the early 1920s, there were already reports that exposure to radiation could be dangerous. Yet clinics continued to stay open and offer the hair-removal service. Women were lured in by the idea of a “pain-free” procedure and kept there by brochures espousing everything from social acceptance to the socioeconomic advancement that would come from obtaining “smooth, white, velvety skin.” They specifically targeted immigrant women who might feel marginalized because of their foreign (and hairier) origins, which I, a hairy Jew, related to.
Maggie, a hairy Italian, also understood.
By 1940, the procedure was outlawed, so these radiation salons began operating in back alleys, like illegal abortion clinics. Many women suffered gruesome disfigurement, scarring, ulceration, cancer, and death, all because of the extreme pressure to become hairless. The women who were adversely affected were dubbed the “North American Hiroshima Maidens,” named after the women who suffered radiation poisoning after the nuclear bombs hit Japan in World War II.
To some women, hairlessness has literally been worth dying for. As depressing as that was, I kind of admired it.
Maggie brought her hands to her mouth and her eyes got big. “That’s a monstrosity!” she said. “That’s batshit crazy.”
“Mags,” I said, “I think I would have been one of those chicks. I would have stuck my face right into some radioactivity.”
Clearly, I still had some issues.
I continued to call on more academics for information.
Oh, who am I kidding? I was calling them for comfort.
For the past eight years, Bessie Rigakos, a sociology professor at Marian University, has studied why women remove their body hair. Her biggest challenge in finding answers has been that she cannot find enough women who don’t remove their body hair to use as a control group in her studies.
Before volunteering for her next study, I began with the basics.
Why do we remove our body hair?
“I research hair removal,” she said, “and I do it myself, and I still don’t know why we do it, which is amazing.”
I felt better already.
She went on to say there are so many factors involved that she just can’t pinpoint which exactly is the cause. “I wish I had the answer,” she said. “Is society controlling it or are women controlling it?”
Keep going, Bessie. I’m wondering the same thing myself.
One thing Rigakos definitely believes is that hair removal gives women positive feedback and is thus a positive force. “Just like how when kids pee in the potty, they are rewarded,” she said, “when women adhere to beauty standards, then they are rewarded in society.”
Somehow that analogy lost me, and I hung up from my call with Rigakos just as uncertain as before, but at least I felt academic validation in my uncertainty. Rigakos had a doctoral degree in hair-removal studies from Oxford, or something like that.
Next, I called Breanne Fahs, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Arizona State University. Fahs was incredibly passionate on the subject and spoke rapidly. Which was good, because I was getting married in less than three months and needed some quick answers.
“It’s amazing how people imagine hair removal is a choice and not a cultural requirement,” she said. “If they say it’s a choice, I say try not doing it and then tell me what you think.”
“What would happen?” I asked.
She said the practice of growing body hair can be so intense that it can show women how marginalizing it is to live as an “Other.” Growing hair, she means, will give you a taste of what it’s like to be queer, be fat, or have disabilities.
“You experience this tidal wave of negative appraisals of your body,” she explained.
“How do you think it came to be this way?” I asked.
“At the root of this is misogyny,” she said. “It’s a patriarchal culture that doesn’t want powerful women. We want frail women who are stripped of their power.” She explained that in Western culture, men are fundamentally threatened by women’s power and eroticize women who look like little girls. “We don’t like women in this culture,” she said. “Pubic-hair removal is especially egregious. It’s done to transform women into prepubescent girls. We defend it and say it’s not about that, that it’s about comfort. They say they don’t want their partner to go down on them and get a hair stuck between their teeth as if that’s the worst thing that could ever happen to them.”
When I got off the phone with her, I admit, I felt pretty tense. She made hair removal sound like it was the beginning of the end of this civilization. I didn’t need that kind of responsibility.
I needed to know if there were any reasons why, evolutionarily speaking, humans might be more attracted to hairlessness. I have to acknowledge that during my reading, I did find evidence that even though hair removal wasn’t popular in early America, it has been done on and off for as long as humans have existed.
Archaeologists believe that humans have removed facial hair since prehistoric times, pushing the edges of two shells or rocks together to tweeze. The ancient Turks may have been the first to remove hair with a chemical, somewhere between 4000 and 3000 BC. They used a substance called rhusma, which was made with arsenic trisulfide, quicklime, and starch.
In Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History, Victoria Sherrow explains that women in ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Roman Empire removed most body hair, using pumice stones, razors, tweezers, and depilatory creams. Greeks felt pubic hair was “uncivilized”—they sometimes singed it off with a burning lamp. Romans were less likely to put their genitals in such peril and instead used plucking and depilatory creams. When in Rome …
This means that though I’d like to place all the blame on advertisers, maybe they were just jumping on an inherently human trait and exploiting it legitimately.
I called Nina Jablonski, an anthropology professor at Penn State, to find out why, from her human evolution–informed perspective, women might be viewed as more attractive when they are hairless.
“Things that are considered to be attractive are also most childlike,” she said, “and hairlessness is something we associate with youth, children, and naked infants.”
She obviously hadn’t seen my baby pictures.
Jablonski went on to explain that women who are considered attractive often have facial attributes that exaggerate youthfulness and are reminiscent of children—thinner jaw, longer forehead, big eyes relative to the rest of the face, plump lips, small nose, and shorter distance between mouth and chin.
“In MRI studies, a huge part of the brain indicates affection, love, and an outpouring of positive emotion when a person lays eyes on a child,” she said. “So these same responses could be elicited in a man when he sees a woman with childlike attributes.”
Interesting, I thought—but I didn’t particularly like to hear it. I was suddenly starting to feel like I might want to embrace my natural state at last, and didn’t want evolution to get in the way of what was considered beautiful.
So I
