Life Is Too Short to Shave

Encouraging women to grow their body hair is not about imposing an aesthetic to demonstrate loyalty to the sisterhood – it’s about reminding each other that life is short, and sitting on the side of the bath to shave your legs takes a long, long time. It takes time and brainpower away from truly productive action.

But there’s still a lingering association with not shaving, as if being a woman who doesn’t shave means being a woman who doesn’t care about personal hygiene, the sensibilities of others, or social niceties. Even those of us who call ourselves feminists often don’t want to be associated with ‘that sort’ of women.

Yet, if we look at the assumptions underneath the sneers there’s a sense that these are women with independent minds and, worse, self-agency. And isn’t that what we, as feminists, are striving for?

We need to get to a stage where women are able to have unshaven armpits while meeting a business client, defending a case, brokering a deal or interviewing a politician. Not shaving should not mean opting out of professional life, because body hair has absolutely nothing to do with competence. As more and more women enter the workforce the focus needs to turn to how well we can do our jobs, not how visually appealing we are while we do them.

What if all the plucking and the tidying up of unsightly hair is directly contributing to the lingering pay gap? In the warm months of summer working women must shave or risk being unprofessional. While the men go from suits to long-sleeved shirts to short-sleeved shirts with minimum hassle, every new workday creates a new wardrobe dilemma for women. It’s distracting and it can’t help our productivity.

So what’s the solution? Solidarity. If you can’t be bothered shaving then stop. The more women who put down the razor and step away from the wax strips the better. Think what we could all achieve if we just stopped shaving. Maybe we could try it for a month, as a society, like men’s moustaches in November. We’d save so much time.