Women Have Hair, Too! (Who knew?!)

Let’s talk about female body hair.

I can think of zero Trinidadian men, literally zero, that would not gag at the sight of a woman with leg hair. What’s worse? Armpit hair. A woman with armpit hair is fear-inducing, skin-crawling levels of absolutely, paralyzingly disgusting.  What’s even worse, is that fellow women share this disgust for hairy ladies. This is silly and also, it is sexist. Fact.

I will elaborate…

Most boys and girls (and gender non-conforming) will go through puberty. Balls drop, breasts grow, ovulation starts and darker hair pops up in the nether regions, the nipples, the legs, etc – it honestly varies based on the individual, but by and large, everyone gets hairier. The difference is that while men embrace these changes, women cannot.

The second a prepubescent girl has, maybe, 3 dark hairs under her arms, she is taught very quickly that that makes her undesirable, especially in the eyes of men, which of course is the entire reason for female existence (I sincerely hope, reader, that you can pick up on my sarcasm here).

The same can be said for leg hair. In primary school, it is a utopia of gender equality where girls and boys have whatever hair god has blessed them with. However, suddenly, when puberty strikes in secondary school, a girl with leg hair at form five grad is equally as disgusting as a girl with dandruff under her tiara. Suddenly, body hair is a “hygiene” issue and not a personal preference, which it obviously is.

Ladies, tell me I’m lying if you weren’t even a teensy bit jealous of the first girl in the class whose mummy “allowed” her to shave her legs, even if it was for swimming competitions.

Tell me I’m lying again if you weren’t over-the-moon excited when mummy got out the Gillette and taught you this important, female rite of passage. Finally, you could remove your “manly” leg hair and express true femininity. Finally you can become a woman, grown up enough to be ashamed of your natural form.

This is legitimately backwards thinking. A girl becomes a physical woman during puberty yet as a society, we actively remove the evidence of her maturation. Frankly, we only celebrate one aspect of female puberty and it is entirely related to sexual objectification. That is, in short, boobs. The over sexualisation of breasts is another article entirely however; back to body hair.

Now reader, I ask you to truly think of one reason why a woman with body hair is so utterly disgusting. I’ve compiled a list of common answers to this and of course, some facts on these opinions.

“That’s just my preference. I personally find it disgusting and I can’t speak to a woman who has hair like that”

Babe, I’m gonna be real with you; you are shaming someone for a completely natural process, simply because she is a woman. This is wrong. This is the equivalent of declaring that women with say, noses or fingers, are disgusting. Adult humans have body hair, they also have noses and fingers. You cannot decide that a woman with body hair is more disgusting than a man with body hair – unless you truly don’t believe in gender equality, in which case, I’m surprised you’ve read this far.

“It’s unhygienic, it smells more”

I have played football on Maracas with both men and women. Let me tell you, deodorant works the same way for both sexes, with or without armpit hair. Also, if a man had a BO problem, I think you would pin that down to his Old Spice, not his amount of hair.

“It’s just not sexy. I couldn’t be with someone like that.”

Newsflash, no one wants to marry a misogynist. Second newsflash, a woman’s primary goal in life is not marriage or children or attraction to males. Come on man, we’re past this.


There is only one conclusion that can be drawn by this ridiculous obsession with hairless women. Feel free to disagree but make sure you’ve thought long and hard about this. Here is the hypothesis: in order to be attractive, women must look like children, children with boobs. If a woman with normal, natural, adult body hair is “manly” and “undesirable”, what does that say about society’s beauty standards? The only females without pubic or armpit hair are children.

Clearly, society has some issues to work out with adult women having adult body hair like adult women do.

Look, at the end of the day, we all know that beauty ideals are a social construct, they change all the time. Whoever thought bell-bottom jeans were sexy in the 70s, would certainly never wear them today. In Elizabethan times, the aristocracy would genuinely coat their faces in mercury to look ghostly white. That is not attractive today. Little history lesson for you, women only started shaving their legs in the 1920s. The Titanic is older than this style trend, so that famous drawing scene of Rose in the movie is entirely historically inaccurate (if you get my drift).

Remember that hair is normal. Hair is not manly, hair is not disgusting, hair is hair. Stop shaming.


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