In the thousands of photos of proud, unshaven armpits and soft, furry limbs that you will find if you search for #Januhairy on Instagram, the number of Indian women can be counted on one hand.
#Januhairy is a social-media challenge that encourages women to embrace their body hair, and post a picture of their unshaved bits. The movement was started by Laura Jackson, a student at the University of Exeter in England. Jackson first grew out her body hair for a performance, and then decided to launch it as a “project for women to challenge social norms”.
“I grew out my body hair for a performance as part of my drama degree in May 2018. That really opened my eyes to the taboo of body hair on a woman,” she told a British tabloid.
No one knows the judgement heaped on a hairy woman more than us Indian lasses. As soon as we are born, our grandmothers start rubbing us down with turmeric and dough in the hopes that we will grow into the hairless, smooth bodies that society equates with femininity.
The definition of an ideal female body has changed many times over in the past century. From slender legs to curvy butts, the part of the female body being fetishized in mainstream pop culture keeps changing. The one status quo that stays is the hairlessness. Body hair acceptance seems to be the one part of the body-positivity movement that most women feel alienated by. It is the last bastion of self-acceptance and the hardest one to conquer.
Our fashion mags have finally put stomach rolls and cellulite on their pages, but you will never see leg hair on their glossy pages. The boldest of body positivity bloggers are scared of letting the hair on their arms grow out. Why are we scared of the fuzz that our body grows though?
In cultures across the world, body hair has been co-opted into an image of hyper masculinity. Body hair has become synonymous with testosterone and the feminine ideal became the opposite of that–smooth and hairless. But both men and women have body hair, but only women are expected to bear tear-inducing pain and spend thousands of rupees every year to alter our body’s natural state. We have been taught that body hair is ugly on women, and renders them sexually unattractive. In a larger culture where beauty and sexual attractiveness is often considered the only capital that women have, that is a judgement which cuts us the most.
It’s not just women–shaming a woman for her body hair seems to be the kind of sexism-lite that men indulge in without guilt. When Swedish model Arvida Bystrom posed for a sports label in a dress with her unshaved legs, her Instagram account was flooded with rape threats.
Accepting body hair is a tough journey for most of us, but looking at the smiling faces of women flaunting their grown out pits and stomach hair with #Januhairy is definitely a good place to start.
