I am angry at man. Not man in the sense of humanity, which the word often gets stretched to cover, but instead, the XY chromosome possessing norks who I share my genitalia with.
The fuel for my fire is the male opinions featured on the TV show, Fuck Off, I’m a Hairy woman, which I had the joy of watching on Really, one of those stations that lurks beyond channel X at the very fringe of your Freeview box’s knowledge.
Within this show, comedian Shazia Mirza is growing her hair long and proud across her body for six months and starting one of those fucking inane journeys of discover to prove some point or another. This time she is trying to get women to become proud of their body hair, and aside from ingrained cultural bollocks where women are not allowed to be hairy in case they catch alight in the midday sun or whatever, there’s also men to contend with.
Push comes to shove; Shazia is trying to arrange some big media furore around a fashion show where real women, and hairy women at that, will model a selection of lingerie that she has designed with a modern artist who works with human body hair. The display is crass and over the top, whilst in reality all she need do was have real and hairy women parading ordinary underwear; but she needed to make her TV show entertaining.
She goes to Loaded, a magazine that fall into the middle range “men’s interest” category at W. H. Smiths that makes me gag a bit. Come, buy a copy of nuts, it says to me, see some nipples and a gun made from human skin, we’re all mates here, we’ve all had a few drinks, have a fosters, pound your meat and titter over a man saying the word fart eighteen times in his opinion column. Guffaw as Danny Dyer insights you to commit hate crimes against your Ex. There a bunch of pudding headed sausage holders tell her that women with body hair are disgusting. Women with body hair are unnatural. That the very limit of their gag reflex is the tiny hairs that grow on Abi Titmus’ arms. If she was bald as a coot and had the vagina of a 6 year old, they’d be salivating like cartoon dogs. An unsightly hair growing anywhere on her air brushed and photo-shop ready body and they’ll be vomiting over one another like flies at a land fill.
I hated these two guys, and laughed merrily as Mirza used an epilator to wrench the living hairs from their skin to demonstrate the pain women go through to keep themselves follicle free. If women should have to punish themselves for your sexual benefit why can’t you do them a favour and read a fucking book. But thee twats were not alone. No sir, when INSERTNAME goes in Radio 5 live to talk about her show, the godless heathens who called in called her an idiot. A Fool, labelled her some kind of degenerate that doesn’t give a shit about herself because she wants to grow her body hair. If you grow your body hair you obviously are some unhygienic, slobby tart who just lets toe-jam and body-cheese build up a viscous layer on their flesh. Gag. Retch. Spit.
This of course couldn’t be further from the truth, body hair means nothing at all. I have known many women who proudly grow their hair long and are these women are some of the sexiest I have ever known. I had a life model who hadn’t shaved her arm pits for three years and not only was she beautiful but she was far more interesting to look at and to try and draw, because she had far more character, shade and definition on her body than the smooth models we’d had before. And as an aside she was a confident woman, and confidence is inherently attractive to the opposite sex.
Of course, the ultimate hypocrisy lies with the complaining men by the way, as they grow their pubic bush like a comedy 70s afro and expect women to go down on them. I once had a conversation with a good friend of mine who refused to go down on her boyfriend unless he trimmed his genital hair, for she was fed up of the follicles going up her nose and making her sneeze. I regularly have my back waxed. Please sirs and madams, try to keep your dinner down at the thought, but I do it for my own confidence.
What I am trying to say is, we need to accept we all have body hair. Everyone. If you don’t, you are not a mammal; and probably one of the lizard alien overlords David Ike has been warning us about. I am so sorry you had to find out this way. Once we get over this fact, we can all move onto the next issues that what we do with our own body hair, is our own fucking business. If someone grows their under arm hair, lets their happy trail spread to their nipples, grows their leg hair, it does not diminish them as a person. It does not remove their humanity, and it does not require some soft lipped gel haired ninny in Reeboks calling them disgusting. Magazines like Loaded, Nuts, Zoo and Front just sell fake body image which helps no one. Men get sad because they’ll never have sex with the digitally honed prom queen, and women get sad because they cannot be her, because she doesn’t even exist. The woman in the photograph is not representational of the woman posing for the photograph.
Peoples preconcived views on beauty are based on myth. Classical beauty, whether sculpture or painting stemmed from gods and Goddesses; hairless chiselled tableaux. Now we’ve moved onto the next weapon of choice, the photo-montage, to express this. We now worship Goddesses of fake tan and liposuction instead of Grecian heroines. Its sick iconoclasm. Whether you have a gut, or a limp, or a lazy eye, you are still beautiful, and you do not need a man who pays a woman to wax his back to tell you that.
