Hair Removal: Only $25 and a Few Years of Shame!

As someone who spends $25 on threading her eyebrows, among other things, every month, Matthew Immergut’s Manscaping: The Tangle of Nature, Culture, and Male Body Hair struck a chord with me. Body hair removal is connected to capitalism – I could have told you that a long time ago, while shelling out money for shaving cream, razors, and those monthly threading sessions. I could have also told you that hair, and lack thereof, for women is policed by nearly everyone, from boys on the playground making fun of your “unibrow” or “moustache”, aunties telling you that you should wax your legs every six weeks instead of using a harsh razor, by friends telling you that the extra hour spent straightening your hair every morning is “totally worth it! You look SO much better!” Even today, there are countless memes all over social media about how vital it is to get a perfect eyebrow arch and brows that look perfect, but not too perfect. However, reading Immergut’s Manscaping helped me continue the process of fitting together all those fragments into one larger picture that reflects not only my experiences, but the way that Western society treats body hair on brown women as a whole.

How Everything Seems to be Racialized…

In modern day America tattooing isn’t much of a taboo thing to do anymore nor is piercings but there seems to be a favor for taboo actions being more excepted on the white body. This also includes white bodied asians, latinos, and any white passing body. When race plays a part in our everyday actions it can create conflicts when whiteness is favored. Tattooing on the black body tends to have more negative remarks then it being on a white body (and when i mean white body i don’t mean only white people). Tattooing on the black body completing washes away what could be the artistic value, freedom of expression, and any other means of having the choice to do what you want.

So what does that mean for the way people of color (brown, black people, actual colored people) express themselves? It means that this fixed lens that we are living, this white lens only allows us to favor artistic expression of the self on the white body because of conditioned thinking like “white is right”. We may not do it in a conscience state but sub consciencely we are still perceiving what the black body in an undermining way, in a way that prevents black bodied people to feel unconformable expressing themselves fully. Being in a black body and in a world that views life through a white lens does fog up what people of color have to offer to this world. We are living in an under world that tries to seek for constant freedoms and liberation, having control over ones body is a huge sign of control of the self but then thats being disturbed by other beings that are conflicted with fear they don’t know how to oversee.