As someone who
has engaged in an almost never ending battle with my body hair since
my teenage years, I can say that it has been one of the most complex
and emotional experiences of my life. For a long time I believed that
the ongoing cycle of having hair removed (the removal, enjoying a
brief period of respite, lamenting regrowth and then starting it all
over again) was an intrinsic part of my experience as a woman. In
other words, I couldn’t have visible body hair because women
weren’t supposed to be hairy. At least, none of the women in
magazines, or on my TV screen had hair on their arms or legs. It was
only once I started university that I considered the possibility that
maybe I actually had a choice when it came to deciding whether I
wanted to remove it or not.
As a Sikh,
growing my ‘Kes’ (hair) is an important part of my faith. Over
the years, I had always tried to negotiate my fear of not fitting the
so-called ideals of womanhood with being true to my beliefs as a Sikh
woman. When I started university I was unable to ignore the hypocrisy
in this negotiation.
To be clear, this
is not a judgement of women who choose to remove their body hair-
rather me stating the importance of being authentic to your beliefs.
Learning more about my faith, and the centrality of Kes to it,
allowed me feeling of empowerment when it came to looking at my own
body. I was able to work at removing the lens of the outside world,
and instead replace it with a lens of my own fashioning. This lens
was built by asking myself questions like, what felt right to me?
What did I like? Did the hair on my arms and legs make me feel ugly?
Instead of a subscription to other people’s ideas of beauty, I
bought myself the ability to reflect on what felt authentic to me. In
my view, part of being a Sikh is recognising the sovereignty of all.
With this in mind, if I could commit myself to activism for the
rights of others, why could I not advocate for my own freedom from
other people’s views of what was beautiful and what was not?
I distinctly
remember stifling summer months where I felt unable to take off my
cardigan because of a suffocating fear that someone would see the
layer of hair covering my arms. Looking back at this, I am only able
to question this mind set by coming to other realisations. Body hair
is natural, and yes- women do grow hair all over their bodies. I know
this, other women know this, and men should know this. So what
exactly is it that I was so determined to hide? Maybe if we just
universally acknowledge that women can be hairy- we won’t feel so
pressurised to hide it all the time. After all, it’s not some big
secret, it’s something we all share and engage with in one way or
another.
The importance of
authenticity to your own beliefs is something which I am learning
more and more as I navigate my 20s. In some ways, the acceptance of
body hair, and the places where it chooses to make a home seems to me
like the first step in this process. This is not to say that there
aren’t days where I choose to keep my cardigan on, rather that
these decisions are now made a little more consciously. I reflect on
them, I learn from them, I like to think that I grow from them. It no
longer feels legitimate to do things blindly because of the way
society has been conditioned. If I am to be part of the solution, and
I very much aspire to be, then I need to be critically reflective
about the choices that I make.
In order to work
at providing women freedom to make their own choices, in ways that
feel authentic to them-, we need to work at emancipating ourselves.
Sometimes that can start here.
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