cilium's truth - secondary research

the core subject matter of this investigation remains gender inequity following what was previously stated in the statement of intent. this time, the critical context will be following the inequality in women and men’s image. like dworkin (1989) stated, women are taught from the very tender age that their appearances are a crucial part of their lives whereas their male counterparts are taught that their accomplishments are what counts. there is a huge contradiction in perceiving hair, where hair on the head is perceived as a sign of wealth, youth, health, power, vitality, and attractiveness (leach 1958) and hair on the body is perceived to be dirty, ugly, superfluous, sexual, and animalistic (hollander 1993; lesnik-oberstein 2006).

moreover, since the beginning of the 20th century, when fashion became more skin revealing, women’s body hair became a subject of abject. king camp gillette created the first female razor and started spreading words in his advertisements that female body hair was unsightly and disgusting.

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starting from female armpits to female legs, they made sure to convince everyone that women needed to be hairless and smooth to be considered beautiful and a proper lady. they used design to its maximum potency to change the whole mindset of the world by carefully choosing how they use their words in their advertisings. instead of using words such as ‘shave’ or ‘blades’ which was culturally associated with men, they rephrase their sentences with words such as ‘smoothing’ and ‘proper grooming’ to sound more feminine. they curated their copywriting to degrade body hair by using words such as ‘objectionable hair’, ‘women of refinement’, ‘an embarrassing personal problem’s further make women conscious about their body image. at one point, shaving was considered as an act of patriotism and since, the total removal of body hair became an inevitable part of womanhood. (hope, c. 1982). americans kept pushing the explanation that removing the female body hair meant to be clean but hope continuously argued that it was not ‘an obsession with cleanliness’ but rather it signified that the absence of body hair is seen as feminine and the presence of it is masculine. rebecca herzig writes that more than 99% of american women voluntarily remove hair, and more than 85% do so regularly, even daily. the usual targets, for the moment, are legs, underarms, eyebrows, upper lips, and bikini lines. those habits, furthermore, appear to transcend ethnic, racial, and regional boundaries. (herzig 2015: 10–11) in her conclusion, she wittily said that ‘we are all plucked’.

smelik’s empirical research confirms that nowadays, a smooth and hairless body has become the norm for women and most women choose to conform to this norm. (smelik, anneke. 2015). while in the 1970s, the choice to shave or to not shave was still a feminist issue, depilation seems to be a ‘feminism’s lost batter’ (spencer 2003). one can point out that women still do not have equal right on their body decisions as society takes the smooth and perfect skin of women for granted as they consider it to be an aspect of acceptable femininity. (toerien and wilkinson 2004; toerien, wilkinson and choi 2005). the ideal of hairlessness is ‘part of the same sociocultural message that women’s bodies are not acceptable as they are’ (basow and braman 1998: 644).

body hair for women is now such a strong transgression of the norm as to have become a taboo (lesnik-oberstein 2006). due to this norm on the ideal female body, hairlessness is supported in popular culture and this regarding body hair as disgusting and unclean. according to tiggemann and hodgson, the main reason women still shave all their body hair is to be ‘feminine’ or ‘be sexually attractive’. there are articles and commercials in most magazines, websites, tv commercials that are endorsing various methods of hair removal such as shaving, plucking, tweezing, waxing, ‘permanent’ removal by electrolysis, laser, and light surgery. (smelik, anneke. 2015). all over the globe women dedicate an enormous amount of time and money to make sure that they remove every single hair from their body (herzig 2015). basow and braman (1998) have found that both men and women view a woman with body hair as less sexually attractive, sociable, and intelligent than the same woman without body hair. not only, female body hair is perceived as less attractive and intelligent, but tiggemann and lewis found that female body hair is highly associated with disgust. in a report, they stated ‘that attitudes toward women’s underarm hair have become aligned with attitudes toward flyswatters and maggots in meat’ (tiggemann and lewis 2004: 386). they explained that this disgust arises from the defensive emotion to protect their body from contamination.

this response of disgust towards female body hair may come from the realm of abject; that which has been ejected out of the social order as dirty, impure, improper, or unclean. (smelik, anneke. 2015). abject refers to anything that signifies an unstable boundary between the inside and the outside of the body and can be loathed as ‘what disturbs identity, system, order. what does not respect borders, positions, rules. the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (kristeva 1982: 4). body hair is easily removed, hence can be ‘abjected’. the psychological process of abjection is revealed in the description of body hair by respondents in sociological research as dirty, messy, smelly, unhygienic, gross, repulsive, and disgusting. (smelik, anneke. 2015). mary douglas’s seminal book purity and danger (2002 [1966]), in which she studies why and how ‘dirt’ becomes tabooed, may give further insight into the contemporary loathing of female body hair. in each different society and culture, there are different kinds and types of dirty and usually those things are related to this society’s fear and labelled taboo. (douglas 2002,1966). she also explained that for something to be labelled taboo, it has to have the compliancy of the community and we can note that since the 20th century, everyone has accepted the normative pressure of having a smooth and soft body. smelik argues in her report that the disgust of female body hair comes from the abject that it is breaking said boundary of animal and human, men and woman, childhood and adulthood and the inside and outside the body. (smelik, a. 2015; 246).

the extent of this conformity is still the norm nowadays, a century later. based on tiggemann’s research on the relationship between negative attitudes towards body hair and disgust sensitivity, she found that women associate the reason they are removing their body hair is for femininity and being attractive rather than social or normative reasons. as femininity has become more closely aligned with youth and pre-pubescence rather than the reproductive system, women cannot differentiate between societal pressure and femininity. in the report, tiggemann found that the reasons that women cited for other women removing their body hair were more socially normative in nature but do not associate this with their own practices. it is observed that women can recognise the normative pressure on then in general to shave but are unwilling to accept this as the rationale for their own behaviours. (tiggemann, m. and lewis, c. 2004;385). tiggemann says that that is maybe because of the normative values of individualistic cultures that makes it difficult for women to acknowledge their own vulnerability to social pressure, but they are able to recognize it in others. tiggemann points out that this kind of rationale, that is shaving for femininity and the failure to recognize normative pressure on their own practices is the reason why women are so insecure of their own bodies.

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