“Have you heard the one where Abram complains to Moishe, ‘you know, my wife has been going out of her mind with worry. My youngest, Sarah, has grown a beard.’ Moishe responds, ‘Mazel tov! You have a boy to run your shop!’”
“Thanks for that, mom!” said Roza, as she picked up the tweezers.
— — — — — —
“How do you tell the bride at an Italian wedding?” Cecilia’s grandma told this joke at every family dinner, to the embarrassment of her grandchildren.
“She’s the one with the braided armpits!” Nona Torchio laughed uproariously at her own jest.
— — — — — —
“Female armpit hair. Hmm, sounds a little gross.”
We wonder: is it the “female armpit” part? Or the “armpit hair” part? Or just the “female hair”? What about coarse female stomach hair? Or beard hair? Or nipple hair? Is any female hair okay?
None of it was okay when we were kids.
Roza’s middle school friends all straightened their already-straight hair every morning. But her massive, coarse Jewfro took three hours to straighten–and would rematerialize at any hint of wind or humidity (or normal human movement).
Three states away, Cecilia was walking barefoot with some camp friends when one of them asked “are you a hobbit?” Cecilia wasn’t sure what this Lord of the Rings reference had to do with her until she looked down at her hairy toes. Thanks to her Mediterranean genes, she did in fact have foot hair that could compete with Bilbo Baggins’s.
Back in school, the popular girls were either blonde or mysteriously smooth like babies. We figured that we were just maturing a little earlier when our hair came in thick and sprouted everywhere. But as the years passed, it became very clear that not all women have Italian toes or Jewish fros.
In any case, coarse dark hair anywhere on the body does not conform to Western beauty standards. According to dermatologists who specialize in hirsutism (excess hair growth in women), variations in hair growth are significantly related to race and ethnicity.* The Mayo Clinic reports that women of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and South Asian ancestry are more likely than other women to develop excess hair growth.
Societal standards for female beauty are often seen as a feminist issue so it’s common for activists to grow out their body hair in protest of societal norms. However, those women who feel the most comfortable growing out their body hair tend to be women with sparse and light hair. So barely-visible female body hair becomes more normalized but this doesn’t make it any easier for women with coarse, dark hair. And, as such, we are still left to do battle with our hair.
One reason that it is so easy to ignore the role of ethnicity in determining the distribution and density of body hair is that hair can be fairly well-concealed noninvasively, unlike other physical characteristics linked to ethnicity, like dark skin, big noses, or flared nostrils. Our mothers taught us what they knew to help us blend in: Shaving with coconut oil instead of shaving cream or soap. Repurposing beard trimmers for arm hair. Tweezing your Italian lady-beard. Bleaching your mustache. Though none of this would ever be completely effective, still we battled on. At the beach, no one could guess that we had spent hours going through these remedies, while our friends took just five minutes to shave their calves.
Abram’s hirsute daughter and Nona Torchio’s Italian bride made us squirm as kids, but as adults we can see the discrimination hidden in the punch-lines of those jokes. Instead of turning a blind eye to the discriminatory implications of Western beauty standards, feminists and hair-lovers everywhere should acknowledge the relationship between body hair and ethnicity. Just as women are expected by men to be hairless, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern women are expected by Caucasian women to have fine hair. The female body hair debate is an instance not only of sexism, but also of discrimination on ethnic grounds.
We’ve slowly accepted our hairiness and have come to the realization that we are not at all exceptional in having a physical trait that subjects us to judgment. Plenty of people face much worse. As we come up with new ways to hide and remove our hair, we think of all the people who are severely discriminated against, and not merely laughed at, for having physical features that they do not have the option of hiding. Growing up a little bit different ourselves, we’ve seen this discrimination, however minor, first-hand. Just as we’ve learned to accept ourselves, we’ve learned to accept others and hope you can do the same when we walk around in shorts with our unshaved luscious leg hair.