feel like a woman? We don’t have any cultural tropes for this, because women are supposed to have hair on their heads.

For the time being, I’m ignoring it. I’m wearing my hats and my headbands. I have a box of red hair dye sitting on my bathroom counter. My hair may not be the curly locks that I craved when I was 10, but it’s doing OK for me now. As for the future, well, I’ll try as best as I can to build my own story.

Hair Part II: Face

I was horrified when I started getting hair on my face. Little mustache hairs at first, then some on my chin. I also have wispy sideburns and thick eyebrows, though those don’t bother me as much.

I thought I was a freak.

I didn’t know that other women got facial hair as well. Nobody told me. No other women ever mentioned getting eyebrows sugared, mustaches waxed, chin hair tweezed or lasered off. Because, while we acknowledge that leg hair is a fact of life for most women, we never talk about facial hair. But just from doing some cursory Internet research, it looks like 10-25% of women are estimated to have facial hair. That’s a lot of women.

I could write about the ways in which facial hair blurs the boundaries between masculine and feminine, and how that’s scary.

I could write about wanting to feel beautiful, despite being a fat woman, and how facial hair gets in the way of that.

But I want to talk about race and ethnicity. Because I think far more than 10-25% of my Jewish female friends have facial hair, though none of us talk about it, except for a quick tip now and then regarding a method for removal. And although, theoretically, I feel the same way about my facial hair as I do about my leg hair (Why should I remove it? It’s not hurting anyone. Smash the patriarchy!) I still bring my tweezers along on trips. I’ve even contemplated laser treatment because I feel so ashamed of it.

One of the few fights that I remember between me and my brother (and trust me, we’ve had many fights), was when I was 20 and he was 15. He tried to insult me by telling me that my mustache was better than his, and it worked. I ran to my room in tears.

What is it about facial hair that makes it so shameful?

I think that one reason for Ashekenazi Jewish women,* is because it’s a reminder that we can almost blend in to whiteness, but not quite.

Don’t get me wrong. I benefit from white privilege, as do many of my friends. I am white, and I’ve never heard a compelling reason from a light-skinned Ashkenazi Jewish person in the US for why they do not qualify as white. But it wasn’t so long ago that we were considered a different race, fully separated from whiteness. Distinguishing physical characteristics brings that past to present. Despite my pale skin, fairly straight hair and nose, despite my English last name, I am hairier than your average US woman, and that hairiness is because of my Jewish ancestry. It sets me apart. It plays into Jewish stereotypes about Jewish women being more masculine (loud, overbearing, whathaveyou) than their non-Jewish counterparts.

In a culture that privileges tall, narrow-hipped, light-skinned, light-and-straight-haired, women, who definitely don’t have any facial hair south of their eyelashes, it’s another way that we can’t possibly fit, because even if we spend every day meticulously tweezing those wayward hairs, even if we drum up the money to remove that mustache for good, it wouldn’t matter. We still had to concern ourselves with it in the first place, same as the stereotypical Jewish teenage girl and her nose job (thank you, Glee, for perpetuating that hateful bit of misogyny against Jewish women). It’s even more beauty work that’s required of us, and even if we follow through with it, we can’t win. Because you get more facial hair as you age. Because even laser treatment doesn’t work perfectly. Because sometimes you don’t have time to tweeze in the morning. Because of stereotypes about the sneaky Jew trying to fit in. Because patriarchy.

I don’t have any good answers here. My feeling, at least, is that facial hair is even more taboo than leg hair, for the reasons mentioned above and many, many others (one other: transmisogyny! another: powerful women = scary! another: masculine women are unfuckable! I could go on and on…)

So, at this point, I just want to get the conversation going. Do you have facial hair? If so, how do you deal with it? Do you let it grow? Do you remove it? Have you ever considered *not* removing it? How much beauty work is too much? When is it enough?

When do we get to stop?

*I’m not a Jewish woman of color, and so I can in no way speak for their experiences.

Hair Part I: Legs

I’ve never been particularly consistent about shaving my legs. They were already pretty hairy when, at age 12, I asked my mother for my first razor. It was pink and disposable. After my evening shower, I grabbed it and the shaving cream, and attempted to de-hair my legs. It took a long time. The razor kept getting clogged and I nicked my heel. It gushed blood, as heel nicks do, and the bleeding took forever to stop. But, by the end, I managed to get most of the hair, save for a few random patches. I pretty much always miss a couple spots.

I never shaved my legs in the winter. Sure, I agreed with the commercials that “silky smooth” felt great, but I just couldn’t be bothered. I’d have fits of embarrassment in gym class because we had to wear shorts, but an extra five minutes of sleep trumped that embarrassment. Thus went my first experience as a hair nonconformist.

I maintained my non-diligence through college, shaving (mostly) during skirt season and covering my hairy legs with long skirts and tall boots through the winter.

Then I moved to Seattle, where pretty much every season is skirt season.

I started dating my soon-to-be-husband and gained my leg-shaving motivation. After all, why would a great guy like him stay with a fat, hairy woman like me? One strike or another might be OK, but tolerance of both just seemed like too much to ask for.

