Chris

I've been wanting to tie this together with music and Star Trek, oddly enough.  But that's been getting in my way, so feh.

I steal a bit from a prior post, here: I find it difficult to give things up on principle.  I am not an abstract cat.  I am a concrete cat.  I can understand that a lot of rock music promotes patriarchal ideas, but you'll pry music from my cold, dead hands.  I can understand that Star Trek TOS, while ridiculously progressive for its time, was still argle bargle bad on the gender equality level, but no way you're gonna get me to not watch it.  It was the ages and ages of reading feminist posts and comments and suchlike that helped me internalise such things.  So you, random you out there, cannot get me to not listen to certain music… but after reading feminist stuff for ages, listening to said music makes me want to throw it out the window.  (Somehow.)

I'm not saying new things.  I'm writing down my things.  This is that thing where you soak up enough information about a topic to where you can't be blind to its effects any more.  It's disruptive, but worth it.  In this instance, it's shaving my legs.  I've already posted that I don't mind it on rare occasion but the every-day shaving thing is what sucking is, and that I have anxiety and so I still shave.  Sometimes.  If I know I'm going to see one of my partnerfolk, or I'm taking a bath and I'm really bored.

The feministy things that have been building up in my head have mostly centered around the question of what is natural, and what is worth it.  Despite decades of advertising and society trying really really hard, shaving remains not a woman's default state.  It takes effort to conform to society's standards of what a woman should look like.  I'm not going to explain myself well here, because I can already hear people replying with how easy it can be, how little time it takes, and how they like being clean-shaven and don't have a problem with it.

I do not have a problem with you shaving.  What I have a problem with is so many women I know professing to love shaving for its own sake and how it feels on them and so forth… and I have heard of one man shaving his legs, and he rides a bike, so that's less aesthetics and more tactics.  (I think.  I don't ride bikes at that level.)  So it became very interesting to me that there's no pressure, it just so happens that a whole bunch of women – not men – really like doing this one thing.  That just so happens to be yet another beauty standard for women only that is about a generally public-facing area and that takes time and effort to achieve.  Gosh.  Coincidence.

Pff.  I will say straight-out: if I could get away with not shaving, I fucking would in a heartbeat.  I continue to shave because of societal pressure and my anxiety, the end.  Sure, I like how it feels, but (a) it only lasts an hour or so, and (b) then it all turns into a slippery slope (arharhar) of fucking upkeep.  Hours and hours of maintenance to get moments of a nice sensation.  Jesus, at least when I code, it's useful to others as well, and I usually learn something on the way.  (Not to mention, again, this quote.)

I do not see the point of spending all this time on a meaningless beauty ritual.  I do not believe that women who truly love shaving their legs are, every single one of them, somehow doing this without any pressure from society at all.  And I continue to not like shaving.

The clicking point, and why I'm writing this at all, is when I was talking to my boyfriend about me and shaving.  His response: "If you want to shave, awesome.  If you don't, awesome.  While your leg stubble is about 1/20th as annoying as my face stubble, though…"  And two things occurred to me.

1) Everyone I am dating – in fact, everyone I have dated in the past couple of years – has expressed much this same sentiment.  Or nearly – it ranged from "do as you like" to "please don't shave", with "aiee stubble" being a constant.

2) Holy sweet mother of disco ball, I was seeking my boyfriend's input, in an awfully permission-seeking-sounding fashion, about what to do with my own body.  (I make that distinction because there's a difference between a casual "Should I dye my hair blue?" and a hesitant feeling-out on the topic of shaving.)

So I am going to try not shaving my legs.  I want to see how it affects me, and how it affects my relationships.  My assumption is that I will be nervous and will like the lights out a lot more, and that neither of my partnerfolk will care that much, in a good way.  But, we'll see how long I last.  I hope it sticks.

–

What is beyond confusing to me is, the entirety of the thinking I did on not shaving my armpits was "This sucks, I'm not doing it", and I haven't done it for years and years and years, no twinges at all.  *baffled*

[eta] I followed up on this.

Originally posted at Xtinian Thoughts.  Comment here or there.