Beauty Demands

The changing norms of body hair removal are dramatic and illustrative. I have written previously about the rise in body hair removal as the ‘ canary in the mine’ . We now remove nearly all body and facial hair.  A survey of 7580 US residents aged between 18 and 65 found that “74% reported grooming their pubic hair, 66% of men and 84% of women” (Osterberg, Gaither, Awad, Truesdale, Allen, Sutclifee & Breyer, 2016, p.162) . A generation ago this didn’t happen; few women removed pubic hair and there was a time in 60s and 70s when underarm hair could be considered sexy. (Although there are arguments about how extensive the acceptance of body hair really was. Some think it was limited to the fairly small, fairly affluent, hippy culture.) The change from then to now is dramatic. As Rebecca Herzig argues “within a single generation, female pubic hair had been rendered superfluous” (2015, p.137).  It’s not just body hair we are obsessively removing, facial hair has also b...

Outside Hirsutism 1 and at times pubic hair 2 , societal perceptions of women’s bodies include an absence of hair 3 , as we know female beauty and normative femininity is still overall represented and perceived through a hairless appearance. Representations overarchingly continuing to construct and maintain an image of a ‘fuzz free’ look as natural for women (Jenkins, 2017; Smelik, 2015; Fahs and Delgardo, 2011), and hair outside what should softly cascade from our scalps, as the invader to be plucked, waxed, shaved, bleached and/or lasered off.  Accordingly, even as representations of hairlessness are brought into question in the UK and elsewhere, with female celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Amber Rose and Madonna publicly embracing their body hair, hair removal products and methods continue to boom.  For the BSA (British South Asian) women I interviewed in Birmingham 4 , the mundane and routine act of hair removal that often starts in adolescence, is positioned as requ...

Along with ‘Dry January’, ‘RED (run every day) January’ and ‘Veganuary’, ‘Januhairy’ is one of the challenges which comes with the ‘New Year, New You!’ onslaught of how to become a better person. In my last Beauty Demands blog   I commented on the dramatic change which has happened as we see ourselves not as ‘inner’ thinking and doing beings, but as ‘outer’, to-be-looked-at beings. Indeed we have gone so far on this trajectory that a better self now means a better body. In a visual and virtual culture, our bodies are ourselves. Januhairy is a month long challenge which aims to get women to ‘love and accept’ their body hair while raising money for charity. It was launched by students from Exeter University, and has received lots of press, taking off around the world. Photo: istolethetv  (CC Attributions 2.0 license ) In Perfect Me ,   I write a lot about body hair. I call body hair ‘the canary in the mine’. It is a very clear example of the normalisation and natur...

“The beauty ideal is not an evil taskmaster, but it is an ethical ideal and powerful and only when we recognise it can we begin to address it. What we need is beauty without the beast” Friday 1 st June 2018 saw the official launch of Professor Widdows' new book ‘ Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Idea l’, published by Princeton University Press, at the University of Birmingham.   Perfect Me is the culmination of nearly ten years of research in the philosophy of body and beauty for Professor Widdows. The book explores the changing and ethical nature of the beauty ideal, where the pressure to achieve the ‘perfect’ body has become increasingly more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before. Guest speakers for the launch included Dr Clare Chambers (University of Cambridge), and Professor Alison Jagger (University of Colorado at Boulder and University of Birmingham) who each summarised the arguments in Perfect Me before highlighting its most significant ...

One of the questions I often get asked when I talk about my research is how much longer I think the trend for full pubic hair removal will last. I’m hesitant to give an exact expiry date if I’m honest. But I think this question opens up into broader discussions about what impact social, political and economic change has upon our bodily surfaces, and how embodied ideals of womanhood and femininity can both shift and remain constant over time. More revealing than any answer I might be able to give about the potential longevity of the Brazilian wax, is the asking of the question itself.  It demonstrates an understanding of pubic hairlessness as ‘current’, constructed, transitory, and it encourages conversation about where the norm has originated from, and why women in particular feel pressured to conform to it.  My Google Alerts notified me recently of an online survey examining men and women’s pubic hair grooming preferences, undertaken by Cosmopolitan.com , and suggesti...

The norm for women to remove visible body hair is perhaps one of the strongest norms of appearance in Western society. Although more and more men are starting to wax and shave, there is still a sense in many social contexts, I think, that this is optional. For women, however, it is viewed as essential in almost all social contexts. From a feminist perspective, this norm can be critiqued in two ways. Firstly, it can be assessed in terms of its effects: women spend time and money removing body hair, time and money they could be spending on other things inst ead. Moreover, I’m not sure it’s something many women particularly enjoy; from talking to friends about removing body hair, I get the impression that most of them experience it as a chore rather than a treat. Many describe the prospect of not removing body hair as unthinkable. Secondly, it can be assessed in terms of its social meaning. As Sandra Bartky (1990) points out, the hairless female body, which typically occurs naturally onl...