And, well, I couldn’t be less fat, so I would be less hairy.

For the first few months of our relationship, I shaved without fail. Then I started testing the waters. A day without shaving. 2 days. 3. A week.

The STBH didn’t say anything.

Finally, the secret came out: the STBH didn’t actually care about silky smooth legs. In fact, he thought the whole hair-removal thing was pretty weird.

I didn’t really understand. Didn’t he know that women were supposed to have smooth legs? Didn’t he know that I was supposed to be ashamed of my stubble? Didn’t he know that “hairy” is one of the worst things a woman could be?

I continued shaving regularly for a bit, but it became a less and less frequent regimen. I haven’t yet reached the point where I feel comfortable with my hairy legs all the time, but it’s a process. I haven’t replaced my razors in a while, though I did shave before the last wedding I went to. Sometimes I have a fit of wanting to feel feminine, and my brain still thinks that I can only do that with smooth legs.

Most of the time, my logic goes as follows:
1. “I should shave my legs! I will look prettier with shaved legs!”
2. “I have no razors. I need to get razors.”
3. “I totally don’t have time to get razors. Maybe on the way back from work…?”
4. “Wait, fuck this. Why should I go out of my way to shave my fucking legs? I’m no less of a woman when I have leg hair! Smash the patriarchy!”

As I said, it’s a process.

I really wanted this to be some story about how I made an enlightened decision that razors are tools of the patriarchy and cast them away in a fit of rebellion. But really it’s the story of claiming back a bit of time and money for myself.

I’ve been challenged on that, mostly by other women, even feminist ones. I’ve gotten side-eyes while in bathing suits and comments while in dresses. I’ve been asked whether I’m making a statement, and sometimes I feel like I am.

But most of the time, the statement is that I just don’t feel like it. And that’s OK.

In many ways, my resistance to shaving feels like my resistance to dieting. It’s work that I’m supposed to do in order to maintain patriarchal standards of beauty. Even if I’m not intending to be subversive, I am, simply by enjoying and living in my fat, hairy body. It’s selfishness, and women aren’t supposed to be selfish. It’s abstaining from a beauty requirement, and women are supposed to uphold a certain paradigm of beauty. It’s a challenge to what patriarchy says a woman should look like and it’s a challenge to women who buy into those standards to consider why they spend the time and money.

What’s sickening is that even something as simple as letting leg hair grow out has its consequences. I don’t wear skirts while on job interviews or while presenting at conferences, for instance. My clean, soft leg hair would be seen as unkempt at best, a sign that I neglect self-care at worst. But I think that’s just another reason to be more public about my hairy legs. An army of hairy-legged feminists sounds scary to a lot of people, other feminists included, but I think it’s just the thing we need. I hope that the more women are upfront about not wanting to shave their legs, the more accepted it will become to abstain completely.

Notes From My Boner: “Natural” beauty

In case you were wondering–and I know you were–it’s not just your boobs that are up for Internet approval. It’s also your makeup! At Pandagon, Amanda comments on the thoughtful guys who wants you to know that their boners will still think you’re pretty without that faceful of slap. Stop being insecure! You don’t need all the makeup! You’re pretty just as you are, which I can comfortably say despite never having seen you, with or without makeup!

Awesome Dad of the Day

Will Smith:

“We let Willow cut her hair. When you have a little girl, it’s like how can you teach her that you’re in control of her body? If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. She can’t cut my hair but that’s her hair. She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that is hers. She is used to making those decisions herself. We try to keep giving them those decisions until they can hold the full weight of their lives.”

The Parallels Between Breast Augmentation and FGM

A very interesting article asking what distinguishes voluntary genital mutilation from voluntary breast augmentation:

But even if FGM were carried out in the best of clinical conditions on a consenting adult woman, we call it a human rights violation. Why? Because it is an intervention which is carried out solely to satisfy stereotyped notions of what a women could or should be, and which has:

1. no discernible health benefits;
2. a negative impact on women’s sexual health; and
3. permanent effects on women’s health more generally.

Well, okay, out of context it does look a little silly.

A man poses coyly next to a bicycle like a vintage pin-up
Totally sexy, right?

Sexy images are sexy, right? Okay, bad question–sexy images are subjective. But sexy images are supposed to be sexy. To someone, anyway. It turns out that without that air of objectification, sexy images are… kind of weird, frankly.*

We’ve seen how Batman just isn’t quite the same in bustier and cocked hip. And now photographer Rion Sabean shows us that a gender-bent approach to the classic pin-up girl loses something in translation. Could it be that photographers back in the day–and right now, frankly–portrayed “sexy” with coy, nonthreatening, ultrafeminine poses? No way, right? Discuss. (See the whole “Men-ups” set on Flickr. I like Mr. December, but then I’ve always been partial to the mountain-man beard.)

Next up in the “you know, it seemed to work in the magazine” category is artist Yolanda Dominguez, who “works from what is disquieting”–in this case, the awkward and uncomfortable poses that are apparently meant to be sexy on fashion models in magazines.

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