Bad Feminist

I overheard my five year-old telling my husband that she wanted to have ‘no hair, like Mummy’, the other day.

“What do you mean? Mummy has got hair.” Her father replied, accurately enough.

“On my legs.” Daughter clarified. “I want to have no hair on my legs, like Mummy.” She pointed to the razor on the bathroom shelf.

I felt a pang of guilt.

I was horrified when I learned (from a feminist book, ironically enough - How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran) that, these days, women were expected to get rid of all their pubic hair. Apparently the proliferation of Internet pornography, where pubes are eradicated to give the viewer a better view of the genitalia (not so sexy when described like that, eh, voyeurs?) had given men (bloody men!) the expectation of a bald pudenda. Thus it became fashionable to wax all the hair away. I was outraged; women were now expected to look like prepubescent girls (with tits)!

Tattoo Fixers is a T.V programme that I find oddly compelling, despite the fact that I don’t have any ‘ink’. It’s where the tattoo artists cover up bad, amateurish or lewd tattoos with pictures of skulls and flowers and stuff.  One episode featured a woman who wanted them to cover up the tattoo of a cat that she had on her vagina because she’d showed it to her colleagues on a drunken night out and now she was embarrassed!! (And you thought that your office parties were raucous!) We were watching this programme, me and my enlightened spouse and we both said - Yes, you could cover up that picture of a cat with a different, larger tattoo, or, how about this for a controversial idea - you could just let your pubic hair grow back.

However, as my daughter can attest, I’ve been shaving my legs for years, ever since I received my first ‘ladyshave’, at the tender age of twelve, to be exact. I never really questioned this, I just did it because all my friends did. In the same way that I sheepishly had my ears pierced and my hair permed, I just accepted this as something that you did. Pubic hair was supposed to be trimmed into a neat triangle, god forbid that any of it should obtrude from the leg of your swimsuit, but it wasn’t eradicated completely. Other cultures were roundly mocked for the female members not getting rid of their armpit hair. And Nena, of 99 Red Balloons fame (Google it, whippersnappers), was described (by an older, male friend of a friend) as a ‘dirty bitch’ for raising her arms on Top of the Pops and exposing the little furry guinea pigs residing in each pit. What can we conclude from this? That, not only is there (perceived to be) something unhygienic in not shaving your armpits but also something suggestive of promiscuity??

While my husband struggled to explain to the five year old, that it was Mummy’s choice to shave her legs but a result of cultural conditioning, throwing around words like patriarchy, and that she was too young to shave hers, I wondered what sort of a message I was sending her and her sister. Here I am, trying desperately to hold the tide back against the tsunami of pathetic, pink Princess nonsense, which threatens to engulf them at every turn but perhaps I am setting them a bad example. I buy subversive children’s books about strong, independent women who throw off society’s expectations and outwit or befriend dragons. I try not to talk about weight or associated issues with them and yet, and yet I still shave my legs. Does it really matter? Will it hold back the cause of equal rights and female emancipation if a middle-aged woman from West London persists in depilation??

Of course it won’t. Who cares about the minutiae. Similarly, if I choose to sport the odd bit of eyeliner, every now and again, I’m sure that the ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft won’t come back to haunt me.

However….am I being rather inconsistent with the whole bald leg thing?

I’m sure that other women don’t worry about this. Many women even shy away from the term 'feminist' as from an embarrassing label, akin to running around a department store shouting ‘I’ve just farted!’

“Oh no, I wouldn’t call myself a feminist.” They say, with distaste. Which I find utterly bizarre. Would they like to hand back the right to vote? To equal pay? Would they like it if custody of their children, automatically went to their husband, if they got divorced?....

I could go on, and on and on but I won’t.

Perhaps, now that Winter is Coming, I’ll stop shaving for a while and see what happens...

In the meantime, I’m going to go away and record a song called ‘Bad Feminist’, written to the tune of Michael Jackson’s ‘Smooth Criminal’. I’ll have to work at the lyrics. That will be the next post.