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Razors, tweezers, wax and hair removal creams: these are the tools for the initiation rites that signal the passage from girl to woman. Today the only acceptable places for a woman to have hair are on her head (preferably long), her eyebrows (not too wild) and eyelashes (not too sparse). All kinds of cosmetics are sold to achieve the desired effect of localized luxuriance. At the same time, the industry of removing hair everywhere else on the body advances relentlessly. Hair is no longer a sign of joy but a battleground of cosmetic surgery. In this short book, the Catalan writer Bel Olid draws on personal experience to dismantle preconceived ideas about the supposed benefits of waxing and shaving, and to lay bare the social penalties that are meted out to any woman who allows their body hair to grow. With clarity and courage, Bel Olid exposes the contradictions and hidden costs of hair removal, and issues a rousing call to women everywhere to set themselves free from the urge to please everyone else and to focus, instead, on what pleases them.… (more)
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Review of the Polity Press Kindle eBook edition (February 2022) translated by Laura McGloughlin from the Catalan language original "A contrapelo. O por qué romper el círculo de depilación, sumisión y autoodio" (Against the Grain: Or Why Break the Cycle of Hair Removal,
I was so impressed with the variety in Bel Olid's collection of short stories Wilder Winds (orig 2016/translation Jan 2022) that I immediately looked for further translations of her work. I found it in Hairless, which is also a translation by Laura McGloughlin. This later work though is non-fiction and is Olid's essay about the social norms and perceptions that drive the hair removal industry for women. It was fascinating to read about how these views change over time especially from earlier centuries when female bodies were more covered and how peer pressure (often driven by forces such as the cosmetics and 'beauty' industry) can manipulate reactions and practices.But the long-term effects on the self-esteem of future women are clear: we are teaching girls to give way to the autocracy of society’s control of their bodies, to reject their bodies as they are and modify them (even through painful procedures) in order to conform to an increasingly inflexible norm and submit to the tyranny of external ‘desirability’. Because, if indeed, among the ‘body police’, there are boys and girls, women and men, this police always argues in favour of the male gaze and appoints the heterosexual man as a judge of what is desirable: ‘no one will want you with that hair’ (assuming that ‘no one’ equates to ‘no real man’).
Regardless of sexual orientation, showing body hair publicly is a kind of neon billboard saying ‘I don’t follow the gender norm of hair removal’, and any derailment in gender expression breaks the mirage of heterosexuality by default. For that reason, the supposed choice between shaving or not is never innocent. Not doing so places you on the side of the rebels.
Obviously this is completely outside of my bailiwick, but the entire essay was food for thought about these issues, esp. the creepy and somewhat pedophilia-implied inference that a desire for hairlessness is a return to prepubescence.It’s fascinating that the hairless body, the fruit of a social mechanism such as hair removal, is considered a sign of innate femininity. It would be logical for body hair, which separates the girl from the woman, to be considered intrinsically feminine (and even sexy). However, we’ve reached the point where it’s the contrary. And I find that deeply worrying.