Shave that 'stache!

This is a response to my sister's post about women shaving themselves in various places. Read that. Warning: ol' sis holds nothing back. Which is why we love her. Below is my response.

Many social conventions are of course non-moral. Some, though non-moral in themselves, are reflections of a broader adherence to a Belief, which may be moral or non-moral. The individual's adherence to conventions may be conscious or unconscious of the beliefs which are their founts. Rejection of a convention is usually conscious. Either way--adherence or rejection--it is a reflection upon that individual for other individuals to read, which they may only do in the context of their own time and place. One is not allowed, however good the reasons, to consider oneself the norm. Thus, to reject a convention is to allow heightened scrutiny and judgment.

Another way to approach this particular issue would be to ask: "Is a woman shaving her pits and legs morally repugnant in itself?" The answer of course is no. The reasons behind it MAY be: vanity, for example, on a vast scale; or financial exploitation, as you suggest; unreasonable expectation, etc. etc. But whatever its origins (and those are important), I think our dad is at least not wrong, if not wholly right in the most literal sense. Bodily hairiness IS generally a masculine trait. For example, if you went bald or grew a mustache or wiry chest hair, you would probably take action--"alter" yourself, as you put it. (As an aside, I would point out that men "alter" themselves as well, historically just as much as women, so you can't make that a sexist thing. 14th century dudes used to wear makeup, for example, and curl their hair. I see almost as many magazines in the rack pumping how a man should look as I do for women. I think they're both mostly ridiculous, of course. But I've got a goatee right now. I am on a diet. I'm trying to develop muscle tone. I don't wear t-shirt-and-jeans every day, like I want to. Etc. You could argue that putting on clothes is "altering" oneself.) Now, both of those traits (baldness and superfluity of body hair), though certainly far from universal, are natural in a man in a way that they aren't for a woman, though it does happen to some women. When it does, we recognize it as unnatural, or at least abnormal, like a hairlip. It's nobody's fault that they have a hairlip, and there's nothing morally wrong with it, but they have reconstructive surgery (more "alteration!") all the same. Obviously this is an extreme example. In many cases, a health issue is involved with a hairlip, I realize. But if a woman grows a mustache, we think DANG, she needs to do something about that mess. Why? Well, because it's not something that is typically female. On another level, there's an entire organization (Locks of Love) that exists to provide real-hair wigs to kids who lose it due to cancer treatment. Another extreme example (and I don't mean to offend with it), but it is a cosmetic charity which exists because we all recognize that this thing is not the norm...and there's that word again.

"But it remains a fact," you might retort, "that all women naturally grow hair on their legs and pits." Very true. I'm not saying that you (or any woman) SHOULD shave those things. I don't like shaving either, though facial hair on a man is more typical (though not all men have got the goods, if you know what I mean).

At this point I'm going to call on ol' Gilbert Keith Chesterton. I can't remember where, but there is a point in Orthodoxy when he says that we do not ornament something that we think is ugly to make it beautiful. We ornament something that we think is already beautiful. Perhaps women shaving stuff is vanity, perhaps it is male domination, or something cliche like that. (Though if I am to listen to Van Morrison, women dress up for each other.) Probably often it is this kind of thing, and I doubt many saints cared much for it. But it could just as easily be a kind of innocent extravagance, a heightening of that which is recognizably and beautifully female as distinct from male--i.e., generally less hair on the body and more on the head. It's trouble, yes, and much more trouble than I know about, which is why I wouldn't ever think worse of a woman for avoiding it. But I also cannot deny that it IS more attractive to me than a hairy leg or armpit, even if a hairy leg is not repulsive to me (it isn't). Culturally conditioned in me it may be, but I can't make myself born in another time and place, and it doesn't seem to me to be a practice grievous enough to change on a massive scale. You say women were shamed into behaving as they do, and that may very well be. My history-of-pit-shaving lore is pretty scanty. But it could just as easily be that women had minds of their own back in the day and said, "Hey! I like that!" when the option was presented to them. And they really might have.