Flow it, show it, long as God can grow it...

I don't remember when I first started shaving my legs and underarms. Likely in seventh grade, about the time I started my period. It may have been later. I was never particularly hairy to begin with. Even the hair on my head has always been baby fine. But "by 1964, 98% of American women aged 15 to 44 were regularly shaving their legs." I was one of them.

I actually don't know whether I had my own razor, or shared one with my mother and sister, but I remember it distinctly. You twirled the handle and "jaws" opened up. You then removed the razor blade from its paper wrapping and inserted it, and twirled the razor shut. Proceed to shaving, which featured nicking yourself, attempts to staunch the flow with wadded up toilet paper, and - finally - resorting to my father's styptic pencil to stop the bleeding.

Then there was something called Nair. Nair was a chemical depilatory that you slathered on your legs. After letting it set there for a few minutes, you washed it off. Voila! No leg hair. 

The problem with Nair was that it was more expensive than cadging the communal razor and razor blade supply, and my mother wasn't going to spring for it. Plus it smelled just awful. Worse than having a home permanent. And you didn't use it under your arms. 

By the time I was in college, I had my own razor, and I'm pretty sure it was something from Gillette, and something marketed specifically for women. And I'm pretty sure I bought it, and a stash of blades, at Spag's, a great - and, alas, defunct - surplus store where everyone who lived anywhere near Worcester did their shopping for back-to-school toiletries. 

But, alas, it wasn't a Gillette Milady Décolletée, which was introduced in 1915, advertised as"a beautiful addition to Milady's toilet table -- and one that solves an embarrassing personal problem."

I never gave much thought to body hair as "an embarrassing personal problem." Nonetheless, shaving was a weekly ritual, and it was a ritual that I never questioned. 

Hair removal, I learned from a recent story from CNN, has been part of our "gender dynamics" since pretty much forever. But the idea of the less-hair-the-better (for women, at any rate) really took off in the 19th century:

The modern-day notion of body hair being unwomanly can be traced back to Charles Darwin's 1871 book "Descent of a Man," according to Rebecca Herzig's "Plucked: A History of Hair Removal."

Darwin's theory of natural selection associated body hair with "primitive ancestry and an atavistic return to earlier, 'less developed' forms," wrote Herzig, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College in Maine. Conversely, having less body hair, the English naturalist suggested, was a sign of being more evolved and sexually attractive...

By the early 1900s, upper- and middle-class white America increasingly saw smooth skin as a marker of femininity, and female body hair as disgusting, with its removal offering "a way to separate oneself from cruder people, lower class and immigrant," Herzig wrote. 

Immigrants, eh? Why am I now try to remember whether my mittel-Europa and all those great aunts shaved their legs and their armpits?

Anyway, fast forward to the Roaring Twenties and sleeveless flapper dresses with short skirts, and we're definitely in hair removal mode - with products (and marketing) aimed a women taking off. Stocking shortages and shorter dresses during World War II got more women shaving. And so it went.

Then, in the late 1960's-early 1970's, hair became more of a thing. Men were wearing their hair longer, and we sang along to our Hair albums:

Darlin', give me a head with hair, long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen
Give me down to there hair, shoulder length or longer
Here, baby, there, momma, everywhere, daddy, daddy…

Ultra-long hair on men was never something I found/find particularly attractive. Ditto for super-hairy backs. I guess I'm with Darwin there. 

Anyway, while men were getting into long beautiful hair, there was movement among feminists to stop shaving their leg and underarm hair. Why cater to the patriarchy? Etc.

So I decided to stop shaving. But after about a month of trying to grow righteous, feminist hair, all I had to show for it were a bit of underarm fuzz, and a ruff of hair around my ankles. 

I used to say it resembled the ruffs that Popeye's Goonies sported, but just look at Alice the Goonie, an dher impossibly lush fur.

The bottom line was that my righteous feminist hair looked ridiculous, so I shaved it off.

Then there's the pubic hair thang. (I blush...)

I'm too old to have ever considered a Brazilian, but hair removal of the nether regions strikes me as weird and more than a bit creepy. So does what I read about the opposite situation with pubic hair in South Korea: some women have taken to transplants to augment what comes naturally. Club for Women. Oh.

And I'm too old to be worried about hair, something that - body wise - I have less and less of. Other than the stray "granny sprong" that sprouts over my lip, on my chin, or out of my eyebrow, I just ain't making all that much of it. As for shaving, what used to be a weekly ritual is now once a month. 

But what with next wave feminism, gender fluidity, body positivity, and all those other good things, some women are back to letting in all grow out. 

So I'll leave with a few more lyrics from Hair:

Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
Flow it, show it, long as God can grow it, my hair