beauty standards are all bad but one that sticks out to me is the idea that women should be free of body hair, because literally no-one has naturally no body hair like what are we trying to emulate here?
oh, except children
oh
Boom. I’m pretty sure this started because of sex workers in France – shaving to appear younger because then they could charge more, since young girls were more valuable to their clientele, especially if they were virgins. And from there it spread until it became a beauty norm in the West. Rising hemlines and sleeveless dresses in the 20s probably went a long way to making it mainstream.
*Pinches bridge of nose*
Tumblr…I get that you can’t go a day without doing this crap but it isn’t even eight o’clock in the goddamn morning!
And since I’m exhausted and this is exhausting, I’m making this history lesson short:
SHAVING HAS EXISTED SINCE 30,000 BC AND HISTORICALLY, MEN HAVE ACTUALLY SHAVED MORE THAN WOMEN!
So why did they all start shaving?
A number of reasons, none of which are linked to pedophilia you complete and utter—seriously tumblr what the hell?
These reasons include but are not limited to:
– Religious Reasons
– Convenience (it’s sort of hard to maintain body hair in the BC’s.)
– To keep lice and other bugs from jumping ship
– To keep germs from spreading
– What do you do if you have literally only a river nearby in which you bathe but you also have this body hair that keeps getting coated in dirt and grime? Simple. You remove the body hair. Dirt and grime rolls right off your smooth skin. Crisis solved.
It’s worth noting that people shaved different ways, including plucking, straight up pulling out your individual hairs with your bare hands because you were that much of a badass, and using various rocks/glass to shave.
Then you have Alexander the Great who was more paranoid than Alastor Moody and was like, “People could grab our beards during battle!” and so he made himself and all of his soldiers shave.
Then Julius Caesar came along and was like, “I look horrible with this beard but what do I look like without it? D a m n. Okay new fashion trend.” And everyone in Rome plucked out all of their body hair which sounds extremely painful and probably led to him being stabbed 23 times.
But that’s the point. Even back in BC, it became a fashion statement, created by men for men, specifically one of the most influential men in history.
And in the last two thousand years of history, body hair has gone in and out of fashion, sometimes seemingly overnight. In fact, hair in general has gone in and out of fashion, which is why people eventually started wearing big giant wigs so that they could just take it off and put it on depending on the morning.
So then in the 1900s (essentially yesterday as far as history goes) these magazine companies came along and were like, “Ladies, you know how men have spent the last 30,000 years or so going through this trend of stripping all of their body hair off for the sake of fashion because smooth skin looks badass just look at Caesar? Have you c o n s i d e r e d?” Now with that being said it’s important to know that flappers in the 1920s still rocked leg hair if they wanted to because they didn’t care they were too busy being badass.
But you know, flappers were the outliers. People who followed fashion now had these magazines saying that the newest fashionable thing was this. Razor companies picked up on this fashion trend in the mid-1900s and were like, “Oh yeah. Shaving everything is awesome, women. You should shave everything and you should buy our razors to do so.” And since it’s historically proven that people follow trends, women shaved everything for decades and still do. Give it a few years and suddenly looking like Cousin It from Addams Family will be the newest trend.
Now obviously this simplifies things because yes, there are extremely sexist men out there who have bought into these capitalistic fashion trends and somehow have gotten it ingrained that yes, in order to look sexy, women do need to shave because gosh gee golly dee this newspaper says so. But it’s no different than men seeing an ad for makeup or a new dress and being like, “Jiminy Crickets, Sally, you should try this.”
Were women forced to undergo trends due to internalized sexism (thinking they needed to be better than other women) and blatant sexism (men weighing in on what is sexy or not)? Absolutely. Are we still forced to undergo those trends? Eh, no, not really, but some people really want us to. And that sucks.
But the point is that shaving does not not NOT have pedophilic roots.
tl;dr: Shaving does NOT have pedophilic roots!
(Actually, I don’t care if it’s too long, go back up there and read because you all need to learn something.)
Sources:
– Being a History Concentration which gives you the power of knowing random history facts while forgetting your mother’s name.
– http://www.almanac.com/content/history-shaving-and-beards
– http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/04/the-history-of-shaving/
– https://history.barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/kirstenhansenthesis.pdf
Honestly I think both the historical observation of non-gendered hair removal (which dates all the way back to the stone age) and the connection of the modern double standard to promote sexual infantilism of adult women are both correct.
It’s two separate points and they’re not mutually exclusive.
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